Photography by David Sabat.

Questions for Lovers: Do You Know That You’re Beautiful?

There are questions I like to ask my lovers. And when I say lovers, I mean lovers, potential lovers, people with whom some kind of intimacy is becoming possible, whether romantic, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, or otherwise. I am interested in the ways we relate to one another and what becomes available when we are intentional about that relating.

Questions for Lovers is a series about some of the questions I find myself asking and the conversations I like having as I move more deeply into connection with someone. I don't mean them as instructions for intimacy or a formula for getting to know someone. These are simply some of the places my own curiosity goes.

I think we could stand to be more curious about one another. There is so much to know about a person beyond the facts we tend to exchange when we are first becoming acquainted, and I am interested in the questions that let me wander a little further into how someone experiences themselves and the world.

One of those questions is:

Do you know that you’re beautiful?

It isn’t a question I ask people right away. There are people for whom our connection is fleeting and I never think to ask. It isn’t one of my standard getting-to-know-you questions, and I don’t think it belongs on a first-date questionnaire between What do you do for work? and What are you looking for? (I hate both of these questions, but that’s for another time.) Usually, something has already brought us into the territory. We’re talking about bodies, attraction, or something one of us finds beautiful. Maybe they’ve said something about themselves that makes me curious. Maybe they are talking mainly about their physical attraction to me and it makes me curious about what they value as beautiful in others. Maybe I’m wondering how they see themselves because I’m beginning to understand how I see them. Somewhere in there, the question occurs to me.

Do you know that you’re beautiful?

We Are All Beautiful and Also Funny Looking

I believe we are all beautiful. I also believe we are all funny looking. And I mean both of those things quite sincerely.

Human beings are strange little arrangements. We have folds and hairs and asymmetries. Our faces do weird things when we laugh. Bodies change shape depending on whether we are standing, sitting, bending, sleeping, fucking, eating, aging, living. Look at any of us long enough and there is something peculiar going on. I don’t think that interrupts beauty. I think beauty is far less orderly than we have been taught to believe.

I believe beauty is subjective, but I also understand it to be cultural, political and personal. It can be rewarded, withheld, manufactured, assigned, exploited, celebrated and sold. What the world calls beautiful has material consequences, and I don’t think “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is enough to erase any of that.

But I believe the beholder matters, too.

There is what a person looks like to me, what looking at them makes me feel, what the larger world has told them they look like, and then there is the experience they are actually having inside of themselves. Those things may overlap beautifully. They may have almost nothing to do with one another. That space between them is part of what interests me.

Why I Ask

The question has never felt like a test to me. There isn’t an answer I’m waiting to hear, and I’m not secretly trying to find out whether someone is confident enough for me. A yes doesn’t put a little check next to healthy self-esteem, and a no doesn’t disqualify anyone from anything. I’m not even sure confidence is exactly what I’m asking about.

But saying it isn't a test doesn't make the answer inconsequential. Curiosity produces information, and if our lives are beginning to overlap in more substantial ways, that information matters to me. I am not looking for sameness, but alignment of values and expression matters when I am sharing increasing amounts of time, space and experience with another person. I am interested in whether the lives we are each interested in living make sense alongside one another.

Beauty is one place where quite a lot can become visible. None of us arrives at our understanding of it independently of the world that formed us. Colorism can be there. Fatphobia can be there. Sexism can be there. Ableism can definitely be there. So can the degree to which someone has learned to understand themselves and other people through a particular gaze, including the ever-present patriarchal gaze. Beauty can reveal what kinds of bodies someone has learned to value or dismiss, what they associate with desirability, femininity, masculinity, status, worth or belonging, and how much of that they have ever thought to question.

I don't expect someone's relationship with all of that to be perfectly resolved. Mine isn't. That's part of why I'm interested in where a person actually is rather than an answer that demonstrates they've learned the correct language. But there are beliefs that can emerge in a conversation about beauty that tell me quite plainly that someone and I are not particularly aligned. I can receive that without needing to argue them out of it, and without pretending it is irrelevant to what I want close to me.

There is another kind of alignment I am curious about, too. What do we each want to experience as beautiful? What kinds of environments move us? What do we notice? What do we want to make, witness, participate in and surround ourselves with? If we are talking about wanting to share beautiful experiences, then what each of us means by beautiful seems pretty important.

