The will or won’t Sienna marry Rhys question is starting to get on my nerves. Sienna I am fond of, or as fond as you can be of someone you have never met. I have seen her at close range a few times, including once in the powder room of a club, where she was cheering up a grumpy civilian girlfriend. (A good test of a girl is how much time she is prepared to devote to her mates, when she could be elsewhere soaking up the limelight and cocktails.) In short, as well as being violently pretty, she seems like fun and a good egg.

But then there is this thing with Rhys Ifans. Oh dear. What is it that makes their liaison so squirm-inducing? Is it his I-wish-I-was-a-Rolling-Stone wardrobe: the shirts slashed to the waist? The dog tags? The earring? The bracelets? (Well, he is 39 and has hair issues.)

No, it all boils down to the message he allegedly sent Miss Miller last August, which translated as (it was in Welsh, read that as you will) Marry the Misfit. She didn’t say yes to that proposal, or the one after, and has only – if gossip is to be believed – recently relented.

Let’s cut to the chase here. Where there is an obvious physical inequality between a couple (she is fit and he isn’t), the man must be big enough for it to be irrelevant. He must have monster sex appeal/iconic status (Serge Gainsbourg), bags of personality and talent (Pavarotti) or power and money (Harvey Weinstein).

All of the above add up to confidence, the world’s most effective aphrodisiac.

If the bloke isn’t all that, then it’s important he has reason not to care; otherwise, there will be trouble.

It isn’t that Rhys is not enough of an Adonis to deserve the likes of Sienna, it’s that he is acutely aware of his score on the Adonisometer. His whole demeanour suggests that she is the goddess and he is the scruffy oddball who got lucky. He is just too self-consciously the misfit, and the problem with a man who styles himself as a misfit is it’s all about proving something to himself. Marry the misfit, that’ll show them.

Poor Sienna took a pretty-boy holiday because she learnt the hard way that men’s vanity is the greatest obstacle to women’s happiness. But she forgot one thing: you don’t need to be gorgeous to be self-obsessed. As a matter of fact, your misfit man is likely to be a good deal more appearance-conscious than the George Clooney type. Their hair is always a big deal. They are usually contemplating a tattoo. They get their ears pierced years after it’s appropriate. They love jewellery. Increasingly, I think Jude Law wasn’t such a bad thing.

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