Love or Beauty

Do you love me because I'm beautiful, or am I beautiful because you love me?
Oscar Hammerstein, II

Do you love me because I'm beautiful? We all have our own quirky standards of beauty. What I consider to be a beautiful woman might be someone you consider pretty plain, and vice versa. Sometimes a person seems attractive just because they remind me of someone else that I loved in the past. Then of course, there are those of us who think someone is beautiful just because the media label him or her as such. Just because many other people find them beautiful.

Am I beautiful because you love me? This is a trickier question. But so often, I find that if someone is beautiful on the outside but has been cruel to me or just has a personality I don't like, all of a sudden he/she looks ugly. And if I love someone for some personality quality, they all of a sudden look more physically beautiful to me. Sometimes love is all that is needed to make a person look physically beautiful in the beholder's eyes.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could make everyone beautiful just by loving them, just by finding something about every person to love. It's true that if we can love and accept a person just the way he/she is, that person will improve much more easily and quickly than if we tell them that we expect them to change before we can love them. That person will become more beautiful, and give us even more reasons to love them, if we will only love them in the first place. Here we create an upward spiral. And that is how we create heaven on earth.