Gorgeous girls lose their attraction but Plain Janes are forever gripping
Being a great beauty for three or more decades can have its drawbacks.
Let’s say you start being a beauty at 15 and carry on till 48. By 48, you have got used to being swooned over and getting your way, entirely because of your looks.
No one could blame you for not having put much work into your personality as you went along.
And then you notice you have started to go off – and you wrongly attribute men’s failure to enthuse to the fact that you now have crêpy arms. It’s nothing to do with your arms.
Contrast two current widows from my own network. The first widow is Cynthia, so celebrated a beauty in younger life that jaws would drop open and cars almost crash when she walked along the King’s Road.
At 75, Cynthia is obviously no longer sending out sexual-signalling hormones – which nature turns off when you can’t reproduce – but she is still a classic corker to look at.
Despite being well-connected and moving in milieus with desirable singletons of her own vintage, she’s getting nowhere with her search for a new partner.
Philip, 75, would have fitted the bill. The top singleton widower in one of her circles, he lusted after Cynthia when they were young. But, 50 years later, when she made it clear she would now welcome an overture, he seemed disinclined to make one. He wasn’t ageist. So why?
The second widow, Bertha, 70, has never been considered attractive. The size of an upright fridge freezer – in both height and width – she has always been badly dressed. She’s always had unflattering hairstyles and glasses with cheap, plastic frames, which take up most of her face and magnify her eyes to an unnerving size.
But she’s always been a marvellous empathetic ‘sort’. Bertha has been snapped up by Philip. Why?
It’s a cautionary tale for current beauties such as Cynthia. Don’t get used to resting on the laurels of your looks. You need a few extra dimensions to yourself, once the hormones stop signalling.
What seemed mysterious and enigmatic, when Cynthia was younger, in later life seemed more like vacuity.
And the expectation of being treated like a piece of Sèvres porcelain is no longer realistic when oldie suitors need to be heaved out of cars or chairs.
Bertha, by contrast, was so used to men not fancying her that, once she had arrived at an age where she was certain she was definitely past it, she found herself in a marvellous position.
She could just get on with straightforward conversations with attractive men. No eyelash-batting or saucy innuendos. Just lots of self- deprecating honesty and well-considered talk about reading matter. And she had always been exceptionally kind.
It helped that Philip and Bertha were spending a week together as guests of a friend who had rented a sporting estate.
A standard getting-to-know-each-other courtship, with three-hour dinners at most once a week, would take four months to notch up 48 hours of exposure.
Yet, as guests under the same roof, you can notch up 48 hours of exposure in four days: sitting side by side on sofas; walking along riverbanks looking straight ahead, instead of at each other; eating three meals a day at the same table; observing each other’s table manners and how considerate the other is towards fellow guests. And having the other guests as shared references for discussion. A house party is the perfect hothouse to ‘force’ a relationship.
In these casual conditions, as Philip went to bed each night, he started to feel he could hardly wait to see Bertha at breakfast the next morning. By the end of the week, it had dawned on Philip that Bertha was his absolute soul mate.
Bertha was horrified when Philip declared his suit. She couldn’t believe it and thought perhaps he had sudden-onset dementia. Moreover, she dreaded his seeing her in the nude. Cynthia would have also dreaded this, but only because of her crêpy arms, whereas Bertha’s entire body was problematic. But progress was obviously made, and at Bertha and Philip’s wedding their seven combined children sobbed with happiness.
Cynthia has been discombobulated by the surprise development. She’s fretting and wondering how she can develop a late-onset interesting personality. Might a book club do it?
It’s not about Cynthia having an interesting personality. It’s about her developing the non-narcissistic skill of finding the interesting personality inside the possible new suitor – and learning how to communicate her appreciation of this personality. She can forget about pouting now.
For every thing, there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven; the meek shall inherit the earth. And the hideous will carry off the prize of the handsome heart-throb.
After a certain age, men worth their salt will not be looking for great beauties tilting about on high shoes and paying constant visits to hairdressers.
They will have much more fun and feel more of a bond with the capable and kind, jolly-hockey-sticks woman.
