Yes, it’s unfair to deny a chance for romance to a good friend based on appearance and sexual chemistry alone, and you can rationalize that being with him is good for him and better for you than being single. It’s more unfair, however, to give that friend a chance and then discover, for reasons you don’t control, that you can’t give the full amount of affection he deserves.
As gross as it is to only judge prospective mates by their physical attributes, it’s just as inadvisable to become romantic with someone who seems like a good match when physical attraction isn’t there. If you’re looking for a long-term partner, avoiding romance with someone you’re not sexually attracted to isn’t superficial, it’s smart.
Being Beautiful
Over time, getting admiration for good looks may give you special confidence, but it may also give you attention from people who don’t know, understand, or like you as you really are. As a result, you may feel hollow and unmotivated to develop skills and achievements that don’t involve pictures, partying, and being pawed by a looks-obsessed horde. So, unless you’re vain or think being an object is your calling, expect good looks to impose burdens and potentially interfere with your finding true friendship and satisfaction in your life. Learn how to screen out the response that beauty inspires in others, and certainly never depend on it; otherwise, you won’t find people who appreciate you for you, and you won’t be fully appreciating yourself, either.
Here are three examples:
• I started to get attention for my looks in junior high, but even after all this time, I’m still not comfortable with it. I think it helped me avoid being bullied in school for being gay, and it certainly makes it easier to meet other guys. But now I also get a lot of attention I don’t want or need from people who get hurt if I’m not nice to them or don’t give them a lot of attention. People also assume weird things about me based on my looks, like that I’m promiscuous or stupid. It just gets distracting and embarrassing. My goal is to figure out how to keep good looks from ruining my life and making me an asshole.
• I’m comfortable with my looks—I’m not a supermodel, but, being frank, men tend to consider me beautiful—and I’m careful not to be overly flirtatious. Still, I’ve always felt other girls don’t trust me because they think I’m trying to steal their dates. I wonder if I’m being more seductive than I realize, but I really do make an effort to keep my signals clear. In the meantime, I miss having closer friendships and being able to hang out with friends who are dating one another. My goal is to get other women to trust me in spite of my good looks.
• I’ve always been known for my good looks, and I’ve made the most of it as a lifelong bachelor, but I’m afraid I don’t have anything else to offer. Now that I’m nearing forty, gaining weight, and losing hair, people are less interested in what I have to say and I’m losing my confidence and starting to panic. My goal is to find an identity and confidence that don’t depend on my looks.
Although we like to think our identities come from who we are more than from the way other people think of us, most of us are, indeed, strongly influenced by how others respond, particularly when we see them every day for a long time. That’s why high school often teaches us more about what stereotype we supposedly fulfill than it does about algebra. And why dreamy football players are treated like royalty while zitty, awkward geniuses are often deemed deserving of physical punishment.
When people respond to our good looks, in high school or in the real world, their strong feelings can shape how we see ourselves unless we are strongly grounded or totally oblivious of human interaction. And even if the good-looking are also aware of their good fortune, that doesn’t mean that they’re immune to an attractiveness backlash.
One dark side of people’s response to your good looks, after they’ve given you attention and flattery, is to find and invent faults that will help soothe their envy. So it’s not unusual for people who begin by overadmiring you to soon suspect you of being shallow, promiscuous, and/or incompetent at everything other than a beauty contest. Meanwhile, they discount and ignore your actual gifts or disregard your actual needs, while expecting an unreasonable amount from you and spreading an unrealistic perception of who you are.
Trying to change your image or address the issue by talking about it are two strategies that are usually ineffective; prejudices are powerful, and defensiveness often gives more power and validation to false opinions. You did nothing to cause overly positive and negative judgments other than be attractive, and short of gaining fifty pounds or giving yourself a Trump do, you can probably do little to talk others into seeing beyond your looks to who you really are.
Instead, try to ignore your appearance while focusing on the quality of your work and your relationships with old friends and family. If you’re thick-skinned and socially adept, you may achieve this goal while accepting invitations to date, party, and whatever. But if you’re sensitive, worry about hurting others, and can’t easily say no, be careful. You’re better off spending more time at school or the office and restricting your social life until time brings you relationships with people who see you and appreciate you for who you are.
Even if you’re comfortable with your good looks and immune to gossip, you may well find yourself isolated from friends who have paired off and are susceptible to insecurity and the fear that you’ll seduce their partners. That could cause you to wonder what you did to arouse their fears and try harder to win their trust, but again, your efforts will probably fail. Not only are their fears beyond your control, but you can’t correct behavior in yourself that wasn’t wrong in the first place.
Instead, accept the paradoxical fact that beauty often makes you lonely, even as it seems to draw people to you, and that you must learn to bear this loneliness without blaming yourself for social mistakes or beauty opportunism. Respect yourself for living up to your standards, regardless of temptation, and for tolerating lonely times without lowering your friendship standards.
