Can You Be Too Beautiful For Your Own Good?

I just read an article that Halle Berry recently split with her baby's father, Gabriel Aubry, and I found it really sad.  For one thing, I always get sad when celebrity couples whom I like break up (Tom and Nicole, Brad and Jen); but for another thing, this latest breakup got me to thinking again:  Is it impossible to be a beautiful woman and happy in love?

Just look at lovely Sandra Bullock:  Beautiful, successful, and with a cheating, soon-to-be ex-husband.  I was thinking that perhaps Halle chose too well with her guy being a model and nine years younger than her -- he's got to have so much temptation looking the way he does -- but Jesse James is the total opposite, and yet he still found a way to break Sandra's heart.  So what's a beautiful, successful girl to do?

There are some that seem to make it work.  Recently re-crowned People's Most Beautiful Person Julia Roberts makes it work with her husband Danny Moder.  But we hear so many stories about the beautiful women who it doesn't work for, that it makes me wonder what it is that keeps them from finding happiness in love.

And then I thought of this theory that might apply.  Maybe these women are just too beautiful.  They are too beautiful for their own good.  And maybe the reason why their significant others were drawn to them was mainly because they are so beautiful.  But the thing about beauty is that it fades, not just because of time and aging, but because of familiarity.  If you look at a beautiful rose long enough, or even a beautiful scene long enough, it no longer is as pleasing as when you first saw it.  In fact, it diminishes in beauty the more time you are around it and see it, even if nothing about it has physically changed.  Love, of course, can make you see things as more beautiful, but if you loved something mainly for its beauty, you will find that that love will fade.

I learned this lesson really early on with a boyfriend who I thought at the time was really good-looking.  But some time into our relationship, I didn't find him so good-looking anymore.  In fact, I thought he started to look funny-looking, and I doubted my eyes.  That feeling I had when I first saw him had gone.  I had to then constantly ask my friend if he was in fact, good-looking, because I could no longer see it.  And of course, that was the beginning of the end of our relationship.  I should have realized what really attracted me to him were his looks more than anything, and that couldn't last.  But the mind plays tricks with the eyes and the heart, and familiarity and personality alter the way you see a person.

The same thing happened to me with Denzel Washington and Halle Berry.  I know they're good-looking people, and when I first saw them I was blown away by their gorgeousness.  But now I don't see that anymore.  That awe I used to feel when I saw them went away, and I can't get it back.

It almost seems better then not be so pretty.  Maybe by being so beautiful, there's nowhere to go but down, in terms of someone's affections for you.  And the thing with loving someone for their beauty is that, once you insert their personality, you will see them differently.  I don't think anyone -- anyone -- can live up to the fantasy sparked by a beautiful face.  What you will inevitably find behind that is a person, an ordinary person, living their life behind extraordinary features.

But trying to be less beautiful to be happier?  That would seem like crazy talk, especially in this country, and around the world.  However, maybe one doesn't have to go to the extreme of uglying oneself to find happiness.  Maybe one can just let oneself be ugly sometimes, just so that people can appreciate the times when one is really beautiful again.