I still maintain that a compliment is one person's opinion, and they have a right to their opinion. You can take it as fact or not.

I see a lot of women get themselves into a lot trouble with this one. The "If I don't agree with your compliment I will dismiss it completely." The ever-notorious Clock Girl was a master at it. If she received anything she could interpret as a criticism, she believed it immediately, magnified it, and took it to heart forever. Any compliment I paid her was dismissed immediately and forgotten forever, because it apparently didn't match her self-image.

The kicker - and the problem with this kind of 'vetting' - was when I was accused by her of "always being negative" and "never having anything nice to say". Eventually I twigged to the behavior enough to write down circumstances and dates of a few explicict compliments I'd paid her at the time. The next time I was told I "had nothing good to say about" her, I pulled them out and listed them off. She dismissed the entire list with, "I don't remember it that way." Even though I'd written it down.

One thing that has to be considered here is that your self-assessment may not be accurate. People's self-image only very rarely matches the actuality of their behavior, and the discrepencies are both on the too-positive and too-negative side of the ledger. (Witness, for example, that about 80-90% of people respond that they're a "better than average driver" on surveys - absurd on its face.) And when it comes to things like physical beauty, you don't get to vet someone else's opinion of your looks.'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder', as the old saying goes, and whether or not you agree, someone who thinks you're beautiful has every right to hold that opinion. I personally believe that they deserve at least a courteous "thank you" for paying you the kindness of telling you so, but as many of you know, I'm a bit of stickler for old-fashioned manners.

Since your self-image probably isn't accurate, pay attention to the compliments you receive (and the criticisms). If you hear the same thing from several different people, it may very well be true even if it differs radically from your perception of yourself on the matter.