You Ain't Got No Alibi, You UGLY
Loving Ugly
Something interesting happens when one thinks deeply about beauty and its inverse, ugliness. You begin to realize the moral and ethical dimensions society attaches to these subjective qualities. Beautiful people are "good," and ugly people are "bad." Beauty equals success; ugliness equals failure. It's the kind of thing we don't question because questioning it would lead us down an existentialist rabbit hole we're not quite ready to enter. But what if we did? What if we flipped the script and made loving "ugly" people a philosophical experiment?
Here’s my premise: ugliness doesn’t exist - at least not in how we've been taught.
The notion of beauty is an ever-shifting, arbitrary standard. And ugly? It's the absence of something that's only temporary. If we're honest, ugliness happens when a person doesn't match the current cultural expectations. It's like missing the memo that skinny jeans are out and baggy ones are back in. This matters because ugliness is not universal. The people you consider ugly might be beautiful to someone from a different decade or continent. Despite knowing this intellectually, we still treat ugliness as a fact, like gravity.
Loving 'ugly' people demands a radical shift from the conventional approach we've been conditioned to accept. It's an active form of love, like the decision to keep your phone after you’ve cracked the screen. The phone still works, but you must look beyond aesthetics to appreciate its value. The screen, even with its cracks, now has 'character.’
I believe we love ugly people more than beautiful ones. Think about it. Beauty is fragile, temporary, and almost too easy to be distracted by. Ugly is permanent. You can't change ugly. Ugly sticks like white on rice. If we want to love the ugly, we have to look past the ugly. Loving ugly takes work, hard work. You don't see past the superficial unless you've got the Holy Spirit or serious beer goggles. Loving ugly people is a direct challenge to the culture of beauty, a rebellion against the photoshopped world we're told to idolize.
How do you love ugly people? You start by realizing there's no such thing as ugly people. There are just people. And some don't look like what TikTok says they should look like. And some will never be the faces we see on television or in movies. But that's precisely why they matter more. Loving ugly people (and loving our ugly selves) is the ultimate subversion—a bold declaration that real life is messy, imperfect, and flawed.
By conventional standards, we’re all ugly and hard to love. Some of us are ugly on the outside, while others are hideous on the inside. Many people are ugly all the way around, inside and out. I want you to remember: ugly is in your head! Each of us is in need and worthy of ugly love. It is hard, ugly work to love others as we love ourselves. Once we can get past seeing and being ugly, we might be able to do the ugly work of love despite the horror of the world around us.
Love ugly.
One of the strangest effects modern life continues to have on me is to get me to appreciate aspects to my upbringing that I never thought were benefits. For example: I grew up in a small town well before the internet. Which meant I couldn't choose my friends.
Some were popular, some weren't, some looked presentable, others didn't, and none of it mattered. Because we were all stuck with one another, what mattered was how we treated each other.
Not sure of the extent to which that still holds true today.
That's really beautiful, Richard. And inspiring!! 😊🙏 Thank you for sharing. You have illustrated that experience of life is subjective and the beauty or ugliness are only present within us, not without. It is one of the best pieces of writing I have read in a very long time! Bravo!!