My sweet one

In the latest Esquire, the "10 Things You Don't Know About Women" feature was contributed by Liz Vassey (who's apparently on one of the CSI shows), whose rule #4 was:

We won't tolerate your lies. Exception: "You're the prettiest girl in the room."

Maybe I suffer some kind of disorder, but I was not of the belief there was an objective standard of beauty that every single person had to adopt; I thought there was something to that whole "eye of the beholder" stuff.

I concede there are certain tendencies that are common regarding what is interpreted as physical beauty, and that the media makes great efforts to codify our perceptions of beauty (although all they really do is declare who is "hot", which is separate from being beautiful). However, that doesn't actually force everyone to perceive beauty uniformly.

In any room full of people, there will inevitably be many (if not all) women who are pretty. However, there'll only be one who's the prettiest: the one I'm in love with.

Am I suggesting love alters my perceptions? Damn right I am. If it doesn't do that, it's not love. And not only does it do that, but it should do that.

That's how I know she's the woman for me: That when we're in a room full of very pretty women, I look at her and my genuine thought is that she is beautiful. Thus, were I to declare her the prettiest one there, it wouldn't be a lie.

I know the pithy remarks on the page aren't meant to be overly analyzed, but I get the impression Ms. Vassey was alluding to what guys who are just trying to get laid say. However, by suggesting the guy's statement was intrinsically untrue, I think she is too dismissive of the possibility that the rest of the women in the room ... could merely have good personalities (as they say), and that (statistically speaking) she really could be the prettiest one, in given situations.

As long as my girlfriend isn't there.