Think Lee Mack’s wife is out of his league? The joke’s on you

It’s always tempting to boil attraction down to the idea that certain attributes are worth a certain number of ‘points’, but people gel for reasons that are impossible to pin down

It’s tempting to blame the recent toxic discourse around dating and relationships on immature provocateurs like Andrew Tate and his cabal of incels, but we’ve always treated human relationships like bizarre eldritch rituals.

The fact is, people are attracted to each other for reasons so random and esoteric that the fact that anybody ever gets laid is frankly indistinguishable from magic, so it’s no surprise that we have a compulsion to boil that attraction down to a few quick tips and tricks that we can pass on with minimal effort.

Take the recent incident with Lee Mack, where the 54-year-old comedian met a woman at a party who assumed that his (very beautiful) wife started dating him after he became rich and famous. When Mack corrected her and said that no, they’d actually met in university before his stand up career had taken off, the person replied: “Did you save her life or something?”

Is that a terrible thing to say to somebody you’ve just met, with its implication that one person in the relationship is somehow unworthy of the other’s affections? Yes. Is it also very funny? Also yes.

We’ve all met couples that don’t make any sense to us, and it doesn’t always come down to just looks. “She’s so smart, why is she with somebody who’s never read a book in his life?”

“She’s so boring, how did she manage to land somebody who’s so funny?”

“He’s a fitness nut, but I saw her house an entire 12” pizza to herself at 2am last time we went out clubbing: how does that work?”

In Mack’s case, the answer is really obvious: if you think there’s a discrepancy in their relationship, then a) it’s none of your business, and b) he’s a funny, charming, scandal-free stand-up comedian. He could look like one of the house elves from Harry Potter and he’d probably still score more dates than the average person.

No matter how many times some con artist dating “expert” tries to tell you that women are cookie cutter narcissists who can be hacked with the right input of commands, it’s worth remembering that some clichés stick around for a reason: a charming personality and a half-decent sense of humour have about as much relationship capital as good looks and an over-inflated bank account.

The problem with people like Tate is that you can’t teach a sad, lonely, bitter, entitled boy to have any of those things. All you can really do is keep reinforcing the idea that they’ll be alone forever, blame it on women, and bask in the ad revenue that their Dorito dust-caked hate-clicks bring to your YouTube channel (until it gets banned for hate speech about six months too late).

The thing is, you don’t even necessarily need those specific things, either. It’s always tempting to boil attraction down to the idea that certain attributes are worth a certain number of “points” (you need three “funny” tokens and at least five good deeds to equal one “impressive career” credit), but people gel for reasons that are impossible to pin down. Sometimes it’s shared interests. Sometimes it’s shared trauma. Sometimes it’s one little inconsequential moment that happened the very first time they met, that they didn’t even notice, but that accidentally ended up bonding them forever.

It doesn’t help that people are rarely the same person with their significant other that they are when they’re talking to friends, relatives and colleagues. There are very few people on this planet that have seen “relationship Ryan”, and it is my sworn mission that they must never meet and start comparing notes.

I don’t need people to know how many Pixar films I’ve cried at. I don’t need them to know that despite my protests to the contrary, I have a much bigger appetite for trash TV than I let on. I definitely don’t need them to know about all the sex stuff.

People won’t accept that though, because it’s impossible to quantify. And because it’s impossible to quantify, that means it’s impossible to replicate. And if it’s impossible to replicate, that means there’s a chance that it might just never happen for you. And that scares people.

That’s the space that these self-styled relationship gurus occupy – and manipulate. It wouldn’t be such a problem if most of them weren’t so toxic, but I guess the idea that we might never find somebody lends itself to toxicity by default. And that’s a shame, because it’s that exact toxicity that’s going to end up being the biggest barrier to their followers ever finding that one accidental spark of connection.

When you see a couple like Lee Mack and his supposedly-too-hot-for-him wife, it’s worth bearing in mind that romance is a random, swirling void of pheromones and chance encounters, and trying to understand why two people might be together is like trying to figure out why the universe is populated by something instead of nothing. If you think about it for too long, you’ll probably end up going mad.

But above all – and I cannot stress this enough – you don’t need to think about it at all, because it’s none of our business either way.