My (22M) girlfriend (21F) of 1 year refused to be seen with me for our anniversary dinner last night because I had a black eye and now I don’t know how I can fix this.
My girlfriend “Nicole” and I have been together for a year and for the most part, things have been going great. We hardly ever argue but, over the past couple months, I've noticed she's become increasingly concerned with her public image, especially what she puts forward on social media.
Historically, it's been little things like asking me to change what I'm wearing before going out or having me retake the same picture a dozen times because she isn't satisfied with it. Pretty normal relationship stuff.
Yesterday, while I was riding my bike to class, a jaywalker walked out into the street and I had to swerve to avoid him. I ended up swerving into a signpost and hit my face on the pole. Luckily, my helmet and sunglasses took the brunt of the collision, but it left me with a bit of a shiner and destroyed my sunglasses.
I ended up going to an urgent care to get my eye looked at and luckily nothing was seriously wrong, although the doctor said I was definitely going to have a black eye for a while. After my visit to urgent care, I texted Nicole letting her know that I had gotten into an accident, but that everything was okay.
As you would expect, she was very concerned and wanted to make sure I was okay. Nicole immediately FaceTimed me so we could talk so she could make sure everything was okay. When I answered, I deliberately hid my face at first just so I could warn her that it looked a little rough. I could definitely see her tense up a bit when I told her that and she became upset when I actually showed her my eye. At that point, it had started to really bruise and was almost completely swollen shut. I tried to assure her that I was going to spend the next few hours icing it and that I was sure it would look much better by the time we had our dinner reservation and that I wasn't going to let a little bruise ruin our plans for both dinner and after (plans I had texted her that morning to give her something to look forward to).
At that point, Nicole began crying and hung up not long after. I kept texting her that everything was going to be okay, but she didn't respond for a couple hours. When she finally did, she said she wanted to postpone our anniversary dinner and other celebrations until my black eye was gone. I told her that I didn't mind going out in public with my swollen eye and that it shouldn't stop us from having a good time, but she replied that she did mind. I even floated the idea of an eyepatch or buying new sunglasses (since my only pair had been destroyed, but she was adamant about it.
This definitely hurt my feelings a bit and made me a lot more self-conscious about my eye. I don't think we should have to postpone celebrating for a few days until my eye is all healed and have told her so, but Nicole couldn't be convinced. It also has me questioning our future together as it seemed like getting perfect pictures was more important to her than celebrating our anniversary.
How can I convince her to ignore what people think of us on social media Any advice you give would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
