Love Isn't Really Blind: And Here's Why!

“Love is blind,” the old saying goes. 

Merriam-Webster states that the phrase means “people do not see the faults of the people that they love.” Often, you hear these words used in a negative way, to suggest that being in love is a kind of deception, a kind of illusion. The implication is that once the intense emotions associated with the initial “falling in love” pass, the couple will cease to be blind and come to see the reality of one another’s faults and imperfections—and the consequent disappointment.

Seeing reality will be a let-down compared to the blindness of being in love, so the thinking goes. Love is somehow irrational. Observing a young couple who are experiencing the first rush of being in love, the skeptics wag their heads and mutter, “Just wait until they have to live with each other and they’ve been married for six months. They won’t be starry-eyed anymore.”

This can be a crushing thing for one in love to hear.

He begins to wonder, Is it true that everything I’m feeling is just an illusion, just a chemical accident? Is the person I love not so amazing after all? Everyone talks about how “the honeymoon phase” passes. Is it all just gloomy when you get to the reality of married life? Is love blind?

The short answer to all these questions, happily, is “no.” But let’s dig a little deeper.

This skeptical attitude toward love is, in part, an overreaction to the opposite error, which we find rampant in today’s culture. All too often, movies, TV, and poorly written novels present love as a purely emotional matter that sweeps you up in an unending bliss of romance once you find “the one,” who will be an intelligent, funny, sensitive, self-sacrificing, glamorous model who will fulfill your every dream and give perfect meaning to your life.

This demonstrably false idea generates, understandably, the skeptical interpretation of “love is blind,” which bitterly dismisses all the noble impulses, powerful emotions, and profound mutual admiration of lovers as mere self-deception. To be clear, both extremes are errors.

Love, of course, is not primarily an emotion.

Though it has an emotional component, love actually consists in willing the good of the other, which is a question of the will, not the emotions. And often it is difficult, even painful, to put into practice, especially when emotions come and go and you don’t feel like making the sacrifices love demands.

On the other hand, the excitement, intense emotion, and admiration that accompany falling in love do express a profound truth. They are real. They are not mere illusion, so long as the two people in love have really worked to get to know one another. A superficial knowledge of one another might lead to illusory love, but if the couple has a real understanding of each other, “falling in love” has meaning. You cannot love what you do not know.

But it’s also true that love deepens knowledge.

Commenting on the connection between love and knowledge, St. Augustine says, “To possess any subject of study is to know it. . . [and] however good a thing is, if it is not loved, it cannot be perfectly possessed, that is, known. For who can know how good a thing is if he does not enjoy it?” The same thing can be said of knowing a person. We cannot perfectly know someone without love.

In a healthy relationship, the surge of mutual wonder, admiration, and affection comes because the lover has obtained a unique vision of the beloved. The lover sees a real goodness and beauty in the beloved that no one else, perhaps, can see or ever will see. The lover is privileged to understand what, to other eyes, remains hidden: the best of the actual and potential qualities in the beloved. This is why we say that lovers, like poets, can be inspired. They are a kind of visionary.

In the opening paragraph of his book The Restoration of Christian Culture, John Senior puts it this way:

“Richard of St. Victor, a spiritual master of the middle ages, says in a cryptic Latin phrase, Ubi amor ubi oculus—'wherever love is, there the eye is also,’ which means that the lover is the only one who really sees the truth about the person or the thing he loves. It is the perfect complement to amor caecus est, another more famous phrase, that ‘love is blind’—blind to all this lying world because love sees only truth. When a young man loves a girl, we ask, ‘What does he see in her?’ But Our Lord said, ‘Let him who has eyes see.’ If you love, you will understand.” 

Seeking and seeing virtue.

Now, it is true that in the unique knowledge that the lover has of the beloved, faults and imperfections tend to pale at first. Those faults will become more obvious later. But the faults do not lessen the real goodness that the lover first beheld in the beloved and that generated the love to begin with. The goodness is still there if one has the eyes to see.

Seeing the imperfections in one’s boyfriend/girlfriend or spouse presents a real challenge, of course, and those imperfections must be acknowledged. But rather than succumbing to a false disillusionment, the lover ought to remember the unique view that he originally had of the beloved’s potential. Part of the vocation of marriage is to try to help one’s spouse achieve the potential that you—and perhaps only you—have seen in them; to grow and develop those virtues that first made you fall in love.

To be in love is to have a kind of vision. It is to see another soul, in a limited way, as even God sees them, and as the world can never see them: all the good that they are and all the good that they may be. And that, surely, is the truest sight, the very opposite of blindness.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux had little theological training, yet she is considered a Doctor of the Church. This is because the Little Flower saw God with the eyes of love, thus achieving a much profounder understanding of Him than books alone can give. 

And it can be so, in a limited way, in human love, too, when love lifts the veil from our eyes. So our understanding of the old saying is precisely backwards. It is the world that is blind, and only the lover who truly sees.