Physical beauty 'may wreck your love life'

According to US psychologist Dr Shauna Springer, a relationship and lifestyle researcher and author of ‘Marriage, for Equals: The Successful Joint (Ad)Ventures of Well-Educated Couples', beauty can be a social handicap.

Springer looked at the spectacularly high failure rate of marriages in Hollywood for clues that beauty can spell disaster for relationships.

There are a number of obstacles to marriage or long-lasting relationships for the impossibly attractive, according to Springer.

"Those who are physically beautiful may need to be especially cautious in assessing the character of any potential life partners," Stuff.co.nz quoted her as telling Life and Style.

"Beautiful people may tend to attract people who are more likely to treat a person as a possession, people who seek to display external signs of success to make up for a rather rotten core self" and "a beautiful person might be more likely to attract someone who seeks shallow sexual-economic transactions instead of a loving, respectful relationship," she said.

Possessing extremely good looks may also bring psychological challenges. Some people might assume that a beautiful person is arrogant and unapproachable she said.

Beautiful people are also "more likely to have a ‘spoiled child' element in their personalities - and an expectation that their wishes will be granted with little opposition, resulting in an acute coping crisis, an adult tantrum, when their desires are not met."

"Related to this, self-absorption and narcissism may also be occupational hazards of the beautiful life. Those with these character traits and behaviours may inspire lust in their partner's eyes, but reflections of love and respect will be much more elusive. While they may desire to have a loving relationship with their partners, they lack the foundation of good character to achieve this," Springer said.

She added that beauty can also bring insecurity.

"Like a person who is flush with material wealth, those who have great beauty often struggle with questions about why people seek them out and what people are really after when they form relationships with them," she said.

"They often ask themselves whether their friends are true friends or whether they are attaching themselves - by way of an entourage - because of their obvious physical beauty," Springer said.

While "beauty alone will probably not ruin a person's chances of having a good marriage it is beauty in combination with other character deficits that is more likely to produce this result," according to Springer.