Being beautiful is not an advantage
IT’S hard to feel sorry for beautiful people. We’re all aware of the “beauty bias”. It propels us towards the fair of face. So beguiled are we by a ravishing countenance we are prepared to abandon common sense and believe that He or She of the evenly symmetrical features must be a delightful and trustworthy person.
Political pundits claim presidential daughter Ivanka Trump is benefiting from the beauty bias. Angelic- faced Ivanka is presented as her father’s conscience, an influence for good, the Jiminy Cricket of the White House and because she could moonlight as a supermodel we buy into the myth wholeheartedly.
That’s why it’s just a tiny bit satisfying to learn that, although they look stunning with a hangover, are incapable of appearing hideous in photographs and simply lean on a bar waiting for enthralled acolytes to buy them expensive cocktails, the visually stunning are beset by problems all of their own.
RESEARCHERS at Harvard have concluded that beautiful people do not have beautiful relationships. Even if we’re used to rugged square-jawed heroes sweeping doe-eyed heroines off to live happily ever after in novels and on the silver screen, in real life the prognosis is rather less idyllic.
turns out our mothers were right. Never, they warned, have more than a temporary fling with the achingly attractive class heart-throb. He’ll be selfobsessed and entitled and before you know it he’ll have copped off with your nextdoor neighbour.
Beautiful people, Harvard finds, are more likely to divorce. The explanation is simple: they feel so alluring they are confident that acres of greener grass are theirs for the ploughing. They don’t feel grateful to be loved. They’re used to homage, worship and total strangers writing sonnets to their earlobes. They’re not going to knuckle under and put up with boredom, frustration and spending Sunday afternoons with your parents.
Why should they put up with the bog-standard, the pedestrian and predictable when they could be swanning off to pastures new? We love stories about lottery winners living miserable lives and complaining that AT LAST, proof that what we’ve always suspected is true: men love their businesses as if they were their babies.
Finnish scientists have shown the money has only made them more wretched. These cautionary tales satisfy our sense of fairness: if these lucky beggars have won all that cash it’s only just that they shouldn’t enjoy it.
It’s the same situation with the physically blessed. If they’re so darned hot it’s only right that they crawl, downcast from the divorce court.
It seems there is a price to pay, even for being dropdead gorgeous. that if you show a chap his business’s logo, the synapses of his brain respond as if he’d seen a snap of his toddler.
Do female bosses feel the same? JEREMY CLARKSON has made so much dosh and is so revered by a fairly sizeable sector of the population that he has every reason to think he’s the bee’s knees. Neither his thwacking bank balance nor his popularity, however, precludes him from – occasionally – saying the silliest things. His pal Richard Hammond, 47, hit his head coming off a motorbike while filming their show The Grand Tour.
Hammond, who was badly injured 11 years ago in another accident while filming was knocked unconscious and lay in the Mozambique road miles from all medical help. Jeremy’s unwise words: “We don’t do hospitals.” Doctors have responded with one horrified voice: “You jolly well should.”
Chaps who shun hospitals have a horrible habit of becoming seriously ill with ailments which would have been treatable if they’d only elected to see a doctor. Not “doing hospitals” is only good old blokey fun if you don’t succumb to something horrible as a result. Get well soon Richard.
LOVING YOUR BUSINESS AS THOUGH IT WAS YOUR BABY
What do you think? So next time a man of your acquaintance refers to his café or hairdressing salon or blue-chip company as “my baby” and explains that he needs to “help my baby through to adolescence” try to forbear from scoffing. He, almost literally, means every word and love is love no matter where on this earth you happen to find it.