1. Very good-looking men have more opportunity to stray, so less attractive women would not want to risk being with them out of fear of investing themselves only to lose to a hotter interloper.
2. Very good-looking men have higher testosterone than less physically attractive men, and are thus more likely to pursue extrapair fornications. Women instinctively know this, and the less attractive of them avoid dating much better-looking men, influenced by their visceral grasp of the relationship power imbalance.
3. Men place more emphasis on women’s beauty than women place on men’s looks, and this innate predilection manifests as a willingness (and a honed ability) by men to strive harder than women for mating and LTR opportunities with relatively hotter opposite sex prospects.
But the most important reason, I believe, is egoism.
4. Men and women love to enjoy the privileges of their greatest strengths. It brings them happiness. For women, this means that they love the feeling of power that their beauty gives them. A woman who is with a better-looking man has that power robbed from her in subtle and in sometimes transparently humiliating ways; she has to deal with the attentions of female competitors, the attention her lover gives to female competitors, and the unspoken, but not any less felt, degradation of her number one asset. When a woman can’t leverage her beauty because the better-looking man she is with doesn’t value it as much as a less attractive man would value it, she loses a sense of purpose to her life.
It’s a similar dynamic to the stay-at-home dad married to the breadwinner wife. Maybe he thinks he scored by marrying a rich woman who can give him an easy life dusting up around the house, but over time nagging doubts about his masculinity and his wife’s faithfulness — even if she gives him no reason to doubt her fidelity — will eat away at his self-esteem. He will drift into an ennui of purposelessness and dreamscapes of receding chins and pendulous manboobs, because the soul-enriching feeling that comes with being able to leverage the natural male power which resides in providing, leading and dominating will have been stripped from him. Subcutaneous machinery of self-doubt will gradually shred well-intentioned insistent, mutual professions of love.
The reader asks if hot women will go for lesser looking men. The answer is that hot women will go for higher status men: an evasive answer befitting a misguided question. Women won’t actively seek out uglier men, but they will feel imperceptible compulsions to avoid dating men better-looking than themselves, which ultimately means that many women will wind up in the arms of less physically attractive (but perhaps higher status!) men. The study linked above suggests that all women, not just hot women, will gravitate into LTRs with men who are less good-looking compared to themselves. And they will be happier for it.
The study also implies women are more open to an uglier man’s game than men are open to flirting with uglier women. While ugly men won’t turn women’s heads, a bold ugly man can overcome the obstacle of his ugliness with the right attitude and seduction skill set. This is only true because physical ugliness is not the crippling deficit to a man’s dating success that physical ugliness would be to a woman’s dating success. It’s a difference of degree so pronounced that it almost qualifies as a difference of kind.
This doesn’t mean you can be an ugly man and expect hot babes to line up for the ego-boosting thrill of your comparative ugliness. You’ve still got to offer something women value, whether that’s money, charm, talent, game or social status. But it does mean that you can, and should, do better than your ugly looks have conditioned you to believe, particularly if LTRs are your goal.
This is all very good news for those uglier men who think game can’t help them date a point or two higher up the female attractiveness scale.
