Girl Too Hot to Marry

Dating for marriage is hardest for the hottest, you probably couldn't pull it off.

There are two kinds of girls. The first doesn’t feel like doing anything about her dating life, since doing something about anything is a stretch and also cringe. As she fantasizes about a soulmate falling into her lap, she thinks how much easier it would all be if she was really, really hot.

The other kind doesn’t believe in soulmates, she wants to be proactive about her dating life. She asks the internet for advice. Everyone from red-pilled bros to traditionally married Christian mothers agrees: forget girlbossing or developing a personality, just lose weight and try to become really, really hot. On rare occasion, a woman may be given hotness-orthogonal advice like being less insecure or liking men more. But I’ve not once heard a woman be advised that she’s too attractive and should tone it down.

It seems straightforward: women gatekeep and select men. The hotter a woman is, the more men she can select from to find one that satisfies her, and the easier it will be to keep him. According to “the economic model of relationships”, being hot provides an advantage in all stages of a relationship — attraction, negotiation, and maintenance — with no diminishing returns. There should be no point where physical attractiveness becomes a downside.

And yet it does. Very attractive women (and men) are less satisfied in relationships, get divorced more, and have fewer children than nice mids. It’s hard to find a measure of relationship success or happiness that 10s do better on than 6s.

As a happily married 6, I don’t find this surprising at all. It’s instructive of the differences between transactional dating and what it takes to build a partnership that lasts. Relationships require selecting for specific traits in others and cultivating them in yourself. Attractiveness raised the skill floor required for both. Dating while gorgeous is a challenge not many people are up for.

Note: most things in this post apply to some extent to very hot men as well, but I’ll focus on just women for simplicity. Male attractiveness often involves e.g. an outlier skill or achievement that makes you rich or famous, and how that works in dating depends a lot on what that skill is. For women — unless you’re a celebrity — hotness is just physical appearance.

Adverse Seduction

I wrote about women proactively asking guys out: they gain the opportunity to date more attractive men, but lose the power to select for devotion and commitment.

The same is true for certified baddies: they get a lot of interest from hot men, but can’t easily tell who’s really interested in them personally and who’s just attracted to their attractiveness.

Hotness is capital, and guys want to get rich. Nothing raises a man’s esteem like a beautiful woman by his side: in his own eyes, in the eyes of other men, and especially in the eyes of other women. Since women generally gatekeep the initial approach but not long-term commitment, the status-boost of having seduced a stunner sticks to a guy even if the relationship didn’t last.

A hot girl also pay an intimidation tax, filtering out competent but non-flashy men who feel she’s out of their league. Paradoxically, it applies doubly to a guy looking for a serious relationship. He runs the risk of initial rejection and the risk of her losing interest over time, which both seem more likely with a girl who has seemingly infinite options. A guy who’s only interested in something casual has less to fear in asking her out.

So: a bombshell has a lot of inbound interest, but it’s adversely selected against devotion and commitment. She’ll be tempted to come up with heuristics to narrow down the sheer number of suitors, but such filters are more likely to be gamed by exactly the sort of player she hopes to avoid. Being hot, she is restricted to dating only hot guys — one more obstacle to finding loyalty and commitment.

The default outcome for very beautiful women is an endless string of casual relationships that last exactly three to six months, eroding their trust in men and in themselves.

The Crisis of Disillusionment

The Value of Others lays out all the components of the problem of projection:

Whether or not they want to, people unconsciously fill in the gaps in their knowledge bases with what they expect to find there. […] When people are attracted, they fill in those same gaps with hopeful projections and positive attributes. This is an example of the halo effect, in which people unconsciously attribute positive personality traits to those to whom they are attracted. Statistically speaking, it’s unlikely that the beautiful woman you just met is also funny and charming and intelligent and kind. And in any case, you can’t possibly have enough data to support those conclusions at this point. […]

Like Narcissus, the romantic lover tends to fall in love with his or her reflection – except, in this case, the projected surface isn’t water: it’s another human being. These people aren’t engaging with another person as much as they are interacting with the reflected projection of their own fantasies.

