The Beauty We Imagine and the Battles That Bind Us

I saw a tweet.
Yes, a tweet — because no matter what they call it now, we all still say the same thing.

It was Margot Robbie telling a light anecdote: she had organized a private screening of Wuthering Heights. In the room, a group of women. On the screen, Jacob Elordi playing Heathcliff.

What followed was not film analysis.
It was pure emotion.
Shouting, crying, exaltation.
Margot said it jokingly: if Jacob had walked into the room, they would have devoured him.

And that’s where the illusion appears.

None of those women actually know Jacob Elordi.
They don’t know who he is in real life.
They don’t know how he loves, how he fails, how he reacts to fear, loss, or exhaustion.

What they love is the expectation they’ve built in their minds.
A private fiction.
A story that exists only inside them.

Physical beauty is real, yes.
It’s objective.
It attracts. It seduces.

But the love we project onto it is entirely subjective.
What moves us is not the body,
but what we believe that body promises.

That’s why beauty entertains but doesn’t sustain.
That’s why it excites but doesn’t create loyalty.

And this is where Ortega y Gasset fits perfectly.

The phrase “there is no great man for his valet” does not mean that great men do not exist.
It means that true greatness is not revealed in comfort, in the superficial, in what is easy.

Ortega explains it with a perfect image:
to see a stone well, you must get close;
to see a cathedral well, you must step back.

Greatness can only be perceived from the right distance.
From respect.
From perspective.
From deep experience, not from trivial closeness.

And the same happens with love.

You don’t truly love someone for how they look.
You love them for how they endure.
For how they walk with you when life stops being beautiful.
For how they stay when leaving would be easier.

Relationships are not strengthened on the surface,
but in the battle.

In difficult decisions.
In crises.
In days with no glamour,
no symmetry,
no promises —
only presence.

It is in battle that real loyalty is born.
Not loyalty based on desire,
but loyalty based on history.

Like the soldier who goes to war with his king:
he doesn’t love him for his image,
but because they have shared fear, fatigue, and exposure.

And the same is true in love.

It is not with the most beautiful woman that the bond becomes eternal.
It is with the woman with whom you have fought battles.
With whom you have lost and won.
With whom you have crossed long nights and uncertain days.

Beauty can start a story.
But only shared circumstance makes it unbreakable.

And that is why, dear Romina,
what we have is not built on what others can see from the outside.
It is built on what only we know.

On the dark passages we crossed together.
On the decisions that cost us.
On the silent sacrifices.
On loyalty without witnesses.

It was not perfection that united us.
It was life.

And that — like everything real —
does not look like a movie.
It looks like a story that survived.