He takes off his socks, places his feet on the coffee table and curls his toes to the edge of the glass. Ugh. Why can we be so interested in someone but inherently feel disgusted or “icked” out by the simplest action? Is it truly the person or the image we built of them being tarnished? 

Countless times, I will be in the midst of dating someone and will quickly be turned off within seconds at the sight of incredibly chapped lips, greasy hair, the use of an Xbox controller as a tv remote or an extended chase of a ping pong ball down the hallway. Once, I was icked out by a video of a guy I was dating. He was climbing up a tree when a coconut fell on his head, and he slid down and fell all cartoony. Now, while all of this is objectively shallow, it is a part of dating. I had 10 University of Oregon students tell me their icks that made them fall out of liking someone.

“When they aren’t into a wide range of music and film taste, generally when people aren’t invested in art forms,” Maddy Fry said.

“When they give codependent eyes,” Kaelyn Salz said.

“When guys wear flip-flops around,” Emily Dvorson said.

“When she has to watch tv to fall asleep,” Corey Sharr said.

Veronica Gallegos has a few icks — men wearing bedazzled jeans, leaving dead skin around the straw after sipping drink and perhaps most particularly, “When someone takes acid and after has a revelation about empathy and the injustices that are going on in the world.” 

“When their idea of a first date is tagging and skating around a mall,” Teja Graf said
“When someone uses the cat crying laughing emoji unironically,” Mae Olivier said.

“When they scroll through their camera roll and start pulling up pictures from their seventh-grade soccer team,” Kaelyn Salz said. “Or when someone starts talking about a dream for a continuous amount of time and there is no fun part.” 

With this said, if someone loses interest over this: they’re not the one. Nobody who truly values or is interested in you will use an “ick” as a dealbreaker. Being able to surrender to the idea that we simply have control over situations to a certain extent is helpful. We never truly know what someone is thinking and have little control over small acts that could change someone’s perception of us. Most times, it has little to do with the person themselves. An analogy I once heard was: You can be the whole package and still end up at the wrong address. Most often we take someone losing interest as a personal reflection on our self-worth but oftentimes it’s quite the opposite.