Love is Blind

All our lives we love illusion
Neatly caught between confusion
And the need to know we are alive
 
The Residents "God in Three Persons"


People in relationships often come to hate each other. “You’ve changed”, “You’re not the man I married”, “You weren’t the thoughtless man you are now when we first met”.

This of course is almost certainly nonsense. Once past early adulthood people’s characters and habits don’t change very much.

What happens is that when people fall in love, they blind themselves. They take up with someone they hardly know and in passion and desire blind themselves to that person’s flaws, or at best convince themselves that the other person will change for the best.

Love is – as the old saying has it – blind.

Sooner or later passionate love fades away, and if a couple, or even just one partner has initially blinded themselves to their lover’s faults, the other person seems to have changed for the worse. But it is mere perception that has changed, the other person was always like that and the disappointed partner is simply and literally dis-illusioned.

All that has really happened is that one person is finally seeing the other literally dispassionately, seeing the flaws and faults, the incompatibilities that were always there, that they even knew about but denied or ignored.

Sometimes even then people foolishly persist, knowing they are unhappy, in the sad and wasteful delusion that the other person will change. People’s fundamental characters don’t change. My mother stayed with my father despite it being obvious very early that their personalities were ill-matched, and at her end she commented that she hadn’t had much of a life. I have never fallen passionately in love. I have only fallen in love with two women, neither of whom I could have, both of whom I knew quite well, whom I loved while being able to see their flaws and loved without hope..

Sadly for me, they could see my flaws all too clearly as my flaws are many and close to the surface, so I must do without love.

Oh my fortunate deluded sisters and brothers. Because most of you find a partner even if only for a while despite delusion, in your need or your passion.