I was 27 when it happened. My face exploded with cysts and nodules that antibiotics couldn’t clear and makeup couldn’t hide.
It wasn’t the first time – I’d suffered with adult acne on and off for 10 years – but it was the worst, and it wholly broke me.
Then, after two months of unrelenting spots, my partner of almost four years suddenly left me. To this day, I’m not entirely sure why.
I suspect he wanted a life change and I was simply collateral, but I’ve always wondered if my acne played a part. Was I too much? Did I cry too many times after removing my makeup? Did the sight of my inflamed, weeping spots make him feel sick? I couldn’t blame him – I wanted to claw my skin off every time I caught my reflection.
At the time it confirmed my worst fear – that acne had rendered me unlovable and now I had to date with it.
Acne is horrendously painful: the cysts hurt and your skin cracks constantly. I will never forget the sensation of feeling my skin rip during a meeting and not knowing if it was pus or blood trickling from it.
But it is emotionally taxing, too. Complaints of breakouts are often seen as vanity – even by doctors – but it’s far from skin deep: there is a stigma attached to it, that it’s caused by poor hygiene or bad diet.
So, face full of spots and suddenly single, I set up a dating profile while debating if using a picture from four months prior when I was spot-free was technically catfishing.
The first date I went on in four years started with a 30-minute skincare routine while hunched over a sink at work. I left to a chorus of well-intentioned ‘you can hardly notice it’ – knowing it was a lie.
The date went well but half way through I realised I had no contingency plan for if it went really well.
The sheer volume of products required to cleanse, dry out and hide acne doesn’t lend itself to spontaneous overnight stays, and sleeping in makeup is definitely not an option.
Instead, I got blackout drunk and hoped that the confidence gained from two bottles of red would see me through. The night ended with a kiss and a text a week later explaining he didn’t ‘see a future’.
I continued in this way, steeling myself before dates with yoghurt masks and layers of foundation, too terrified to stay the night.
No one ever said anything, they probably barely noticed, but all I could see was their eyes darting around my face, pupils dilating with panic when a flash of light revealed my true complexion.
Acne is aggressive, rapidly changing, consuming and demoralising. It is the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see at night. Bookending your day like that does something to your psyche and, just as my ex had months before, I fell out of love with myself.
I continued dating, or at least attempting to, but it was miserable. I spent more time cancelling because of a sudden flare up than I did actually meeting anyone. I became totally obsessed with how awful I looked.
I finally started a treatment of accutane, a medication that’s used to treat acne over a six-month period. It’s a toxic substance that can have severe side effects, but I was tired of feeling like my life was on hold every time a breakout worsened.
I responded well and my skin improved almost immediately – but it took seeing myself through someone else’s eyes to really start healing.
I matched with my current partner while on a trip to Copenhagen to figure out if I could live there. A fellow Brit who’d moved years prior, we immediately bonded over our shared love of the city and the quirks of Danish culture.
For our first date, he sprang a lunch date on me on a ‘good skin day’ – I’d felt brave enough to give my face a break from makeup, which meant I was unprepared and barefaced, sitting in broad daylight with scars and spots.
But after weeks of messaging, the thought of sitting miserably at my desk at work instead of meeting a boy who’d made me smile for the first time in weeks seemed inconceivably stupid.
He was disarming, put me instantly at ease, and looked at me so intently that for a brief moment I forgot I had acne. I went back to the office amazed that I could feel comfortable with someone I hardly knew, despite having none of the armour I’d got accustomed to.
To this day, if you ask him about my acne he’ll tell you he never thought it was that bad, because he genuinely never noticed. Instead, he saw me the way I wanted to see myself: vibrant, happy, full of life.
Realising someone loved me – warts and all – reminded me that I deserved that love all along. No one abandoned me because I had acne, I had simply abandoned myself.
I never saw acne as a part of who I was, it was an alien that had rooted itself in me, feeding like a parasite. But you cannot separate these things so the disgust I had for my skin was just disgust for myself.
My skin is clear now and truthfully, my life is better for it, but I like to think that if my acne came back tomorrow I would still love myself and expect to be loved fully by others.
Insecurities only carry the weight that we give to them and I’ve decided to put that weight down, because I deserve to be loved. And it strikes me that there are only two types of relationships – with those who use your appearance as an excuse not to love you fully, and with those who fall in love with you, even when you have acne.
Last week in Love, Or Something Thing Like It: My wife earns more money than I do and it’s changed how I show affection
Write for Love, Or Something Like It
Love, Or Something Like It is a new series for Metro.co.uk, covering everything from mating and dating to lust and loss, to find out what love is and how to find it in the present day.
If you have a love story to share, email rosy.edwards@metro.co.uk
MORE: Being a virgin makes it so much harder to find love
MORE: Dating in the countryside takes an acquired sense of humour
MORE: A decade of casual sex has shown me what true love really is
source https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/14/my-acne-ruined-every-date-11636457/
0 Comments