Plastic surgery seems to be very popular these days and I wonder why. Do people want to look more attractive to others or to themselves? Maybe both. Then I remember a man I’ll call George. He wasn’t handsome in any traditional sense, but soon after we met, I wanted to know him better.
The author Henry James made this same discovery about Mary Ann Evans, the woman who wrote the famous novel, “Middlemarch,” in 1871. “To begin with,” he said, “she is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous,” and he listed her physical defects.
Then, he added, “Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end up as I ended, in falling in love with her.”
I felt the same way about George, immediately impressed by his warmth, his integrity, his careful listening. He was passionate about being an attorney, a husband, a father.
As I told this story to a group of women, one of them said at once, “You mean George! I fell in love with him, too!”
