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The world seems awash with hearts and flowers this month,
and the American Greeting Card Association estimates that in excess of one
billion Valentine’s Cards are sent each year. 
“With all that romantic idealism floating around, it’s not an easy time
of the year to be single,” a young woman said to me the other day. “I find that
I’m looking at myself really critically and thinking that if only I looked
different, lost weight or was doing better professionally, I might be in a
relationship.”

We live in a society that is heavily invested in this kind
of thinking. Living with an innate fear of being not-enough drives more and
more young women to be expect perfection from themselves in every way. In
pursuit of whatever we perceive perfection to be, we may speak to and treat
ourselves in ways and language that we wouldn’t even use toward someone we
really dislike.

The Girl on the Cover

Nowhere is this more apparent that in the concept of
feminine beauty. Just try explaining to an already self-conscious teenager that
her soft womanly curves are beautiful; and that the reason her legs look
different to the girl on her magazine cover is that the girl on the cover has
an unhealthy relationship with food, in addition to having been airbrushed
svelte and flawless.

Beauty magazines have their place, but that place is seldom
in making women feel more beautiful. In the words of Naomi Wolf: “We as women
are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather
than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women.”

There is great irony in this, because the range of what is
considered beautiful in the Western world of advertising and airbrushing is
almost completely the opposite in other cultures. In her breath-taking book
Mutant Message Down Under, Marlo Morgan tells of the great concern the
Aboriginal tribe she travelled with had about her blond hair – so synonymous
with beauty and femininity in her home country of America, yet to the tribe such
paleness indicated that she must be ill.

Wisdom and Honour

In some cultures, the lines on a woman’s face represent the
wisdom of her years and earn her great respect; the stretch marks on a woman’s
body are her badges of honour as a mother. In ours, they’re the tell-tale signs
that we’re not as young as we used to be, and so are less-than-desirable.

The truth is that there isn’t a pill or a potion, a diet or
a doctor that can bring out radiance and beauty in a woman in the way that a
sense of her own worth and value can. I’m not suggesting here that inner
happiness and harmony equate to looking – or playing! – like Maria Sharapova,
but simply that by respecting our bodies, hearts and minds for the immense and
perfect abilities they already have, we are able to live life from a place of
appreciation and joy, rather than aloneness or lack. And in the process, we’re
able to be the kind of partners to ourselves that we think we’re looking for in
someone else.