Hey, I just wrote this while thinking about my wonderful girlfriend and a mild but persistent conflict in how I feel about her. I think it reflects a struggle that many people share, when they love a person but the physical attraction is not perfect. I wonder what you guys think.
[size=150]When I first met you[/size]
When I first met you, I did not find you beautiful. It was not that you did not meet some public ideal of beauty propagated by our mass media - I’ve never cared for those ideals. And even if I did (for one cannot help being subconsciously influenced by such ideals), you do not fare poorly against that standard. Your face may be plain, your cheeks a little odd, but your body is tight, fit, and achingly desirable. To be frank, it’s hard to look at anything below your neck without intense physiological arousal setting in. And when I kiss you, any hope of avoiding that predictably vanishes the moment our lips meet. And there is nothing in the world that can light up my day like your smile. But when I look at you, I have to admit, there is some small part of me – just occasionally, just for a moment – that is repulsed.
Oh, how I wish that part would die. The love I feel for you is so deep, so rooted in the short and crowded timeline of our romantic history, that I feel like I could prove it as a scientific law under the most rigorous peer review. But I have no need for objective validation - in the court of my own mind, I feel 99.9% certain that no other girl, no other human being, could make me as happy as you do, and to choose not to be yours forever seems certifiably insane. Thus, it seems that I have two choices. I can tolerate this part of me, and never ever ever let you know (I always want you to feel beautiful to me, because in my heart there is no one more beautiful). Or perhaps I can reshape this part, this tiny insignificant part of myself that I loathe… so that I may love you, so that I may be bewitched and utterly infatuated with you, completely, unreservedly, our bodies, our minds, our souls all one.
But I feel I must be perfectionizing. Why would a man focus on the one imperfection in his love - no, the one imperfection in his ability to appreciate her - when the gift of her was more than he ever hoped for from life, more than he ever imagined was possible? Surely there are better and nobler things to think about in life. Like our shared life together. How I will respond to your hilarious prank email suggesting that you are, in fact, a dream concocted for me by a cabal of mad scientists as I have suspected all along? How will I surprise you on Chinese Valentine’s day, or on your birthday coming up a few months from now? These are the questions that matter. I have always been a bit of a perfectionist, to my fault. I am slowly learning that the best is the enemy of the good, and all energy devoted to making one thing better comes at an opportunity cost, a sometimes-tragic surrender of all the other possible emanations of that beautiful human energy. If I wish to break from that ruminative, obsessive part of myself, perhaps this is one of those times where actions will speak louder than words.
So I will act. I will love you, I will be together with you, I will laugh and cry and continue this mad impossible nerd romance that I hope desperately will never end. And if this alien part of me never goes away, so be it. You are my gift. You are my beauty. To me the only beauty in a woman that matters is whether or not she is you.
<PS to mods: Cross-posted w/ Mundane Babble: hope that’s OK, lemme know if not.>