Eye Of The Donkey

A while ago, Fergus said that he wouldn’t love me if I had a beard. To be fair, I probably shouldn’t have directly asked the question, and also he was joking, but anyway, it made me think.

It’s easy enough to say that you love someone so much that it’s regardless of what they look like, but I don’t believe that that is ever entirely true. What if they put on 50 stone? What if they were decapitated but still alive? What if they turned into a donkey? Here’s a more likely one… what if they changed gender?

Would you change yourself because of this, for example, by buying really strong furniture, buying lots of massive hats, or pursuing bestiality or homo/heterosexuality? People think it's pessimistic to say that love is conditional: of course it's conditional, everything is. How about the condition of not being a murderous, slovenly 8-day-old caterpillar? Yeah, I thought as much.

Is there a sliding scale? Do I need to draw some sort of graph, starting at maybe ‘has a particularly bad spot’ to ‘goes bald’ and then to ‘is turned completely inside out and bright green’? If so, are women generally more willing to go higher up the scale than men? Why? What if it was only you that could see this change, and to everyone else they looked normal?

It’s the “Does my bum look big in this?” for the 21st century: “Would you love me if I were a putrid, mouldy slug?” and the answer, if you care enough, should always be, “I’d try”.

I'm aware that none of that made sense.