Aside from that...

My mom said that any beautiful girl can get ugly pretty quick.

She means that any woman who treats me badly will seem ugly. Mom's absolutely right, but I'm not so quick to trust sensation as that.

Two caveats:

1) Cognitive dissonance says that if we choose one cognition over the other, we are going to justify that chosen cognition more.

So if you're dating some bitch who is beautiful, you might accidentally justify her bitchy-ness because you've already...[insert already chosen reason]. One reason you've already chosen hanging out with her is because she's beautiful, then you've already fallen off of the cart, so to speak.

I'm referring again to Aronson and Tavris's Mistakes were made, but not by me. The authors refer to this vicious circle of justification, but say that people can also establish virtuous circles. So for example, maybe you donate money to charity. That sets you up to justify that behavior more in the future, and therefore sets you up to give charity in the future.

Therefore, dating a beautiful (or smart, or funny, or intelligent, or all of these or different qualities) woman is an invitation to justify behavior and maintain cognitive consonance. That is, an invitation to lessen cognitive dissonance.

I think the justification for these things a lot of times is that a) people push those other qualities that much harder: Mary makes me buy her stuff, but she is so beautiful that I can deal with that; or Mary makes me feel like dirt but at least she's doing it because she is that much smarter than me.

The most ironic thing of all of this is that managing mistakes this way is worse for two people. Recognizing Truth means that both people benefit. This is straight out of Frankfurt's On Truth, whereupon the two people who reveal truth to each other like each other more. (This might even take on cognitive disonance, too, because if someone tells you something that you don't want to hear, you're going to have to justify that harder in order to maintain the stability of them saying that.)

In other words, people like being told that they are wrong. A lot of women like to be told when they are wrong, or that they are hurting their partners. If communication is broken in this one part of the relationship, it's probably broken in other parts of the relationship, which leads us to our next counter-example-argument-thing.

2) "Happy families are all alike, unhappy families are all unhappy in their own ways." This is the first line of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I got it from Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond pointed out that this is decent set theory: when something succeeds, it's because it has answered all of the minor problems that overcome unsuccessful somethings.

So an unhappy family might be sick and sneezy all of the time. Another unhappy family might be a tortured Jewish family during the Holocaust. Another unhappy family might have one brat for a kid. Another might have an alcoholic parent. There's a million of these, and a million million permutations. Any one of these might make a family unhappy.

A successful family, a happy family, must meet and greet all of these challenges.

Diamond used this to argue for why certain plants and animals are domesticable (able to be domesticated, or easily harvested over time).

How does this apply to my mom's facade comment?

The point is that terms of a successful relationship should be considered. Is it still successful if the woman is mean to her boyfriend? Well it might depend on what a person likes.

I think we can make the intuitive claim that no, that is not a successful relationship.


However, a certain amount of leeway should be given to people. Ah! Now there's the rub. Consider: if someone you love is being mean to you/complaining/being too demanding. Can you just drop them off and leave them forever? I think, also intuitively, there is a greater shade of gray here.

That is, even successful couples complain to each other, make fun of each other, and do the sorts of behaviors in question. Total intolerance is surely not the answer every time.