Beauty and Love

In the late 19th Century Ivan Pavlov did a series of gruesome experiments where he taught dogs to associate food with a bell. He noted that the dogs salivated before the food was actually in their mouths so he would ring a bell every time the food was given. After a period of time he would ring the bell and not give them food, but the dogs still salivated as if they got food. Hearing the ring of the bell became associated with food, and the physiological response was the same.

Yesterday I spent the day on the slopes of the High Sierras with my daughter. As I was talking with her on the ski lift I thought she was so beautiful. She is growing up and becoming a young woman. I love her so much. I realized that there is an association that comes naturally, especially to men, of beauty and love. Charlotte is so beautiful to me because I love her so much, not the other way around.

Because of the association of beauty with love, the physiological response is the same. Women want to be beautiful so that they will be loved; men will love them because they are beautiful. This is how Jim Morrison of The Doors could sing, "Hello, I love you won't you tell me your name." A man can feel loving feelings for a woman he has never met because of the natural and normal brain association of beauty with love. While, on the other hand, he could have the same feelings for a woman he loves no matter how she looks.

Immature love
The "beauty industry" is one of the largest industries in the world. It includes make-up, plastic surgery, aesthetics, health spas, Botox injections, creams, pills, food, clothing, herbs, mud, contacts for eyes, gyms, hormones, and a multitude of gadgets to make people "look and feel younger and more beautiful." These are all designed to bring about the associated feelings of love with beauty.

However, the physiological response isn't really love. Like the dog salivating at the ringing of the bell even though there is no food, the immature man looking at a beautiful woman feels all the physiological responses of love without actually being in love. Seeing beauty and loving it makes the woman into an object, not a person. She is like a beautiful painting that an art lover falls in love with simply because it is beautiful. He wants to possess her, to "have" her because of her beauty.

Thus, a big problem of being a beautiful woman is that a man might "fall in love" with her because of her beauty. The foundation of this sort of relationship is how she looks, and is therefore shaky. Part of Pavlov's experiments included ringing the bell over and over without food to see how long it would take to "extinguish" the response. In the same sense, a man will have the physiological feelings of love only as long as she is beautiful in his eyes. For some it will last only until he finds another beautiful woman, for others it will be until he finds some ugliness in her, some flaw in her personality, character, or physiology. The feelings are dependent on a very unstable perception.

In many cases a man will talk himself out of love by picking out the flaws and "ugliness" of his woman. He will tell her that she is fat, or has some other flaw that explains why he doesn't love her. He may even try to fix these flaws, thinking that will make him love her again, but it doesn't work. Picking out flaws is, by itself, an indication that he doesn't love her, and no amount of changing her looks will bring that back. On the other hand I have known many women who gain weight after marriage in order to try to separate themselves from their husbands. It works both ways. Beauty is not a sound basis for a good relationship.

Mature love
Imature love is the bell -- it produces a response like that of food, but doesn't nourish the body.  By contrast, food will always produce the response; it never extinguishes.  If a man learns to love a woman for who she is, then she will always be beautiful to him. The tide will turn as he learns to love her heart.  The feelings of love will no longer come from how she looks, but rather who she is. Mature love makes her beautiful to him no matter what she looks like in the morning, or how much she weighs. He no longer loves her because she is beautiful, rather she is beautiful because he loves her. This love endures; it is real. It is a firm foundation that cannot be moved so she will continue to be beautiful throughout her life, no matter how fat, wrinkled, or infirm she looks.

Love and beauty are permanently connected in the brain, and the physiological response either way is the same; seeing beauty produces feelings of love, but loving someone causes the same feelings and produces the vision of beauty. The association is the same no matter which side we work from. Immature love such as that found in Hollywood is very unstable, as we can plainly see.  However, mature love endures the test of time, and all things. I love Charlotte's heart, I love her being, I love her strengths and her weaknesses, I love what she is inside, I love who she is, and because of that she is incredibly beautiful to me -- and she always will be.