More about love, sex, attraction, societal change

A follow up thought regarding my previous comment. What I’ve done is not focus in on one simplistic, though important, issue regarding “hot” or sexy clothes. What I’m doing is starting a series of instructions that will help you examine your own, and your partner’s, character. It is as though the past two generations have forgotten how to fall in love. It really is as simple as that.

Genuine love is falling in love with the entirety of the person’s character. This is different than the common misconception that one falls in love with the total inventory of their attributes. For example, a boy may fall in love with a girl because she is beautiful, kind and exciting. But I invite you to think about this quickie exercise. If a boy is able to rattle off the list of those attributes, I would think to myself that he’s not in love with her character. Her character defies description, because one is so focused on the integrated overall package that one cannot articulate the list of specific wonderful traits. If the boy is truly unable, if asked, to explain why he loves that girl so much, that is a very good sign because it means he is focused on the entire package, which is her character. Character is not an “excuse” word where you love someone who is not so hot in the attractive category, but you say in compensation that she has “nice character.” Character includes beauty! Character includes the “shallow” physical attributes too! Remember, the body is the temple of the soul. One’s character is shaped by one’s body, mind and spirit. Character is the overall integration of all those “components,” since they really are not separated in an authentic person.

So the boy or girl, or man or woman who is unable to describe what exactly it is about the person they love is actually not just a dweeb poor with words, or someone who “doesn’t know what he or she has got.” That person is actually, probably, more authentically in love with the person than if he or she could list their categories of wonderfulness. Real love, and the love that has been celebrated through the ages, has been character based. And remember, the attractiveness of the body or “chemistry” is part of character. Character is not just a catchall word for the “dry” attributes, like “is nice,” “is full of life,” “has a beautiful soul” (yuck, I hate that New Age canard). Character is shaped by one’s body and its attributes, so true love falls in love with even the most beautiful woman in the world based on her character. I know that’s hard to see but if you work on understanding this, you will recapture much of the depth of love that the previous generations knew and actually took for granted. This is what “loving eyes” means. Loving eyes does not mean that because you are “blinded” or “compensating” that you think your spouse or beau is good looking when he or she “is not.” Loving eyes means that because you deeply love the entire character of your spouse or beau that you would pass a lie detector test thinking that he or she is the best looking that there ever was.

I often look at couples and think how hot they are together, and how handsome the guy is and how beautiful the woman, even though if some modeling agency was looking over my shoulder they’d think I was insane. But I can see each person’s “character” and how they are magnified and glorified when the two are together and genuinely in love. That is having “loving eyes.”

See, modern society both overtly and covertly teaches that one should date and select mates according to “categories” of attribute. They rationalize it by saying things like “scientific studies show that monkeys or people do prefer more beautiful examples of the species because the human eye likes symmetry.” However, that is a totally fallacious type of study. Here is why. In the “old days” men and women did not even look at each other in those terms. Their brains literally were not scanning each other looking for optimal in any category, including beauty.

When one singles it out in a scientific setting by presenting, say, comparative pictures of beauty, one gets a specific brain response and preference. But humans actually are not programmed to think that way naturally. They have been programmed to think like that by themselves, due to societal influences, very recently. It is not a “hard wiring.” It is hard wiring that causes the brain to light up in scientific experiments, where pictures are shown and opinions elicited, but that is not how evolution actually programmed humans, and it is certainly not how humans saw each other until recently. I mean, people weren’t blind, sure, everyone knew who the “knockout” of the senior class was, as far as looks. But people did not pine for the knockout, or “settle” for someone else as second best. They were looking for the whole package, the character, that also gives them the feeling, genuinely so, that they have “the knockout.”

For example, men used to have a certain view of beauty related to motherhood. Men could look at a woman who might not be considered by a modeling agency to be the most beautiful woman in the world, but feel that she is because men had a sensual image that included the capacity for having and loving children. Body types that model agencies find unforgiving and unflattering were highly attractive, genuinely so, “back in the day” when men looked at women and envisioned a life together, rather than a stream of individual activities. Men used to look at women and think “forever,” and women did the same. When you think like that you tend to have more “open eyes” to the fullness of beauty or handsomeness. Recently people don’t think that way, and so they have a mental programming of even a potential marriage partner as being the person who is the “best” in a number of “categories” of sequential activities and purposes, including sex, that does not really comprehend the fullness of the person.

Here’s an example. Men used to find women who were fuller figured and rounder the highest of attraction, not for gross reasons, as the media would have you think today, but because men still thought of themselves as providers, and they found beauty in women who could “rely” on them to be softer and less afflicted by life. They would be horrified at the “work out” ethic of today and its effect on “beauty.” To them, a woman who did not have to be lean and hard from working in the fields was beautiful, and they made sure that they did the best they could to provide for them so they’d not have to work as drudges. So a man would genuinely find a rounder, heavier, softer woman than those who are considered the thin beauties of today to be much more attractive and the “knockout.” This is because he would view her appearance within her total character and the image of them together in a lifetime continuum.

Haven’t you ever wondered what it was like several generations ago? While there have always been exceptions, you would not go too far wrong with this image. Before many young people went on to college, but just finished high school, the entire class would often be pretty much matched up in marriage. Once men started going more to college, and women followed, it was very common to pair up and marry upon graduating. Now, in high school, often the first to marry were not the “hotties,” as you would call them today. But they were beautiful couples who thought they have found “the best” in each other. There was the chemistry of two characters that would bring them together. And there really was very little of that competitiveness, or hankering after the same guy or gal; each graduating class tended to sort itself into couples in a remarkable way. They were the foundation of “the greatest generation,” the ones who fought World War II, and who you’d see celebrate their fortieth, fiftieth and sixtieth wedding anniversaries. Today we have the exact opposite, where people do not see each other and recognize the character chemistry that brings along with it the beauty and the handsomeness. Instead people have check off lists and categories, issues and hidden agendas, and visions of a string of separate activities instead of a lifelong marriage, in every sense of the word, where there is overall character compatibility and yes, loving excitement too. It has been very sad for me to see people lose out on that, what I considered the height of human romantic and family culture and its highest epitome of authenticity. People think they are more authentic now, but they’ve never been more fractured, fragmented and fake.

I could write more on this, and probably will, but with all mindset changing (and genuine overturning of some very deep and destructive programming) I know it is best to put these thoughts out in kind of one unit at a time (the opposite of evaluating your prospective partner, ha).