Go ahead. Date your lovely woman. Marry your handsome man. Fall in love with your physically attractive person. Go ahead. There is nothing wrong with that at all. You deserve to look at your companion and think of yourself as lucky. You're goal is happiness. Beauty is a powerful component of happiness. You should aim for the best. I encourage you to do so.
Just please, PLEASE don't forget this one thing.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I believe it has been said. Not "beauty is in what you're looking at". Beauty is in your OWN eye. So ask yourself, how deep do your eyes see? Are you far sighted? Near sighted? Do you have colored glasses on? Do you wear blinders? Do you look hard, or do you just glance? Do you see or do you just look?
When you decide if someone else is beautiful or not, you are not really accurately defining them. You do not have that power or that authority. When you define the beauty in someone else, you are most assuredly actually measuring yourself.
On your road to happiness, when you look inside and take note of all those things that you measure to determine if you are happy or not, and you locate the section for "beauty", what do you find? Is it a check-mark on a list from 1 to 10? Is it a snap shot of an image, worth a thousand words? Or a fruit on the tree of your happiness whose sweet nectar could never be capture by any amount of words? Is it a pulsing ball of light, that hums and throbs and burns with a tender brilliance like a star capture within your heart, surging through your veins, bursting to break through you?
When you define the beauty in others from the outside in, you are defining yourself from the outside in. If it matters to you more what state their physical rather than internal "attractiveness" is in (by your own opinion or by the opinion of those whom you let sway your opinion), then it will matter more to you what your own state of physical rather than internal attractiveness is in. What matters about the beauty in their heart, depends on the beauty of your heart.
And if you try and measure their heart by their face... you're about to learn a very hard lesson. Because it doesn't matter how attractive you THINK they are on the outside, if they are rotten on the inside. Just like you do for yourself, they are in control of who they are on the inside. No matter what you want to believe. If you can not see that far into a person, how on earth do you know if they are beautiful or not?
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This goes for people who think that others are more beautiful than themselves as well. I know that sometimes I am harsh. On others. On myself. I hate it when people say things like: "I'm not beautiful and pretense doesn't change that." Because sometimes that feels true. When the world around us seems to hold up a picture of a certain look rather than a mirror when it wants us to look inside and examine ourselves. But those days, when that phrase feels true, are the days I am too lazy to open my eyes. The days I don't want to try hard to be responsible for my own inner beauty, or to look inside others and love them. Idealizing and idolizing "beautiful people" is not loving them. In many ways it really is highly demeaning. While they may truly be beautiful on the inside and physically "ideal" on the outside as well, no one deserves to be thought of as an object. No one deserves to be stripped of their identity and personality and inner worth. Some "beautiful" people feel like no one even knows who they really are but judge them impersonally and objectively.
The simple truth of the matter is: No. I am not outwardly the shell of a model or the lustful dream of a sadly shallow man. And I don't want to be. I want to be beautiful. I want to be happy. And I want to look around me and find that I am surrounded by beauty.
I want you to realize, to HONESTLY open your eyes, and find out how beautiful you are.
I want you to look around and find that you can date a beautiful person. Marry a beautiful person. Be in love with a beautiful person. Be SURROUNDED by beautiful people. Even if others don't see it. Even if you have to act on faith 'til you do see it. And NOT JUST IN THEORY! This isn't a joke. No one said it was easy. But those who have seen it have never been so happy.
I want you to OPEN YOUR EYES AND BEHOLD BEAUTY!
Beauty is important to happiness, no doubt in my mind. But if your measurement of beauty is shallow, then that will be the depth of you happiness as well. Good luck with that.
Some inspiration:
“For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart“ (1 Sam. 16:7)
"For the Beauty of the Earth." LDS Hymn 92
John Keats:"A Thing of Beauty (Endymion)"
