Why does the inherent normality of our lovers become the exact reasons we love them. The regular smiles with gap teeth that are slanted a little far left began to shine like the sun peering through winter clouds, or regular brown eyes take on a special twinkle, and our eyes continue to discover the specialness of every movement, every tone, and every laugh coming from our lovers. Captured like the victims of medusa within the magnetic pull of their etheric being these angels, pretending to be mortals, hold the fate of our heart within their unpredictability. Alain De Botton On Spiritual Love guiding us through our memory.
The physical is unreliable, to temporal, to be the basis of our love, but the infatuated lover must pray that the soul holds the same beauty as its casing. We must appreciate the physical, but allow souls to be revealed as we peer behind the image. We need beauty, but we need to learn that love isn’t always beautiful, but the soul is eternally waiting to be recognized. Exploring the reasons he loves Chloe Alain De Botton, in On Love, tries to search for this magnetic pull saying:
Does beauty give birth to love or does love give birth to beauty? Did I love Chloe because she was beautiful or was she beautiful because I loved her? Surrounded by an infinite number of people, we may ask (staring at our lover while they talk on the phone or lie opposite us in the bath) why our desire has chosen to settle on this particular face, this particular mouth or nose or ear, why this curve of the neck or dimple in the cheek has come to answer so precisely to our criterion of perfection? Every one of our lovers offers different solutions to the problem of beauty, and yet succeeds in redefining our notions of attractiveness in a way that is as original and as idiosyncratic as the landscape of their face.
Do our lovers merely contain harmony in all their parts due to illusion? Although, I believe, we should recognize our desire for beauty, but prevent the illusionary assumption that the soul is a reflection of its casing. In our pursuit of different forms of beauty, the aesthetic, the act of being present, and act of discovering another person one must give in to the impulse to love. We will within a culture that is constantly in refinement and suppressing our desires due to social convention. It is better to be wrong and in love than to be in doubt and without love. Alain goes into our desire to locate beauty in the people we love saying:
My imagination enjoyed playing in the space between Chloe’s teeth. Her beauty was fractured enough that it could support creative rearrangements. What counts is the predisposition of the viewer. It was of course love that was generously predisposing me. The editor of Vogue might have had difficulty including photos of Chloe in an issue, but this was only a confirmation of the uniqueness that I had managed to find in my girlfriend. I had animated her face with her soul.
We have trouble trusting the truth in our emotions. Our peradventures in love makes us question whether the beauty, the smile, the teeth, the hands, the jokes actually contain a level of adorableness we ascribe. We may delude ourselves in many areas of our lives, but one must learn to trust love. For if we happen to find someone willing to make the commitment to being then we must trust. Every fear we conceal shall come pouring out of us once we find someone to share in our delusion. Going into the subjectivity of beauty, but the need to find someone to share in our delusion Alain says:
The danger with the kind of beauty that does not look like a Greek statue is that its precariousness places much emphasis on the viewer. Once the imagination decides to remove itself from the gap in the teeth, is it not time for a good orthodontist? Once we locate beauty in the eye of the beholder, what will happen when the beholder looks else where? But perhaps that was all part of Chloe’s appeal. A subjective theory of beauty makes the observer wonderfully indispensable.
Some people have the power to liven our sacral chakra. Encouraging a level of authenticity only matched by lovers of 66 years. Others spark a desire to create a imagined self–a self manipulated to gain the desire of the lover. Continue reading Alain De Botton On healing while in love.