The consequences [of this projection] tend to build up over time until they reach the point at which the fantasies can no longer support the weight of the disconfirming evidence. Whether this threshold is reached by a single large “betrayal” or an accumulation of many small “disappointments” is irrelevant: over a long enough time line, all lovers eventually arrive at this point.

This is the Crisis of Disillusionment.

The CoD predominantly affects the sorts of men a hottie is inadvertently selecting for: guys who care about their image, guys who think short-term, and guys who chase the emotional highs of limerence. Cuties get crushed on, but crushes often lead to crashes.

Avoiding the Crisis of Disillusionment is mostly up to the illusioned, but there’s an important thing the girl herself can do to sail through it. She must replace the projected fantasy with something even better.

A woman can bring joy and value to a man in many ways that don’t include just standing there being hot. If she’s extroverted she can invite him on adventures or delight him with her humor. If she’s quiet and sensitive she can make him feel loved with thoughtful gifts and private acts of care. If she’s intelligent and curious she can stimulate him mentally and help with practical problem-solving. She can even lead him to god.

Unlike the appeal of beauty, which loses its power over a few months, these skills take months to fully showcase. And unlike beauty itself, which fades over the years, these skills take years to develop. But developing them requires honest feedback, and that’s the toughest thing for a dazzling dame to get.

I get immediate social feedback on the quality of experience of being in my company because that’s the only thing people are in my company for. But physical beauty projects a warm glow that people simply want to bask in. If you’re hot, people will seek your company regardless.

There’s a tendency to believe that beautiful people are by nature mean and entitled, but that’s a myth. Hot people experience a world that’s kind and loving and suffer less from the insecurities that can sour people’s personalities. In data I’ve collected, attractive people were slightly more agreeable and extroverted.

But being a great spouse requires more than general pleasantness. Marriageability takes time and effort to develop. A hottie who’s surrounded by friends and hops from one short-term relationship to another may not realize the work she has to do to become a wife, not just a trophy.

Transcending Beauty

Becoming a wife isn’t just cultivating a skill set. It is, literally, a becoming — transforming into someone different. The process of this transformation is what separates real relationships from the transactional arrangements The Value of Others talks about:

The economic model presupposes an economic agent with a fixed and legible set of “wants”. This sort of agent can decouple and “optimize value across individuals”, as you suggest, choosing which desires they want satisfied by a romantic partner and which by porn, social media, hired help, or friends with benefits.

This is not how looking for love feels like. People enter the dating arena hoping to be taken on a ride, to discover new experiences, to be transformed. This transformation, or self-transcendence (in the simple sense of becoming someone other than your old self) isn’t some heroic feat, akin to reaching Buddhist enlightenment. It’s a consequence of being in a relationship you take seriously.

You say that people will never do the “right thing”, whether committing to marriage or eating healthy food, just because it’s virtuous. I agree. They will do it because transactional situationships and donuts are, ultimately, not satisfying.

Gorgeous women are the billionaires of the transactional relationship economy. They can engage more partners, demand more resources, set their own terms, exercise power. The one thing they can’t simply make happen is falling in love.

But — it’s still a lot, and a lot of it will be lost to them if they become someone’s wife. They won’t be able to transact their hotness capital so freely. They won’t be able to fantasize about what could be with their infinite optionality. The main obstacle to hot girls getting married is wanting to get married badly enough to give up being a hot girl.

This is easiest for women for whom being a smoke show is secondary to their main passion, whether it’s acting, singing, poker, chess, or governing Finland. Beauty is a great amplifier of whatever a woman’s life is about, whether it’s an impressive career or her interpersonal qualities. And if being a hot girl isn’t the centerpiece of her identity, she doesn’t have to give up her identity for a relationship.

A very hot girl needs astute discernment in selecting partners, strength of character to develop relationship skills, a talent to shine brighter than her beauty, and the will to transcend being just a very hot girl. But I’m not writing this post as spiritual guidance for perfect 10s who happened to stumble onto this blog (I offer spiritual guidance to 10s in person — DM me!) I’m writing for everyone who’s envious of them. Do you have all it takes to pull off being a very hot girl?

Of course, if you do, then your romantic life is probably going pretty great already. You have no need to be a hot girl, and no reason to envy them. And if you don’t, you probably want to focus on all of those things instead of on looksmaxxing.