The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Sure. But on the other hand that's not always the case. Sometimes people get disfigured in an accident, and I think most would agree it's immoral to leave your wife because she's not attractive any more after a tragic accident. And of course, we all get old and ugly in the end (or die young I suppose), and your relationship needs to be able to withstand that inevitable change. I think that age in particular makes it worth emphasizing the idea that you should love your spouse regardless of what they look like.
Sure, those stipulations make sense, but they don't lead to agreeing with the statement that "one should love their spouse without regard to physical appearance"; evaluating what caused that degradation of appearance is showing regard for their physical appearance. Ailments and disfigurement are tragic and it is obviously the morally correct thing to maintain your love for your partner through them. Aging is not only acceptable, but something that we should do our best to look on with some degree of dignity and appreciation. Neither of these is similar to having a spouse that just decides to stop dressing nicely, stop eating reasonably, or otherwise shows disregard for their own appearance.
Thinking over the examples you provided and the ones I provided, it seems like the key distinction is the underlying cause. In the case of gaining weight it seems like what is a problem is not the physical appearance per se, but rather the fact that your spouse isn't taking care of him/herself any more. In that light it seems fair to say physical appearance isn't important except insofar as it is the symptom of a problem one considers to be a character flaw. What do you think?
I think that's the majority of it, yeah. Falling out of love with someone because they've lost some physical luster is something that has been known to happen but should be vigorously resisted. Falling out of love with someone who has changed their behavior and character is a much deeper challenge.
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