[saef]

Oh, babe. I really feel for you after reading your post, and though I signed off last night without writing a reply, I kept thinking about you. Really.

Were these **really** the words of the same confident blond with the great simple, swept-back hair who looked so good in her t-shirt & jeans? Hard to believe. You were happy in that other post. And now in this post you don't like yourself. At all. One look in a store mirror was all it took. In spite of all your hard work & the changes you know you've made, you crumpled. You're still fragile. Your self-confidence is still being formed.

I do think you're confusing two things.

One thing is how your man sees you & feels about you when his focus shifts overtly toward your sexual potential and his own sexuality. (I mean, when he's horny.) As others have written here, men's desire is as flattering to their view of you as, well, candlelight. It's like smearing vaseline over the lens of a camera, as aging movie goddesses used to like to do, to soften the focus & make them appear more beautiful.

The other thing is how you saw yourself, at that moment in time, in that one outfit, under very particular circumstances.

Do not confuse the two. They are totally different things.

I don't think you're really seeing yourself, for one thing. Because of body dysmorphia. If we learn one thing from reading posts on 3FC, it's that 90% of the time, women don't really **see** what's in confronting them in the mirror. We just don't.

I think you don't see yourself as you are because you have some image superimposed over yourself, and instead of seeing the whole, as it is, you're disassembling yourself into little pieces, some of which satisfy you & some of which make you crazy when you match them up with your ideal. Like, your arm still lacks this, compared with how you want it to be -- your stomach still doesn't look like this, and ought to look like this mental image -- your boobs need to look like this, the way you thought they'd look.

But ... no one but you has those exact same ideals for each of your various body parts. Certainly not your man. No one is making comparisons or critiquing but you. You're doing this to yourself. You. Not some smart-mouthed b&*(%$ch or some guy yelling out of a car window.

You really need to let up on yourself. Do you really think, in your heart of hearts, your man is going to be as exacting & merciless in his scrutiny of your well-loved body as you have been?

Really, you deserve better treatment from yourself.