If you find yourself worried that age will strip away your looks—and a beauty-driven lifestyle—don’t assume that you’re losing something of great value or, worse, the only thing you own. You may indeed have come to depend on the pleasures of sexual conquest, admiration, and special treatment. The alternative, however, is not to be ordinary, ignored, and forever alone.
Being born with good looks has probably delayed your ability to accept what’s not so beautiful in other people and so develop deeper relationships. As a result, enjoying the pleasures of attractiveness can make long-term relationships look dull and ugly. And it’s true that no one seems beautiful when you’re both tired and arguing about whose turn it is to buy more toilet paper.
Your goal, when beauty fades, is to ignore your withdrawal symptoms and seize the opportunity to start growing. Work with a good therapist or coach to figure out how to accept your new normal life, and respect yourself for doing a good day’s work and being decent to others, even though you miss having a great head of hair. If you can ignore the way you feel and retrain yourself to respect values that depend on who you are and how you act, you can also build relationships that increase in value with age, even as your own reflection becomes less prized.
Having beauty may win you admiration and dates, but it can cause you to miss opportunities to find respect and real love. Instead of blaming yourself if it causes you trouble, learn to tolerate its burdens and not overvalue its pleasures. Then you can graduate to enjoying your appearance without letting it interfere with your ability to work hard, be a decent person, and find real beauty—not in the mirror or the approval of your peers, but in family, long-term relationships, and hard-earned moments of happiness.
Appearance Improvement Techniques: Pros and Cons
Technique
Pro
Con
Weight loss
Done carefully, i.e., without straight-up starving yourself or just drinking lemon juice and tears for a month, you might be helping your heart, avoiding diabetes, and
improving your health overall. Plus, exercise is proven to help your mood (assuming you don’t pull, break, or tear something important).
Being thinner won’t automatically make you more confident—your body absorbs food, but your personality does not—nor does it instantly give you the ability to deal with an influx of attention, especially the kind that comes from people who are homing in on your new “hot” body type. Ew.
Plastic surgery
It’s a surefire way to approach anything about your body that you can’t hide or accept. Plus, it can stop that pesky snoring once and for all.
It’s a big risk (RIP, Kanye’s mom) without a big guaranteed reward, because as much as it feels as if your life would be better if you just had bigger lips or boobs or biceps, that’s rarely how it works. Plus, again, the new attention can be tough because, while you might have hated being flat before, you probably won’t enjoy being a magnet for tit-obsessed creeps now.
Style makeover
Taking a chance on a new haircut, wardrobe, and/or eyebrows can be scary, but you don’t have that much to lose (except your gross old clothes), and it’s certainly less risky than joining a cult gym or getting your face sliced open.
Your stylist might make a major misstep, and bangs and eyebrows take a long time to grow out (and pictures of you dressed like an idiot with bad bangs or clown brows last forever). Most important, you can’t assume you’re a different, better person just because your face got plucked.
Therapy
If you want to prettify your insides as well as your exterior, talking to someone about your relationship priorities and the hurdles you face is a good step.
A therapist can help coach you through dating, but can’t help you become a more dateable person or perform an exorcism. If you go seeking a new you instead of useful advice, you’re in trouble.
Finding religion
Can help some people get their lives in order, even if they’re not in jail.
Religion brings people together, but if your passion for Xenu is the main thing keeping you and your spouse together, you’ll be sorry.
Marriage and Beauty
Marriage may solve some problems for the overly good-looking; in spite of the shallow pleasures and temptations of being admired, you’ve found someone with whom you want to share a deep commitment. If you’ve become dependent on your good looks for fun and self-esteem, however, marriage can bore you, challenge your feelings of being special, and trigger withdrawal symptoms. Unless you’re relatively oblivious of the way people react, the transition from being admired and serially dated to being taken for granted by a loving spouse can be a painful lesson. Still, it’s worth pushing through because if you can’t kick your craving for shallow admiration, the realities of marriage will create more problems than they solve.
Here are three examples:
• I was always attracted to my husband—he’s not a hunk or anything, but my kind of cute. Ten years into our marriage, however, he’s gained some weight, grown some hair in weird places, and generally stopped looking in the mirror, so I’m just not that into him physically anymore. I can’t help it, but it takes away the sexual pleasure of our marriage, and I resent his inability to do the least bit of maintenance, especially since I’m slathering myself in antiaging cream and counting all my steps. My goal is to get him to take better care of himself so we can keep our marriage from becoming sexually boring.
• My wife is losing her looks, but after three pregnancies and many years of marriage, that’s just what happens. No matter how many times I reassure her that I don’t care how her body’s changed and would love her even if she grew a full mustache, her changed appearance bothers her and gets her depressed. That makes her grouchy with me and the kids, and that’s much more of a problem than her weight. My goal is to get her to see that looks don’t matter and make her feel better.
