When you look around nowadays, one thing becomes glaringly obvious… society is obsessed with love and beauty. Our song lyrics scream stories of broken hearts from teenage bedrooms, our movie narratives are full of lovers pining for one or the other, and our literature and poetry is full of love, requited and unrequited. Stories of passion and pain.
In terms of beauty, well you just need to walk around the block to see posters of women with flawless photoshopped skin, twig bodies and big beautiful eyes. You only need to switch on daytime TV to hear whispers and promises of anti-wrinkle miracle creams that infect your psyche while you lay there bloated and glazed eyed on the sofa, worrying about your ‘crow’s feet’.
The interesting thing with love and beauty is that they’re both subjective. The experience of love and beauty are not like say, the experience of the colour yellow. If you were to hold a bright yellow banana up to a group of different people, all would agree that the banana is indeed yellow (unless they were colour blind). But, you see, we can’t do this with love and beauty. We can’t all have the same experience of either of them just like we can all have the same experience of yellow together.
No one else can feel your specific love you feel for your wife. Only you know what you feel. And with beauty, well what one person thinks is beautiful, another may think is ugly as it comes down to a matter of personal taste. So, how can two completely subjective experiences, events so personal and private, how can they grip us on mass?
The fact is that love and beauty are one of the same. Like space and time, they can’t be ripped apart. If you love something you will see it as beautiful, if you see something of true beauty, you will feel love for it.
You see, neither beauty nor love are intrinsic features. Nothing and no one can possess beauty, just as nothing or no one can be love. They’re both in the eye of the beholder and both intertwine in a beautiful emotional dance that stirs our hearts. Where there is beauty there is love and vice-versa.
When most people think of beauty, they think of physical appearance. However, beauty goes far beyond aesthetics. True beauty is found deep in one’s soul, or the depths of the universe, or in the moment you fall in love with someone. When you experience true beauty, it’s not about aesthetics, just as true love is not just about lust.
There’s something indescribable about real love for a truly beautiful person or the love we feel witnessing the beauty of a vivid sunset.
Without beauty, there is no love (how often have you loved someone or something you don’t think is beautiful on some level).
Without love, there is no beauty. Love is the true subjective experience that allows us to see beauty. Through feeling real love, we know that we are experiencing beauty.
The two are inextricably combined and create a wonderful, subjective human experience and love is everywhere if you only care to look and feel.