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Look yourself, why smile for the perfect picture?

Look at her, look, she's not smiling in any of the pictures." A friend was showing us pictures of a girl and complaining. They had met online. My friend and this girl weren't dating - yet, as he was finding it difficult to sustain a conversation with this allegedly surly person. According to him, she was "too serious". While he, ever smiling in pictures, wanted to meet "only upbeat, happy people".
Only idiots smile in pictures all the time, I told him. "Tsk, no, you're not understanding," he said. His logic was, if she doesn't appear upbeat at least on Facebook, why would he waste time to meet her and risk the company of a sullen soul?
"You're perpetuating nonsense standards," I told him, annoyed now. "You're why women tilt their heads and make duck faces. It's this mentality!"
"As if women aren't scrutinised enough," I droned on. "Now they have to look happy-happy in every damn picture to hook some guy like you!"
Friend was by now folding his hands to try to get me to shut up and forgive him, all in one go.
Third person, our other friend who had been quiet, said: "Listen, K, if you want to find someone and settle down, stop being so shallow. This becoming a father thing you're craving won't happen if you don't even give girls a chance. Life is hard enough!"
He looked doleful. Two married friends he was unburdening his woes on were giving him grief. But that didn't stop him from continuing to swipe through her digital archives in search of more sullen pictures to support his point of view. "Here! Look at this one," he said, shoving the phone under our eyes. "She's obviously at a party. Why is she looking like she's having such a miserable time?! Life is hard enough - exactly! Why make it worse?"
I snatched his phone to peruse pictures and found at least two in which she appeared distinctly content. "You're being an idiot," we said. These were flimsy grounds to rule out a person. He wouldn't listen.
The writer Elena Ferrante recently wrote about the flipside of parents photographing only happy shots of their kids. "Missing are the tensions between the parents that alarm children, and heighten their uneasiness." She implies how warped it is for kids to grow up and only see a one-dimensional aspect of themselves when they might be searching for a more honest version.
No adult - or kid - is happy and smiling all the time. Then why do we choose photographs that represent this myth? Why do we want to share only the smiles?
I too have grown up with some camera people always saying "smaiiiiile!" or "cheeeese!". You want to ask these photographers, just take a natural photo, no? I have a lot of smiling photos of myself as a younger person. Only after college did it occur to me that it's all right to not force myself to lift the muscles on the corner of my mouth. A face can look acceptable without a parade of teeth on display.
People often dislike candid because it doesn't reflect the best side of them. They think they look unattractive, severe, sad, and that showcasing the non-bubbly, non-upbeat side makes them ineligible for life. But surely candid and honest is more real than counting to three, blurting "cheeeese!" and auto-smiling.
- nivriti@khaleejtimes.com