Beauty and the Beast: A Dear Sugar Column I Love

The people who come to me often feel somehow unfit for love. Their bodies don't match what we've been told is attractive, and somewhere along the way they decided love was for other people.

Yet somewhere inside them is a part that badly wants a different answer.

That's why I keep coming back to Dear Sugar column #46, "Beauty and the Beast," published at The Rumpus in 2010. Sugar, the advice columnist later revealed to be Cheryl Strayed, answers a letter from a young man whose rare illness has shaped how his body looks, and who has quietly concluded that no one will ever see him as a romantic option.

She doesn't tell him he's secretly handsome. She does something braver. She turns the question around: not whether someone could love him, but whether he'll let them.

Then she retells the old fairy tale and points to the detail most of us miss. Belle loved the beast while he was still a beast. The change came after the love, not before it.

That's the part I want you to sit with. I see love as something you choose, and choose again, and that includes choosing to let it in.

Read the full column at The Rumpus

A question to ask yourself

Where am I deciding no one would want me, before anyone has had the chance to say so?

Write down one place where you've closed the door. Then choose one small way to open it this month: the dating profile you finally post, the compliment you let land, the yes to a second date.

Every month I send a short list of films, books and music worth seeing through a sexier lens. Join Under the Covers.