Does the Mirror Lie?

"A very beautiful woman who looks at her reflection in the mirror can very well believe that she is that. An ugly woman knows she is not that.”
--Simone Weil

For more than forty years I have been observing what, for long, I considered an oddity: good-looking and intelligent married to a spouse who, if not ugly, certainly was near the border of that territory. But for the last thirty years, I have begun observing these relationships, but also the ugly-ugly and the beautiful-handsome marriages and also the individual spouses.

I remember only one or two instances when the handsome and intelligent man divorced the wife because they found they couldn't live with that ugly exterior around them and associated with them by society.

On the other hand, I've spent enough time in enough homes that were good-looking/ugly, to come to appreciate what Simone Weil says about the ugly woman before the mirror. She knows that the exterior surface does not show who she really is. I, with a very happy marriage of fifty-some years, have fallen in love--almost--with several "ugly" women who had almost everything except looks.

So for the last twenty years I have recommended to young people that they consider who their intended is, rather than what they look like. I don't know whether any of those of tender years and narrow interests have paid much attention to my suggestion.

I have become leary of beautiful women in general. Their beauty too often becomes cold and hard, their eyes and mouth contradicting their conventional wisdom beauty.

Exceptions to all of this? Yes. I know some of them well. But they are exceptions.