Beauty

I was talking to a very lovely young friend the other day, and she mentioned that she was often uncomfortable when men complimented her, as she was never sure whether or not they did so with "tricky motives."  That started me thinking about beautiful women, and how men react to them.  We talked for awhile on the subject, and I came to some interesting (if not personal) conclusions. It occurred to me that men react to the beauty in a woman in at least three different ways, and that I had probably experienced all three. The first is a possessive reaction - he wants to have her beauty, to keep it, to control it, to take it away from the rest of the world.  Her beauty is an acquisition to be put away on a shelf, like a purloined piece of art, providing him the perverse pleasure of taking it out of the sun, letting it fade and decay, all  his. Even though he may display her beauty on his arm now and again, it is just another gesture of his dominant suppression. If he manages to convince her, she will surrender her beauty to this emotional erosion, giving him the satisfaction of watching it slowly die.

The second doesn't want to possess her beauty, but he does want to be near it.  He wants to admire it, to warm himself in its luster. He may have fleeting fantasies about having her, keeping her beauty for himself, but he knows this is impossible, he wouldn't begin to know what to do with it. The pleasure he knows admiring her eventually is corrupted by the pain of wanting her.  And on a random day, a random issue, a random comment will derail him, and the man she thought of as a close friend will strike out at her briefly and incomprehensibly, then flee in humiliation.

Finally, there is a man who sees her beauty, and wants to bring it in close and  tangle it up elegantly with the good and pure things he feels in his heart. He doesn't want to steal her beauty, or to own it exclusively, only to embrace it, let it connect the disparate constituents of  his soul.  Her beauty will fill the empty parts of his chest, will create the vessel he is meant to be - his soul, her beauty will manifest themselves in the exponential capacity of love. His love, her beauty will be conjoined, and his chest will rise and fall with the softness of a winter's sigh each moment he looks at her.  And if she takes her embrace back from him, he will find he has no internal systems of his own, no network of emotion or grounding rod for his pain - he will once again be hollow, but with the bitter sweet memory of  the consonant corporeal entity he once thought was his heart.

I have been these three men, and I have possessed, admired, and enmeshed the beauty of a woman.  When I finished my thoughts with my young friend, she asked me "which number are you now?"  I thought about it for a bit, then replied........................