Responses to the cheating beauty survey have been predictably few but thoughtful.
A sampling of thoughts:
I suppose it's also the same mechanism that makes death worse when it's someone young.I wouldn't have that reaction. I always think it's crappy when someone is cheated on. How beautiful they are makes no difference. Nor does gender. How good they are might make a difference to me, though. Like if someone cheated on a cheater, it wouldn't be as bad to me as if someone cheating on a loyal partner.
Most people don't realize that relationship issues are a result of unresolved subconscious issues. People cheat because mommy drank. People cheat because mommy said sex was dirty. We pretend like it can all be fixed once we have a grown up house and a beautiful spouse. But guess what, beautiful spouse becomes...you guessed it, MOMMY!!! So we punish Mommy or try to escape her. The fact that someone is beautiful brings this issue more to the surface because it isn't about physically, it's pathology. It's harder to deny that we can escape our feelings of inferiority and that the world we live in is an illusion and a projection!
Because we assume that beautiful people are automatically more sexually desirable. And since cheating is assumed to be about sex, why would someone cheat on someone who is very sexually desirable?
Beauty is always considered more valuable. "She's so beautiful!" implies she is worth more as a human being, regardless of her character or moral standpoint. What if she is a bitch? Does that imply she "deserves" it? What if the man is an asshole? Is he more likely to "deserve" it? If it is a "beautiful man" cheated on, most women would react with a "how stupid was she?" Maybe the "beauty" is the problem.
Last question first: I don't think the first stereotypical ideal we assign to men is his hotness...in the long run, anyway; and certainly not if he's in a heterosexual relationship. If he's cheated on, we tend to think of his value and what the crazy bitch (because, that's what she is now, right?) doesn't deserve... Obviously, there's a certain cultural value placed on beautiful women; regardless of whether or not they actually deserve a special place in the pecking order. This being said, I've heard plenty of my guy friends say, "Show me a beautiful woman, I'll show you a guy who's tired of f**king her."
These graze what I was thinking: we assume cheating is about sex, for the man anyway, and along those lines we can't imagine why he'd want to stray from a beautiful woman. But when I flipped the genders, I couldn't think of an example where I thought "She's an idiot. He's so beautiful." No, to evoke this sentiment I had to use things like how well he provides for/takes care of her. Which is how many of us measure value: women for their beauty, men for their money and security. It's a generalization, of course, but I'm pretty comfortable making it.