Family Feuds·
THE HYGIENE HURDLE
A sibling asks how to tell a booger-eating brother that hygiene and presentation matter for dating, without triggering defensiveness or shutting him down.
How would you tell him: say it straight or soften it?
Be one of the first to vote.
He keeps eating his boogers in public, and then wonders why he can't get a girlfriend.
That's the problem a frustrated sibling brought to the internet: a brother who is, by their account, "feminist and all," generally decent, and still somehow sabotaging himself in the most immediate way possible. The poster says he picks his nose openly, bites his nails, pulls at his mustache, and sometimes scratches his head and eats the dead skin. It's not subtle. It's not private. It happens in front of other people, like he's not noticing what everyone else is noticing.
The poster says they've already told him it's nasty. He did not take it well.
"He has a tendency to get quite upset about criticism," they explained, saying he becomes extremely defensive when his hygiene gets mentioned. And yet, the same brother keeps complaining that he can't get a girlfriend and has no "rizz."
That gap between complaint and behavior is what's driving the poster up the wall. They say his presentation is rough, too: shirts with holes, bleach stains, clothes that don't fit well. Friends have offered to help. The poster has offered to help. A makeover has been on the table. He refuses.
Instead, he keeps circling back to the same line: if a woman doesn't like him as he is, that's her problem.
"If she doesn't like me the way I am, then I don't want her," he says.
The poster says that's missing the point. They aren't asking him to become a different person. They're asking him to stop doing things that make dating harder, like picking his nose in public and eating it, or showing up in stained, ill-fitting clothes while complaining about being single. "who tf wants to kiss someone who eats their buggers????" the poster wrote, bluntly laying out the issue in the exact language that has apparently not worked on him.
So they came to the internet with a question: how do you tell a brother that his hygiene is ruining his chances with women without making him shut down again?
The answer they're looking for is not about changing his beliefs or personality. It's about finding a way through a wall of defensiveness long enough to get him to hear the part everyone else seems able to see.