This is what I mean by curiosity shaped by intention. Not every connection in my life calls for this level of inquiry. Some are lovely and fleeting and complete exactly as they are. But more time together, more shared space and more shared experiences mean that our respective ways of seeing the world begin to touch each other more often.

I don't need another person to see exactly what I see. But I care very much about what they see.

I Don’t Ask If I Don’t Want the Answer

I’ve learned that if I’m going to ask someone how they feel about their own beauty (or anything), I have to actually be interested in their answer. It is an intimate question dressed in fairly simple clothing, and the simplicity of it doesn’t mean the answer will be simple.

Their story comes through. Their mother or father can come through. Their first crush, their childhood, their culture, their race, their gender, the people who desired them and the people who didn’t. The first time someone called them beautiful can live somewhere in the answer, and so can the first time somebody made sure they understood that they were not considered beautiful at all.

There is a full spectrum of feeling that can live there: joy, grief, pride, shame, pleasure, anger, indifference, arrogance, confusion, certainty, humor, contradiction. Beauty has a history in a person’s life, and I’ve become conscious that asking about it can bring some of that history forward.

That is part of what makes the question interesting to me, but it is also part of what makes me careful with it. I have no desire to invite someone into an intimate disclosure simply because I enjoy asking interesting questions. If I’ve opened the door, I want to be capable of staying there for what comes through it. There are times when I have the capacity for that kind of conversation and times when I don’t. Knowing the difference matters to me.

Being open to someone's answer also means allowing it to actually give me information. Acceptance doesn't require me to manufacture alignment where there isn't any. I can understand that someone's relationship to beauty comes from a lifetime of experiences and still recognize that what they believe, value or desire is far removed from what I want close to me.

Otherwise, openness can become strangely dishonest. Genuine curiosity leaves room to discover things I love, things I don't understand yet, things I want to ask more about, and sometimes things that make clear a distance between us. None of those outcomes makes the question a test. They're simply part of allowing myself to actually know what another person thinks.

Where I Am When I Ask

I already know quite a bit about where I stand. I believe beauty is abundant. I know that the world’s standards of beauty have real political and material consequences without believing those standards have the authority to determine what is beautiful. I know beauty occupies a meaningful place in my own life.

None of that means my thinking is finished or immovable. It means I am not asking someone else to settle the question for me. I’m not waiting for their answer to affirm what I believe or looking for agreement before I can feel comfortable with my own position.

There is something in this that feels familiar to me from coaching. I have practiced being in conversations where I have plenty of thoughts of my own and, for a time, none of them need to be said. I think of it almost as making myself an empty vessel, not empty of thought or experience, but empty of the requirement that either take up space that could belong to someone else's fullest response. I can have a response without needing to immediately give it. And I really endeavor to notice where someone’s answer touches my own experience without turning the conversation toward myself. It’s a practice, not necessarily a very straightforward one.

That becomes especially interesting around beauty because reassurance is so readily available. If someone tells me they don’t believe they’re beautiful and I find them beautiful, but you are is sitting right there. It may even be completely true as an expression of what I see. But I am more interested, at least initially, in the thing I actually asked about. I can tell them what I see without needing my perception to replace theirs.

Sometimes they turn the question back toward me.

And If They Ask Me Back

Do I know that I’m beautiful?

Yes, lover.

But that answer alone doesn’t tell anyone very much about what beauty means to me.

I love beauty. I am attracted to it, I seek it, I make it, and I arrange things around it. My visual experience of the world matters enormously to me. I notice light, color, shape, composition, bodies, fabric, architecture, movement, and the way a room feels when everything in it is talking to everything else. I think about what things look like and how they could look. I think about how an experience can be arranged so that beauty has an opportunity to happen there.

I call myself a visionary, and part of what that means to me is quite literal: I care about the vision. What are we seeing? How are these things relating to one another? What changes when I move this over there, or put that next to this? What becomes possible in the arrangement? My brain and my spirit are geared toward noticing these things, blending them, rearranging them and continuing to seek them. I enjoy beauty. I enjoy making beautiful things and being inside beautiful experiences.

And I also know that I am ugly sometimes.

I don't mean that as an insult to myself, or as a confession that underneath all this knowing I'm beautiful I secretly believe the opposite. I mean it as part of the same truth. I don't need beauty to be total in order for it to be true. I can be beautiful and ugly. I can look strange, unappealing, rough, ridiculous, exhausted, unpleasant. AND I DO! I love my gremlin mode lol. I can make ugly things. I can have ugly feelings and ugly moments. There are experiences in life that are simply ugly, and I don't feel a particular need to rescue all of them by finding the beautiful thing hidden inside.

