All Relationships Begin with Physical Attraction

“How important is physical attraction to you?”

I always feel this question has the air of a trap. If you say ‘very important,’ that makes you look shallow. But to say ‘not important’ doesn’t feel very honest.

The truth is that for most people, and for most men especially, physical beauty is very important to romance.

A woman's beauty is the driving force behind initial attraction.

This is so obvious that it hardly seems worth mentioning. One need only consider just about every love story or love poem ever written (including, by the way, those found in the Bible), where praise of the woman’s beauty makes up the main theme of the man’s attraction.

Romeo falls in love with Juliet the moment he sees her across the dance floor. Cupid is so struck by Psyche’s beauty that he pricks himself with his own arrow. The author of the Song of Songs declares his beloved “most beautiful among women.” Again and again, it is desire for the woman’s beauty that is the driving force of the relationship.

True, beauty is not sufficient to form a relationship, and in truth, is rarely presented as such. In the Book of Tobit, Raphael first describes Sarah as being very beautiful, but then goes on to describe her as intelligent and virtuous. The Proverbs remind us that charm is deceptive and beauty fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be prized. Mr. Bingley is awed by Jane Bennett’s beauty, but it is more her great sweetness and kindness that lures him to contemplate marriage.

The few places where beauty alone is presented as the qualification for romance are usually short pieces like myths or fairy tales where everything is done in shorthand (though the fact that admiration of a woman’s beauty is used as narrative shorthand for falling in love should tell us something).

Men naturally enjoy, admire, and desire female beauty

Yet, as said, beauty remains the driving force in just about every work of romance, and if we’re honest, it is often so in real life as well. When we fall in love with a woman, is it not often precipitated by admiration for her beauty? When we’re looking for a woman to approach, don’t we first consider her beauty, not as the most important but the most basic factor? Don’t we say, “What a lucky guy!” when we see some man with a rare and radiant woman at his side?

All this, I’m sure, you won’t deny. Again, this is all so obvious and so well known it hardly needs demonstrating. And here’s my point: there is nothing wrong with this.

Men naturally enjoy, admire, and desire female beauty. The beauty of women is one of the great universal ideas of the human race. We hope and expect to fall in love with a beautiful woman, and her beauty is one of the key factors that cause us to do so. All that is, as far as it goes, natural and healthy.

Being in the presence of Beauty makes us forget ourselves and long to be closer to it.

There is good reason for this. Beauty opens the heart and takes the mind off of itself. To see and admire beauty is to forget ourselves in the wonder of the other, to desire that the beauty should continue and increase, and that we should draw closer to it and become united with it.

No man of ordinary sensibility, beholding beauty, can think of himself. Anyone who has gazed at the night sky, or beheld the paintings of M. Bouguereau, or stood below the Sistine Chapel will know what I’m talking about: the self in that moment simply doesn’t matter, unless it is to desire to comprehend the beauty more fully.

As Sam puts it in The Lord of the Rings, describing the Lady Galadriel: “You could dash yourself to pieces on her, like a ship on a rock, or drown yourself, like a Hobbit in a river.” Beauty is so real and so glorious that our selves seem unimportant and fragile before it. Like pain, beauty brings us hard against reality, specifically the reality of the Other; that which is not ourselves, but which demands our admiration.

Beauty is not entirely subjective and can be objective too.

That is why I hate the phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ and consider it a grotesque blasphemy. To turn that which so completely removes our gaze from ourselves and twists it into a mere statement of our own reactions—in fact to turn our gaze back upon ourselves—is the sensual equivalent of an auto-immune disease, akin to making your charitable works a demonstration of your own piety. Like so much in our modern culture, it invokes compassion to tempt us to self-centeredness.

No, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. It is not something we project upon the world around us, but something that we meet and respond to. It is undeniable reality. As St. Augustine said, if you question the beauty of created things, they themselves will answer you "Here, look; we are beautiful,” and in so doing, point to the glory of their Creator.

The natural response, the one we ought to have, is to admire beauty and to be thankful for it. When we meet beauty in the form of a woman (which is the greatest form of beauty we normally meet in this life), it can inspire the first beginnings of love.

The search for a beautiful woman is not shallow but worthwhile.

You may object that this is shallow and superficial; but why? Because beauty has no moral component? Neither does intelligence or athletic ability or artistic talent, or most anything else we admire someone for. I’ve even heard people talk as if admiring a woman’s beauty somehow diminishes her, but how on Earth does it diminish someone to note she possesses a certain kind of excellence?

Do you suppose that to say someone is excellent and admirable in one way is to say they are not so in any other way? Do you therefore say that because a certain cathedral is beautiful, it cannot also be conducive to worship, or that because a certain film has excellent effects, it cannot also have an excellent story?

Call it superficial if you like; I call it irrefutable. No, beauty is not a sign of moral excellence, and no, you shouldn’t judge anyone by their looks (or by any other non-moral quality for that matter). But you ought to admire a beautiful woman for her beauty; it is a real and excellent quality, which not everyone possesses.

For most men, beauty will be an important factor in choosing a spouse—and that's good.

Now, obviously this shouldn’t be allowed to degenerate into lust, but I don’t think it necessarily tends to. Indeed, I think healthy admiration for beauty can be a strong check to lust.

Lust is ugly, and draws us to ugly, crude imagery. A delight in beauty naturally teaches us to abhor this kind of thing and long for images of higher dignity and to take a different and healthier kind of joy in them. There is a vast difference between the nudes of a porn site and the nudes of M. Bouguereau. I notice, by the way, that lust and pornography became mainstream about the same time that appreciation for beauty came under attack and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ became a favorite canard.

But that is neither here nor there. The point is that to desire beauty in your spouse and to value her appearance is only natural. So natural in fact that whatever you say, you’re probably going to do it. Granted, there are men for whom beauty genuinely isn’t very important, and that’s fine. But for most men, beauty will be an important factor in choosing a spouse, and that’s a fine thing in itself.

It shouldn’t be the most important factor, of course; but it’s only natural that it should be a factor. Rather than trying to deny it or sweep it under the rug as a shameful secret, we ought to embrace the fact, cultivate our love of beauty, and frankly seek it out.

Look for beauty, not just in the women you meet, but in the world around you, in art and in fiction, and let yourself be lost to it. Forget your own petty self for a time in admiration of what is so gloriously stamped with the signature of its Creator. Then return to seeking your spouse prepared to find in her such elevation and self-forgetfulness. Whatever the outcome of your search, embracing the love of beauty will leave you a better man and draw you closer to God.