Potts: Mature love has 20/20 vision

“Well, I guess it’s like they say: ‘Love is blind.’”

We’d been talking about a couple we both knew; they’d been high school and college sweethearts, then finally married in their mid-20s.

But after a few months of marriage, they realized that although they had known each other for years, they actually did not know each other at all — and they were having more than a few problems with what they were discovering about each other.

My friend suggested maybe they had just been so in love that they never noticed they might not like each other all that much.

Perhaps, then, love is blind. On the other hand, perhaps not.

Certainly we all have known such couples. They proclaim how much they love each other, but have never seemed to figure out whether they really like each other.

Sometimes they seem to be in constant turmoil — fighting and making up, hurting and being hurt, breaking up and getting back together again. Sometimes they just have one of those tranquil, polite and somewhat detached relationships. They’re together, just not with each other.

Either way, such couples say they are in love but just don’t seem to be “in like.” If we point this out to them, they will dismiss our observations by simply proclaiming “We love each other!”

I’ve noticed something similar in my work as a therapist. I see about two dozen couples each year for premarital counseling. As I’ve worked with these couples, I’ve identified a pattern. It’s the men and women who are not able to identify what they do and don’t like about each other before they get married who wind up coming back for counseling after they get married.

They may speak at great lengths about how much they love each other, but they really don’t seem to know and genuinely like each other. That’s what gets them in trouble.

I wonder if we need to rethink our idea of love. Perhaps love has to include really knowing the person we love. Maybe it involves seeing the best and recognizing the worst in our partner, then figuring out if we are in love and actually like the other person, for better or for worse.

For example, we can like our spouse or fiance’s attentiveness, but we’d also better at least be aware of his moodiness. Her ability to get things done can be great, but it’s also important to recognize how hard it is for her to just relax. It’s a lot of fun to go to his nightly softball or basketball games, and we admire his skill and drive. But does he make time for us and the children? You get the idea.

Real love, then, is hardly blind. It has 20/20 vision. If we can say we love someone while knowing both his and her good and bad points, then our love is more likely to be genuine and stand the test of time.

But what about those couples who insist they love each other, but don’t really know much about each other? At best, they are dangerously naive. Often, however, their “love” is really something else. It may be infatuation or passion.

We can be overwhelmed by the sheer power of our attraction for another person. We can be in love with the idea of being in love.

It may be dependency or neediness. We can feel we have to have someone to take care of us, or someone whom we can take care of. We can conclude that we won’t survive unless we are in love.

It may be habit or expectation. We’ve been together so long, everyone knows we’ll get married. We must be in love; what else could it be?

Infatuation, dependency, habit, etc. all can be strong motivators. But they are not love, and they often blind us to that mature awareness of our partner’s strengths and weaknesses that is necessary to really love.

Is your love blind? Maybe it’s time to take off the blinders. Love that lasts sees clearly and completely. Real lovers have 20/20 vision.