short and skinny

Today I was checking my email and a couple of links to articles caught my attention. One was called Am I too short to date women? and the other was called Is my guy too skinny? Of course I wanted to read them as I seem to have a trend for dating skinny, sometimes short guys. (See photo below of one of my best friends Paul and I when we were dating in high school. Just ignore the fact that we're matching. It was not intentional.)

-----

So I read the articles and they kinda made me laugh. The first one actually was kind of sad because this 5'4" guy said, "I’m a great catch: I’m thirtysomething, I make a six-figure income, I’m well-educated, outgoing, and have a wide range of interests." I love how after his age he put his income. And while all of this has to do with him, it doesn't really tell us too much about who he is. But this is what the world thinks is important.

-----

In the second article, a woman was saying that her friend who wants to date her is too short (when she has heels on) and too skinny for her.

-----

Basically, both of the people who replied to them said "looks aren't everything," although the woman from the second article basically yelled at the girl and told her she was being selfish, superficial, and stupid not to date a guy just because he's skinny.

-----

So while it is important to find the person you are dating attractive, it is not the most important part by any means. Take a look at the above photo again...if I had not wanted to date Paul because he was skinnier than me or shorter than me (at least the same height, but probably shorter), I would not have gotten to know him as well as I did and we would not be good friends now. He's a really great guy and I'm grateful for the time I spent getting to know him in high school. Again, looks aren't everything. But don't take my word for it...

Let's see what our good friend Karol Wojtyla has to say about this in Love and Responsibility.

In the section called "Love as Attraction," Wojtyla writes mostly of attraction to the person's soul, not to qualities about them. But he also mentions physical attraction...

"The appreciation of beauty goes together with the appreciation of values, as though there was in each of them a 'supplementary' aesthetic value... Beauty finds its prober place in the context of attraction... We should, however, recall here that a human being is a person, a being whose nature is determined by his or her 'inwardness'. It is therefore necessary to discover and to be attracted by the inner as well as the outer beauty, and perhaps indeed to be more attracted by the former than by the latter... This attraction on which this love is based must originate not just in a reaction to visible and physical beauty, but also in a full and deep appreciation of the beauty of the person." (pp. 79-80, emphasis added.)

So there you have it, straight from the mouth of our beloved Pope John Paul II (when he was still Auxiliary Bishop of Cracow)...looks aren't everything.