Ugly Guy, Hot Wife/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: An attractive woman is romantically involved with an unattractive man.

  • Straight: Alice is sexy, Bob is generously considered plain-looking.
  • Exaggerated: Alice makes the gods weep in jealousy, and yet she's with Bob, whose face has to be covered lest he give people heart attacks.
  • Justified: All sorts: love is blind; their relationship is not predicated on looks; Bob has a great personality; Bob is rich and Alice is a gold-digger; Bob used to be handsome but aged less gracefully; Bob got Alice pregnant during a drunken session and they married each other lest they face ostracization; Alice is blind and doesn't know or care what Bob looks like; Alice was subject to Attractiveness Isolation and he was the first decent guy to ask her out...
  • Inverted: Alice looks like a hag while Bob is a stud.
  • Subverted: Bob looks hideous, but it turns out it was makeup for a movie and he's quite handsome.
  • Double Subverted: But he wears an incredibly realistic mask to hide that he's a burn victim.
  • Parodied: Bob is hideous, Alice is beautiful, but they live in a world of Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad so everyone wonders how Alice lucked out or why Bob settled.
    • Alternatively: Bob thinks he's a stud, Alice frets over non-existant wrinkles.
  • Deconstructed: Bob develops a serious inferiority complex against Alice's awesome looks and is constantly worried she'll leave him for some stud, or Alice feels that given Bob's money, Bob views her as a trophy wife and will dump her the moment someone better looking comes along.
  • Reconstructed: They realize that despite what other people think about them or what other people have done, Alice and Bob still love each other.
  • Zig Zagged: Bob looks hideous, but he's wearing make up for a movie, only for that to be a face mask to hide the fact he's a burn victim, only for Alice to reveal she's also wearing a mask to hide the fact she's a burn victim, but then a photo reveals that Alice was attractive and Bob was fugly before the accident that turned them both into burn victims, only for an earlier photo to reveal she had extensive plastic surgery.
  • Averted: There is no extreme difference in looks.
  • Enforced: The writer of the sitcom is the main character and he gave himself a lovely wife.
  • Lampshaded: "Geez Bob, how'd a dog face like you get a pretty girl like Alice?"
  • Invoked: "Don't worry Bob. It doesn't matter that you're ugly, she will still marry you."
  • Defied: "Look, I don't care if I could buy a dozen hundred dollar an hour prostitutes a night, I've loved Alice my whole life. I don't care she turned out, as you call it, 'plain'."
  • Discussed: "If this were a sitcom, Bob would be dating Alice despite the fact that he's ugly."
  • Conversed: "It's so weird how, on TV, the ugly guy always gets the girls."

Back to Ugly Guy, Hot Wife.

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Ugly_Guy,_Hot_Wife/Playing_With?oldid=872612"