Sunday, September 22, 2013

Cruel Joke

"Smoking hot beauty is nature's way of making sure boring people get laid too. The rest of us have to be interesting," Mark Twain once wrote. Well, not really. *I* wrote that in a sardonic fit of dating pique once, and it's a joke I've made many times since.

I have this bias regarding insanely hot guys -- a bias I've held since midway through college. Hot guys have no personality. I am not referring to good-looking guys. I've known many good-looking guys with interesting minds and great personalities, and have even had the luck to date a few of them. I mean that infinitesimally small percentage of guys who are so damn hot, they never have to go out of their way to meet anyone. People just flock to the hot guy. So he's never really had to develop his personality in an interesting way. I'm talking about you, Brad Pitts of the world.

The hot guy is one of the Universe's favorite cruel jokes on us mere mortals. What could be funnier than a guy with an exquisitely perfect exterior, and a perfectly hollow interior? Before I realized the Universe was f*cking with me, I would develop a crush on some hot guy, preoccupy myself with clumsy machinations to loiter in his celestial orbit, then wait for him to notice me. After a string of failed attempts to grab his attention, my eager interest in the hot guy would turn to derogation, marinated by the sour grapes of his obvious disinterest in me. Half of my two-pronged strategy to get over Hot Crush would involve really focusing on his personality, not his abs. Perfect on the outside, Hot Crush was almost always disappointingly ordinary on the inside -- an Adonis with a doughy couch-potato brain. The other half of my "recovery" was falling for some other smoking hot guy. D'oh!

Physical beauty is a deceptive, tricky thing. When it comes to finding lasting love, there is nothing so over-hyped in value as beauty. It's not a particularly valuable asset, so much as it is a drug -- an intoxicating one that can distort your perception of others and yourself. Beauty is the fun-house mirror of dating. You can't trust it as a credible representation of reality, but it's hard not to pause and stare a while, mouth agape as your drool puddles below.

No comments:

Post a Comment