Each one of us has our own private concept of love – how it happens, how it is experienced, what it’s all about. This concept forms over the years as we grow up and make deductions from our family background, the opinions of people around us, the media and our experiences. All these factors combine with our personal disposition to frame our concept of love.
Your concept of love is like a blueprint or a building plan. It determines how you go about building your relationships, how you run your relationships and your capacity to experience love. A healthy love concept gives birth to a healthy love life.
So it is that many of us have grown up with the concept that love is blind. We don’t say it but we act it. We believe that love has nothing to do with reasoning and objectivity. Falling in love is rather an involuntary, irrational thing that just happens to us. ‘You don’t really choose love, love chooses you’, we think. By extension, we don’t really choose our life partner; our feelings dictate whom we should marry. If we feel a certain way about someone, it means we are in love with them. If we are in love with them, we should marry them. Once we marry them, things will simply work out because we are in love. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way.
The reality is that it is supremely easy to ‘fall in love’ with someone who is not good for you. Falling in love is simply a code phrase for attraction, not a guarantee of lifelong commitment. Most people who will end up in the divorce courts next Monday fell in love once upon a time. True love is not blind but sometimes we make blind decisions based on our feelings. There are many reasons why people make blind decisions in love but I will share three.
Infatuation – When we are blinded by an image of a person we cannot see the reality of who they are. Infatuated people see what they want to see in a person, even if it is not really there. If everyone else around can see the glaring flaws in your relationship but you cannot, take a step back and look again.
Desperation – When we are blinded by haste we make desperate decisions which are not in our best interests. We let the fear of missing out lure us into a relationship that saps the life out of us. Do not permit your desire to find love to outweigh your commitment to find it God’s way. Only in hindsight do people realise that no marriage is far better than a painful marriage.
Passion – When we are drunk with the wine of passion, our focus is blurred and our insight becomes distorted. Sex with someone you are not married to changes everything in that relationship and not for the better. Once the sexual dimension enters a relationship, emotional entanglement is reinforced and there is a tendency to let go of all your ideals and settle for what is in hand.
In my next post, How to avoid ‘blind love’, I share four practical tips for choosing your partner wisely.
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