Stop Telling Me that I Look “Young” — It’s Not a Compliment
Saying that I look young just feels somewhat condescending
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One of the most frequent comments I hear from people — whether it’s a colleague, a friend, or even a family member — is that I “look so young”, like a twenty-year-old or someone who’s still in college or even worse, a teenager.
For some reason, people always make it a point to casually and comically throw that into conversation regardless of the number of times it’s already been said to me. And sure, it may have been sort of funny in the past and yes, I may still entertain it with a forced and somewhat awkward laugh, but the truth is, it’s also getting a bit old and quite a bit annoying.
These unwelcome comments about how young I look have continued to follow me into my thirties and they don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. And what I’d really like to say in response to these comments is that I just don’t find them funny anymore. Frankly, I never did. And I wish that people would stop constantly telling me that I look young. Because it’s not a compliment.
It’s downright degrading
Whether or not you mean it as an offense, saying that I look young just feels somewhat condescending based on how I’m interpreting it. It puts me under the impression that I look like a kid and no one — especially no one in their thirties — wants to be told that they look like a kid. And for being someone who is a soon-to-be new parent, I don’t want to look like I’m the babysitter to my own kid(s).
It’s an unnecessary comment
Most of the time, this comment has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. Saying that I look young is almost always irrelevant. It’s irrelevant to my job, my capabilities, and my competence. And in hindsight, I often wish I could ask why someone felt the need to slide that comment into conversation in the first place. Just think, if it were the other way around, I wonder how people would react if I told them that they really old when they still consider themselves relatively young. They probably wouldn’t take it very well.
