Why do so many beautiful people have sucky marriages? The most obvious example is Hollywood, where nobody can stay married for 15 minutes without having an affair, getting a messy divorce, quickly remarrying, having another affair, publicly declaring Sex Addiction, and finally marrying someone 20 years younger and settling into obscurity, too old to score gossip-worthy roles. Most of us figure the reason actors are unlucky in love is that they face too much temptation—if you have to make out with Russell Crowe or Angelina Jolie on screen, chances are you’ll want to do it again offscreen, right? But it’s long seemed to me that excessive beauty can be a liability even in the real world, especially for women, so for the hell of it I made a list of my 10 most beautiful women friends only to find that 8 are either in unhappy marriages or already divorced; 1 is alone after a string of movie-of-the-week bad relationships; and only 1 is in happily in love.

This didn’t look good. Briefly I wondered if maybe everyone I know is in a dysfunctional relationship! (I’m a writer after all.) But when I widened my sample happiness levels (lack of public fights; actually having sex—and it being with each other) rapidly skyrocketed. How could this be? After all, as the old Janis Ian lyrics go, “love is meant for beauty queens.” Women worldwide strive to increase our physical appeal: dieting, waxing, microdermabrasing and even having surgery to force or simulate our way into Beauty. So why don’t superior good looks increase the odds that a woman will find lasting love?

There are probably a number of reasons. Maybe superhumanly sexy women are subject to more temptation, and having men woo you with greater frequency increases the chances that you’ll fuck up, succumb and blow your marriage apart. But I’m not convinced that’s the whole story. Often it’s a beautiful woman who is cheated on by her man (think Elizabeth Hurley; think Uma Thurman—I’m thinking of several of my non-famous friends.) Sometimes the issue is not even infidelity. Could it be that beautiful women are, plain and simple, attracting the wrong men as a result of excessive beauty?

Far more research than the scandals of Hollywood and the poor romantic choices of my best-looking women friends would be necessary to prove my point. And I should qualify that I know dozens of wonderful, respectful, faithful men who are certainly not married to dogs and have a healthy appreciation for a pretty woman! Rather beauty—like most things—seems most functional in moderation. It’s really quite simple. If a woman is beautiful far beyond the norm—makes heads turn when she enters a room—then it stands to reason that she attracts men looking to date (later marry) the hottest woman in the room. And the man who always wants to be with the hottest woman in the room is, simply put, bad news. He is by definition considering looks above other attributes; is concerned with appearances not simply because he likes to get it on with a beautiful girl (an understandable urge) but because he wants the world to know that he is the Type of man who always gets the “best.” His woman is an accessory, more a reflection on him than a person in her own right. Having spent her entire life attracting this Type, a beautiful woman may not even recognize his perils because he is so familiar. After all, other men may be afraid to even talk to her because she’s too beautiful and so—ironically—this may be the only Type she’s ever dated.

So what is a Beautiful Woman to do? Here are some practical tips:

1) While fashion is usually a girl’s best friend, the excessively beautiful may be wise to skip the make-up and bod-baring frock and think outside the box. In the 80s, going Goth was a safe option; in the 90s you could don a slacker skullcap. Every generation has a style for girls wishing to hide their beauty, and it exists for a reason.

2) Are any of his previous girlfriends models? Do any look almost exactly like you? If the answer is yes, proceed with extreme caution.

3) Double ditto if he has more than once dated anyone in excess of 10 years his junior.

4) If you can’t shake these Bozos even in a T-shirt and sweats, gain 15 pounds. No matter how stunning your face is, this Type will never get serious with a girl who is even mildly overweight. Keep a little extra padding on to weed them out—you can always shed it once you’ve found Mr. Right.

Good luck, Beauty Queens. But remember to leave some nerds for the rest of us—they make the best husbands!

TAGS: beauty, Gina Frangello, nerds

GINA FRANGELLO is the fiction editor of The Nervous Breakdown. She is the author of the novel My Sister's Continent (Chiasmus 2006) and the collection Slut Lullabies (forthcoming from Emergency Press). She was the longtime Editor of the literary magazine Other Voices, and co-founded its book imprint, Other Voices Books, where she is now the Executive Editor of the Chicago office. Her short stories have been published in many lit mags and anthologies, including A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, Swink and Clackamas Literary Review. She guest edited the anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters (Hourglass) and teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and Northwestern University's School of Continuing Studies. Gina lives in Chicago and can be found online at Facebook, www.ginafrangello.com and the Other Voices Books' website, www.ovbooks.org. She has twin daughters, a wild preschooler son, and never sleeps.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 10:14 am and is filed under Essays, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.