Love People For What They Chose

It bothers me that the rules for love and hate are so different.  As I just explained, hate has to be rational.  If you called somebody ugly because their eyes were green or their skin was dark, you would be the jerk.  But those are exactly the criteria we use for judging beauty.

How does a man traditionally express his love to a woman?  By telling her how beautiful she is.  And why is a woman beautiful?  Because her eyes sparkle and her hair is luscious and her face is soft and elegant.

I know that I am by no means the first person to say that we should love people for the things they choose to do, but I am still compelled to do so.  It still feels like an oddity that people would like each other and completely ignore the irrational.

In real life, I have met too many people who say things like, "I only want to date an Italian" or "I can't date somebody who is younger than me" or "I only want somebody who is taller than me."  But we don't always criticize them for saying such things.  Instead we relate to their desires and talk about how the heart wants what it wants.

We rationalize superficial aspects of love by studying how physicality and other things actually are an important factor in attraction.  Well, if that's true, then why is irrational love ok and irrational hate is awful?  Are love and hate not opposites?  Does love have special rules that make it ok to be shallow about?  Or does hate simply have a stricter scope of acceptability?

Whatever the case is, I find that writing becomes more difficult because of it.  In visual storytelling, characters need to be attractive in order for any kind of love to be understandable to the audience.  In prose stories, it matters less because the reader imagines the looks of the characters as much as they can.  Even still, we are so mired in the idea that physically beautiful means good person and physically ugly means bad person (wicked witches are ugly bitches), that we embellish or idealize our protagonists anyway.

All I want is some parity.  Either we get to hate people based on things they didn't choose, or we can only love people for the things they did choose.