• My wife always puts a huge effort into making herself look good, which I thought was fine when we were dating, but now, ten years later, she puts the same amount of effort in. The only difference is now she doesn’t just care about how she looks, but about how I and the kids present ourselves, and all the crap she makes us do before we’re allowed to leave the house is driving us all crazy. My goal is to get her to relax her focus on appearances before we all get too mad at her and rebel.
Most people aren’t foolish enough to marry someone based solely on his or her looks; like buying oceanfront property on an eroding cliff or getting a tattoo celebrating a Patriots Super Bowl victory before the season starts, it’s almost certain to be a doomed investment. In addition to being superficial and sure to fade, good looks may also create needs and expectations within a marriage that are so hard to deal with that they last longer than the good looks themselves.
There’s nothing wrong, for example, with finding your husband handsome and, as a result, sexually attractive. If you were lucky, you wouldn’t care when aging made him look mature, distinguished, or, to be less tactful and positive, lumpy and gross. Unfortunately, sexual attraction is delicate and unpredictable, regardless of what lady-magazine writers and even animal biologists tell you, mostly because they only cover courtship rituals. Keeping up interest after the flirtation ends and the bright plumage fades is much more complicated, unpredictable, and uncontrollable.
In spite of your determination to eat and live healthily and invest in a close relationship, libido can suddenly disappear because of stress, aging, negative appearance, or some other cause that no one can diagnose. Not that a diagnosis matters, because even if you know why you feel the way you do, you can never control how or why you are or aren’t attracted to someone. So if you prod your partner to change or make it clear that your sexual satisfaction is on the line, you may find yourself with conflict, diminished performance, and more frustration. After all, he could hit the gym, hire a personal stylist, and even develop a signature scent, and you might still find yourself not interested anymore. Then the only physical thing you’ll want to do with each other is bare-knuckle box.
Accept that, without your being a shallow person, his appearance was more of a sexual trigger than you realized and that now it’s not so hot and may never get better. Certainly, his appearance and your response to it are not under your control, so restoring his attractiveness is a lousy goal. Instead, review the parts of your marriage that work well. Hopefully, you can reassure yourself that your marriage has brought you much more than has been lost by the decline in sexual pleasure, so you don’t feel like a victim.
Then, when your resentment is well hidden, ask him whether he’s interested in improving his health with diet and exercise. Offer to help by changing the foods you buy, your menu, and your schedule of activities. If you accept him the way he is and thus take failure off the table, you may be able to help him get healthy and get back that bonus. If you can’t accept that his looks aren’t likely to improve, think of what you’ve gained from your partnership. Of course, if you’ve lost more than you’ve gained, you may have good reason to move on. Otherwise, remember that you chose a good partner, built a good marriage, had fun while the sex was hot, and now it’s time to make the best of something that can’t be helped.
Sometimes a partner may have an intense need to look good, regardless of how much she loves you. Although focusing exclusively on beauty can make one shallow, many people care deeply about work and relationships and still can’t get good looks off their mind. Maybe beauty-mindedness is a kind of OCD; if so, it’s not uncommon and may confer a Darwinian survival advantage on those who have it genetically programmed into their brains. Even so, living with someone’s beauty obsession is torture.
Trying too hard to stop your partner from suffering every time she looks in a mirror probably won’t work because, as you’ve learned and as we’ve previously discussed, reassurance and logic have no effect on compulsive feelings and involuntary thoughts. Pushing her to be happier will backfire if she feels blamed for a response she can’t help. So stop wasting time
disagreeing with her thoughts, because they’re just a compulsion, not credible ideas that even deserve consideration, and the more time you spend trying to refute them, the more you empower them.
Your goal isn’t to prove her wrong, but to lovingly push her toward finding a way to keep her thoughts from uglying up your life together. Urge her to remember what she has created in your marriage in spite of her worries. Remind her that she may get relief from treatment or, at the least, ideas on how to distract herself and prevent obsessive thoughts from controlling her behavior. If nothing helps, take comfort from your own good efforts and do what you can to protect yourself from her negativity. Regardless of her self-torturing thoughts, you know you have a good marriage and that she’s been a good wife and mother. Your hope is that she’ll share your perspective, even when her thoughts tell her otherwise.
If your partner’s beauty preoccupations know no boundaries and force her to fuss about your and your children’s appearance, then you have more reason to resent her obsessions and wish she could change. You’re sorry she’s making herself miserable, but it’s hard not to resent feeling controlled and criticized. Unfortunately, you are up against an additional hard-to-change trait—her tendency to see family as a part of herself—so trying to get her to stop will probably trigger more conflict. Perhaps a family therapist will referee, tell her that she’s going too far, and offer validation. Change, however, may still be hard to come by, particularly if she sees the therapist as having taken your side.
If you can’t change your partner, build better boundaries. Don’t respond to conversations about appearances but do talk about good times, growth, and accomplishments. Veto appearance-related activities that you consider too demanding while suggesting alternatives. Don’t criticize her views or defend your own, other than to note the difference and express determination to pursue your own course, and for the kids to do the same if they so choose.
F*ck Love: One Shrink's Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship Page 6