Wouldn’t it be great to be blind? No, seriously. Think about it. Not all the time, of course. Just when seeing results in judging.
I asked a good friend of mine the other day if he would still love his girlfriend if she became significantly less attractive than she is now. His answer was “Of course!”
We don’t have relationships with appearances. We have relationships with people. How they look is really not very important at all.
And yet, first impressions are so significant. I certainly tend to seek out people who I find are physically attractive to me. I suspect this is quite natural (i.e. everyone does it), but I also find it extremely unfortunate.
As far as I can tell, there is no correlation between my impression of a human being’s attractiveness and the value their presence adds to my life. So can’t I just forget about appearances?
Perhaps this is a case of age overcoming biology. The older I get, the more interested I am in the substance of people and the less I care about how they (or I) look. Attraction is something I notice, but it doesn’t dominate my motivation the way it might have a few years ago.
It occurs to me while writing this that my tendency to value appearances less over time could be the result of having true, deep, honest, wonderful friendships. I’m fortunate to have friends who would support me through anything (and have done so) and whom I would support through anything. There’s nothing superficial about those relationships.
If only I could encounter people I meet for the first time with the same lack of superficial judgement.
Screw the Moon 