Looking the Way You Feel

The last time I heard the phrase: “One minute you’re an attractive woman – and the next you’re looking at someone you hardly recognize” was from a woman who was explaining how it is a husband’s fault that the woman they considered attractive when they were dating them is no longer attractive as their wife. The rant had to do with how older women are still attractive, but the problem is that their husbands don’t take the time to properly appreciate them. So, when Connie Poirier started down the road in today’s For Better or For Worse strip about how she has gotten old seemingly overnight without noticing it, it was nice to see that this was not used as an opportunity to slam men.

I would imagine that with the nature of the marital problems Lynn Johnston had last year, dealing with issues about her attractiveness would certainly be a part of it. I view this strip as a very good sign that Lynn has gotten over or dealt with this aspect of divorce, so that issues of attractiveness with respect to men has not even been mentioned in today's strip.

Instead Lynn Johnston is focusing on the differences between your self-image and your real life image. Personally I notice such things less when looking in the mirror, as Connie Poirier describes; because that happens every day, and more from seeing myself in a photograph from an angle I rarely see. The more difficult perception (and I don’t know if Connie is going to head this way in her diatribe) is seeing the way people see your personality and react to it. For example, I went through a period in my life, where I didn’t like giving long and detailed explanations of things, and I simply said, “Yes” or “No” to “Yes or No questions”. Even though I would say these things in a level tone of voice, frequently people would assume I was angry with them, and I learned that longer explanations were necessary, more conversational, and made people feel better about you (even if all those extra words were not necessary to answer the question).

This is even true of comic strip characters. However, Lynn Johnston oftentime circumvents that necessity and relies heavily on a relational shorthand for telling her stories. Today’s strip is the perfect example of that. If I take the strip on its merits, I might simply say, “Real people don’t have conversations like this” or “Photoshopping is not really a method to replace exercise, diet and skin cream, so this joke makes no sense.” However, Lynn depends on her readership looking at the few things being said and relating to them. Any person who has felt younger than they think they looked can say, “That’s the way I feel” and then can feel good about the strip speaking for them. They replace Connie or Elly with their own personality, and therefore Lynn Johnston does not have to write a personality for Connie or Elly except as a generic older woman, who thinks she is unattractive because she is old. The rest of the personality is the reader’s own perspective on what happens to the character.