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Are Ugly Guys Worse in Relationships Than Hot Ones?
Lessons from someone who's been with both
Amy Sterling CasilFollow
a11y-light·January 24, 2022 (Updated: January 29, 2022)·Free: No
Until I dated and lived with a man who was markedly less attractive than me, I didn't realize that men who aren't as good-looking as others could be more abusive than the majority of attractive, fit men would ever dream of being. I even thought the opposite: that a less good-looking man would be happy to be with an attractive partner. I thought he would value me and treat me well.
How utterly wrong I was.
After ten years with someone who didn't look much different from the cave man in the header of this picture, I had completed the most miserable decade of my adult life. I had lost a baby because his father was too poorly-motivated to understand the baby's health needs and left him in an unsafe location with his bottle. I had spent countless hours in custody battle courtrooms (not mine — his). I had devoted all of my life, time, creativity, and resources to a miserable, angry, self-centered man whose problems could never have been solved (except by himself — and that never occurred).
Were Alan's problems a result of his physical unattractiveness? They were certainly closely tied to his anger, abuse, and manipulative personality. Over time, I've started to wonder if Alan's unattractive outside was a reflection of the angry, troubled person inside, leaking out. Either way, Alan was a disaster not only for me and my daughter, but for himself. His poor health habits combined with genetic vascular disease that he knew he was at risk for, led to his death after a series of strokes at only age 51.
It all started with a series of mistaken assumptions on my part. First, the assumption that I shouldn't judge others based on their appearance. In Alan's case: yes, I should have. I had no idea that although overweight when I met him, Alan had formerly been super-obese. When I learned of his massive 100+ pound weight loss, I — mistakenly — took this to be a sign he had taken interest in his health and wanted to work to improve it.
Alan was also a hard worker, committed to earning a living for his children, from whom he had been separated due to a horrible divorce and custody battle. Another reason for some of my confusion was that Alan seemed to genuinely love his three children from his first marriage. He had been their primary caretaker when they were infants. So, I — again, mistakenly — interpreted this as a positive quality. A man willing to be "Mr. Mom" to three small children while their mother went to work! But unfortunately, the truth was probably more along the lines of he was limited to work at home because he was at the time, morbidly obese.
Alan's ex-wife didn't help the situation much (she actually made it a million times worse) because she had left him with an individual who had previously stated he was Alan's "best friend," and who had socialized with the couple prior to the marital breakup. This man, unbelievably, was not only less "attractive" than Alan, but also — one of the worst, if not the worst — humans I have ever encountered. Sociopath? Narcissist? Unemployed? Con artist? Child kidnapper? Manson-style leader of his own little "family"? Those are the nice things I can say about this brute. Alan's ex could allege and scream how bad he was all she wanted but she'd left him in a heinous nuclear apocalypse of poor judgment and parental kidnapping and she and her new partner kept the behavior up and accelerated it for a decade and a half.
With wonderful 20–20 hindsight, I look back and see that I had involved myself with a real-life version of a true crime podcast. I and my daughter (and baby son and the other children) were collateral damage in a battle between adults who had not a competent parenting or non-sociopathic thought or idea between them.
Am I saying that all overweight, balding men with sedentary jobs are abusive sociopaths who will treat a loving, competent, committed, and attractive partner like trash?
No, of course not.
But I will say that now I've learned about "red pilling" and "negging," Alan was an expert in that. And I was a vulnerable target, having been raised in a deeply abusive household by a masterful emotional abuser who wasn't reluctant to deploy judicious amounts of physical abuse and terror, either. I was a parental kidnapping victim. I was alienated from my father and his family for most of my formative years. My formidable grandmother kidnapped me from my father's house shortly after my mother died of pancreatic cancer when I was three months old. She didn't have what would generally be understood as "good reasons" for her behavior. The whole thing was about her sense of loss, having lost her own mother six months before, and then her daughter. And — she wanted a do-over.
If I reflect honestly, the abuse Alan put me through was amateur hour compared to what my grandmother did. Of course that somehow made me more willing to tolerate and excuse the inexcusable.
He told me "No man would look at a woman over age 30" dozens of times. He announced "You still carry yourself like a beautiful woman," one day when I was swimming with and playing with his children because he wouldn't be seen in the water or in a bathing suit.
Beyond the common, every day insults to my appearance or downgrading and denigration of my friends, tastes in food, family traditions, or other interests, was the more insidious abuse toward my work. It didn't matter whether I was teaching or writing. Nothing I did was sufficient in Alan's estimation. Writing couldn't be taught, according to him, so why would any work I'd do in the classroom matter? Even if I showed him student work improving, he found ways to put down their efforts.
As to my writing, he found ways to sabotage it and my writing career. Although he asked me to help him with his publishing business and editing and I did so, none of that was ever good enough for him, either.
From my work outside the publishing industry and my upbringing (my grandmother was very abusive but my grandfather was not), I'd learned that gossiping behind people's backs was a bad idea. When I mentioned this to Alan, who loved to gossip and who sometimes recounted stories of awful gossip and backstabbing he and his ex had participated in, I received bitter recrimination and attacks for weeks. The backstabbing and gossip seemed even worse afterward, not better.
Alan's children all had severe behavioral issues as a result of (see above: 3 malevolently incompetent parents with many traits in common with serial criminals). But when I mentioned even simple parenting concepts like regular mealtimes, bedtimes, and organization for homework and school, we went straight to Disney Dad and there it stayed. He was incapable of disciplining, providing any structure, or offering guidance to his children. And, of course, he was callous and cruel to my daughter as well, leading me to leave him several times and put many restrictions on our relationship.
I could be simplistic and say I endured this heinously bad relationship and donated ten years of my life, my probably decent-paying professional fiction writing career, and the well-being and life of my baby to this horrible relationship because I had the idiotic conviction that I should not hold Alan's less-than-optimal appearance against him. I had the stupid idea that a fat, balding, ugly guy could still be a good partner. I persisted in the tiny-brained belief that a guy like that would treat me as well as a fit man with a full head of hair —
But it's really more like "sometimes the outside really does reflect the inside."
Narcissism combined with childhood abuse and a culture that tells this type of man to act the way Alan did, even giving them instructions in how to do so in the form of "redpilling."
We all live and learn. It is anything but "shallow" when I say were I to have it all to do over again, I would have for certain swiped left.
I would have stuck with the good-looking ones.