That acceptance matters to my relationship with beauty. I don't love beauty because I am at war with ugliness. I am not trying to curate myself or my life so thoroughly that everything difficult, unattractive, unpleasant or aesthetically offensive disappears from view. There is something deeply freeing to me about allowing ugly to exist without treating it as evidence that something has gone wrong.

Beauty is also not the highest good in my value system. I don’t think beautiful people are better people, beautiful things are necessarily good things, or something has to be aesthetically pleasing to deserve my attention, care or respect. I understand the employment of beauty in the world as a tool. Access to particular standards of beauty can be translated into attention, desirability, opportunity and power. That is real to me without being the entirety of what beauty is.

There are times when beauty and ugliness arrive together. I have found beauty in some very ugly places. I have experienced beautiful moments inside ugly situations, beautiful words spoken on sad occasions, beautiful gestures in the middle of grief. Sometimes the beauty is there and sometimes it isn't. When it is, the beauty doesn’t cancel the ugliness, and the ugliness doesn’t require me to deny the beauty. I don't need either one to consume the other.

Beauty is readily available to us, visually and otherwise, and I don’t begrudge it. I celebrate it. I seek it. I allow it to matter. I can do all of that without requiring beauty of everything or for beauty to BE everything.

What Else I Find Myself Wondering

My curiosity about beauty isn't limited to someone's relationship with their own physical beauty, even though that is where this particular question begins. The other things I wonder about are already there alongside it, and the question gives us an opening to explore some of them.

I am curious about what they find beautiful in their friends, the people they love and the places they come from. I wonder what their culture taught them beauty was and who first taught them whether they had it. I wonder what kinds of beauty they learned to overlook, what they notice now that they couldn’t see before, what they surround themselves with simply because they enjoy looking at it, what makes an experience beautiful to them, what beauty they are learning to recognize and what beauty they are learning to create.

Face and body, lineage and memory, taste and desire, culture and pleasure, aesthetics and perception: all of that is inside my curiosity about beauty. There is intimacy for me in learning the particular things another person notices, what moves them, what delights them, what they have learned to regard as beautiful and what they might still be reconsidering.

There is room in these conversations for me to think about where I am growing, too. Beauty is a growth area for me, and I don't mean that I am working toward becoming progressively prettier. I mean that I am interested in expanding my capacity to perceive beauty, create it, participate in it and allow beautiful experiences into my life. That certainly includes my physical self, but it isn't contained there. It includes the environments I create, the experiences I make possible for other people, my art, my movement, my relationships, and what I train myself to notice while I'm here.

I Don’t Leave Beauty Off the Table

There are things I want more of while I am here, and beauty is one of them. I want beautiful environments, beautiful art, beautiful movement, beautiful exchanges between people. I want to make things that delight my eyes and my senses (as any Intergalactic Goddess of Sensuality would). I want experiences that make being here feel rich and layered and interesting to me.

That desire exists alongside a deep acceptance of ugly. I don't need ugliness eliminated in order to make more room for beauty, and I don't need to turn every ugly thing into a lesson about how beautiful life secretly is. Beauty is sometimes nowhere near the point. There is room in my understanding of life for that, too.

So when I say I don't leave beauty off the table, I don't mean I insist upon it. I mean I don't dismiss it simply because it can be subjective, superficial, politically complicated or impermanent. I let myself care about it. I let myself pursue it, create it, enjoy it and wonder about it.

I think Do you know that you're beautiful? remains interesting to me because there is so much contained in a person's answer. Surrounding that immediate question is everything that participated in teaching them how to see in the first place: what they've been told, what they've accepted, what they've rejected, what they desire, what they notice, what they value, and what beauty has come to mean after a lifetime of encountering it.

Those are the kinds of things I like knowing and understanding about people. Not because every relationship needs this particular conversation or because an answer is supposed to take us anywhere in particular. I am simply deeply interested in the worlds that exist inside other people and the opportunity we sometimes have to experience some of those worlds together.

Getting to know people this way is itself one of the beautiful experiences I want more of in my life. I get to encounter beauty not only in what I see, make or arrange around myself, but in what another person reveals when I am curious enough to ask and present enough to hear them.

That, too, is beauty I don't want to leave off the table.

So, lover. Do you know that you're beautiful?