Loving your Beautiful Wife

I believe in Love. It defines everything. Takes everything, and puts it in the right perspective. And I believe in Beauty. That through love, true beauty is given. It defines all things, makes them true in the way they ought to be. God, I believe in deliverance from superficiality. I think true love and a true understanding of beauty can give that.

I also believe that with you true love is given for that one person. There is a sanctioning of marriage in your eyes, where that one person becomes the pinnacle recipient of true love. Of love, eternal and everlasting. And I think that in that, true beauty, and true love, are defined.
I say this because there are women of all shapes and sizes. Women of a variety of different facial structures and appearances, and yet our world tells us a certain figure is requisite for genuine, or maybe optimal, attraction. A women without adequate curves is not truly attractive, at least, not as possibly attractive as a women who has them. Now I must say, the question of pragmatics here is one to wrestle with. That is, one cannot deny the basic level of attraction within these certain physical characteristics. However, if one is willing to concede to that entirely, I think they slide into something irreconcilable with the Christian worldview. If all women are beautiful, all created in God's image, then how can I reduce one's "beauty" to their physical stature? I know this treads on awkward ground though. Do we not say that some women, or men for that matter, are attractive while others are not? Is there not merit to that? I can't say I'm unrealistic enough to say there isn't. However, I think we can quickly conform to the world's definition of these standards and not to God's. Everyone is created in God's image, a reflection of His true, and perfect beauty. And in that, one will search for beauty that is within, not without. This, in truth, is also the Scriptural definition. This is how Peter defines true beauty in one of his epistles. It is about inner beauty, about the heart, about the things about us that reflect God, who isn't physical. He is beyond the physical, and fundamentally relational. So it is within that, within the realm of seeing things as fundamentally relational when it comes to beauty, that I believe the Christian is callled to go. We are called to see men and women in that light; in the light of true beauty, as reflections of God: not reflections of their physical makeup.

Anyway, I think one is called to understand this in considering marriage. I say this because regardless of how physically "beautiful" your wife may or may not be, the bottom line is that there are simply too many things to define as physically attractive to argue that there is one woman out there more attractive than others in sheerly physical terms. If you adhere to that, it won't take you long before you begin eyeing someone else. Before you begin comparing your spouse to others, to see if she measures up. Because see, even if she is amazingly beautiful, if you think in the physically comparative way, you are still thinking in a comparative way. Meaning that, you are always wanting/willing to compare her to others. And who knows if that time will come when she doesn't measure up? But the thing is, even if that time never comes, it still reflects an incredibly inadequate understanding of beauty and appreciation for your wife. Why? Because she isn't to be compared to anyone, she is to stand alone. And in comparing her, you are implicitly questioning the superiority of her beauty in your life.

I mean, here's the thing I'm getting at; again, even if she is incredibly beautiful, when you think in sheerly physical terms there is no absolute. I should have said that in the beginning; in physical terms there is no absolute. Men can find one woman attractive and another not for the same or completely different reasons. But even if you want to argue, again, that there are basic phyiscal characteristics to which all men are attracted, the bottom line is that there is no, singular, perfect woman. Even if you took all the women with the "right characteristics" and put them in a room, you're going to be hard pressed to find a unanimous decision on who is the most attractive. Why? Because the fact is that there is not one, singular, physically perfect woman to all. There are facial issues. Facial structures, hair colors, a billion things that get involved that can vary from guy to guy. And if you spend your life trying to find that one woman, that's the problem: you won't find her. Physicality is too relative. There are too many things to distinguish one woman from another. However, again the one main thing that causes this physical view of women to be problematic is it misses the true view of women and their beauty: that it is fundamentally internal and relational.

Again, without any kind of relational value to women, what is there to distinguish one attractive woman from another? Because physicality varies from man to man, even among the "curvacious" women, the only thing left to distinguish one woman from another is relational connection. It's sad because we let people immerse themselves in the understanding of physical attraction and dont' teach them how crucial relational connection is to be married to someone. We have to get at what really matters for a women over and beyond her physical stature. That's really what lasts. That's really what's most important, beyond all things, the thing that you have to understand for your wife.

So anyway, in being in Love with my signficant other I am called to understand her Beauty. By that I mean she should be the most beautiful woman on the planet to me, because beauty is defined by what's inside, not on the outside (regardless of how attractive I might find her on the outside :-) ) It's about that commitment to her, that love, that unison with her that is most important. In loving her like Christ loves the church, the love I am called to is trans-physical. Anything physical that would try and hinder us as a couple is not God's understanding. This is the problem for us; we need to learn to marry someone, seeing them as the most beautiful, and attractive person to us, on the planet. They are the number one. And they can be that number one, because their beauty, is far beyond physicality; it's deeply relational and internal.