Excerpt:

If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It’s no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing.But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She’s earned it, it’s a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake — and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.

Ayn Rand in “Atlas Shrugged”, through the character of Lillian.

Musings:

This is a profound statement offered by the character of Lillian, who is an unloved and unattended wife of Hank Rearden, the Steel Giant. She is devoid of all the love and attention she expects from her husband to satisfy her vanities. At least in the context of the book it appears to be a cry for acknowledgement from a remorseful wife.

However, the underlying concept of loving your woman (I am talking from the perspective of a man since I belong to this gender and thus am not offering a generalized or biased view in any sense of the word whatsoever) is essentially the act of creating a mystical world of fairy tale where your beloved is the central character and the entire world revolves around her. This is not to say that you should call an ugly woman beautiful, no sir! A woman (of substance that is) will take anything but a dishonest flattery. Because a woman knows herself the best, inside out. So to tell a woman how she looks like or what she wants is like teaching water how to flow. But if you do fall in love with a woman (without caring about her physical appearance) what you must do is make her believe what it is that you really fell for. And show her her true beauty. Even if it means showing water how to flow. You have to understand one thing, a woman’s true nature is to blend into the true nature of her surroundings. She is more mutable than a man, and not in necessarily in a negative sense. A higher mutability is also a sign of higher adaptability (professionally, personally and psychologically).

I have digressed from the main course of discussion (without regrets of course because it was meant to be.) So, here the character of Lillian is suffering from insecurity and neglect but she deserves it by all means. She tries to use the status of her husband as an instrument for her social progression, but is not willing to appreciate the fact that her husband has put his mind, body and soul into his work and thus has reached a social status that can afford the extravagant lifestyle of his family.

This woman expects a lot but is not willing to understand her husband and his ambitions. So in such case a woman is not worthy of your love or affection. But most of the times, a woman who really loves you (although she may not understand you) is willing to learn about you and she may happily spend her life trying to be the best woman for you, but for that what is required of you is to give her a position that you have given no one else. The position to influence your decisions, the position to interrupt you at any given time and the position to speak for you when you are not there to speak for yourself. Of course, a real woman of substance is one, who appreciates the importance being placed at such a positions and executes her rights and privileges in a just and sensible manner.

If you find such a woman (which is highly hypothetical) and she may not be the most beautiful woman in the world, and she may not know how too make herself look sexy for you and she may not know how to understand your language without words, the only way you can love her is by loving her for her vices, for defiling the concept of virtues and vices. By corrupting the idea of beauty and by sacrificing your self esteem and conscientiousness.

To love a woman is to forget everything else.