Love based on physical beauty is only skin deep. If the skin is peeled off, the love will disappear. The same goes when the skin becomes wrinkled due to aging. Even if this “love” is “true” at the moment, it is obviously very shallow.
Physical beauty is not the most important thing in life. Love from someone is not the most important thing in life. The greatest and truest love of all is self-love. If you don’t love yourself, you can’t expect others to love you. You are the closest and dearest to yourself; if even yourself don’t love you, that only means you are not lovable or don’t deserve love from anybody.
A person is loved because he/she is lovely. A person is lovely only if he/she is a loving person. Conversely, a person who has a lot of greed, hatred and delusion will never find true love. Birds of the same feather flock together. A bad person can only have a bad person as “friend”. This kind of “friend” is actually an enemy disguised as “friend”. He/she is not a true friend. There is no true love involved.
Physical beauty or ugliness are illusions. All human distinctions are false. We train our minds to perceive something as beautiful and other things as ugly. We make ourselves unhappy when we see “unpleasant” things. This is a form of self-sabotage and we are doing disservice to ourselves.
The most important thing in life is happiness. One is happy when he/she is “rich”. One is truly “rich” when he/she is a giver; because a taker is simply not much better than a beggar. Hence, one is truly “rich” when he/she is a giver of loving kindness, compassion, Dhamma, much better than material wealth. It is hard for a beggar to feel happy.
Everything is impermanent. Love is impermanent. Love arises due to certain conditions, and disappears when the conditions change. Separation from what we love is a kind of suffering. This separation is unavoidable; either the beloved one will leave us, or we will leave the beloved one when we die. Association with the disliked is another kind of suffering. This association is also unavoidable if we have likes and dislikes. The only way to have no suffering is to have no likes and no dislikes. Having no attachment naturally means never having a detachment in the future. However, love and attachment are two different things. Love means “I want you to be happy”. Attachment means “I want you to make me happy”. It is totally possible to love someone without any attachment; impermanent love need not be a problem and need not cause suffering.
The body is impermanent. Everyone will face aging, sickness, and death. Emotional attachment to the body will cause suffering. However, self-love without attachment will cause no suffering here and now, and also the future when the body breaks up.
“And as for a person who is impure in his bodily behavior & verbal behavior, and who does not periodically experience mental clarity & calm, how should one subdue hatred for him? Just as when there is a sick man — in pain, seriously ill — traveling along a road, far from the next village & far from the last, unable to get the food he needs, unable to get the medicine he needs, unable to get a suitable assistant, unable to get anyone to take him to human habitation. Now suppose another person were to see him coming along the road. He would do what he could out of compassion, pity, & sympathy for the man, thinking, ‘O that this man should get the food he needs, the medicine he needs, a suitable assistant, someone to take him to human habitation. Why is that? So that he won’t fall into ruin right here.’ In the same way, when a person is impure in his bodily behavior & verbal behavior, and who does not periodically experience mental clarity & calm, one should do what one can out of compassion, pity, & sympathy for him, thinking, ‘O that this man should abandon wrong bodily conduct and develop right bodily conduct, abandon wrong verbal conduct and develop right verbal conduct, abandon wrong mental conduct and develop right mental conduct. Why is that? So that, on the break-up of the body, after death, he won’t fall into the plane of deprivation, the bad destination, the lower realms, purgatory.’ Thus the hatred for him should be subdued.” — Anguttara Nikaya, 5.162.
RESILIENT KID 