London - Love is blind, or at least in need of a trip to Specsavers. Researchers in the Netherlands say that when it comes to our partners, women tend to overlook their physical failings, crooked noses and stomachs that resemble the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
This would explain my own romantic history. It is not just that I overlook crooked noses or beer bellies, I am often drawn to them.
This is because, like most women, I fall in love through my ears not my eyes. A moronic teenager might fall for a George Clooney lookalike, but any sensible woman knows that male beauty is nothing but a hollow gaudiness.
If it were advertised that London nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow had hired male pole dancers with shoulders like the Parthenon, some of us would go along for a giggle but only a few delayed adolescents or a psychopathic spinster would consider settling down with one of them.
In my experience, the worse a man looks, the harder he tries to flatter, amuse and cosset. Indeed, men seem to give more in inverse proportion to their lack of looks.
My ugliest beau cast pearl jewellery before me. When my judgment failed me later on and I took up with a Uffizi statue, he turned out to be a swine. He criticised me constantly, and when I asked why he was so silent at dinner, he replied he was not there to entertain me, and asked for his taxi fare home.
This is why I have always felt sorry for Beauty, as I suspect the Beast became insufferable when her love transformed him back into a gilded youth.
The miracle of love, for women at least, is how easily that hooked nose morphs into the features of a Grecian sculpture after a little laughter.
As the famously ugly 18th Century wit John Wilkes remarked: “Give me half an hour to talk away my face, and I can seduce any woman ahead of the handsomest man in Europe.” - Daily Mail