What Is Love Blindness?

Love is blind
and lovers cannot see
the pretty follies
that themselves commit

— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Love is blind. The now commonplace phrase is often attributed to Shakespeare, who explored the concept in several of his plays. But if Shakespeare gave the concept so much of its rich meaning, he wasn’t the first to introduce it. Chaucer had already coined the phrase in the 14th century, and the idea was depicted in images well before that, in representations of Cupid wearing a blindfold. Arguably, then, the notion that “love is blind” has been around longer than our modern English, possibly as long as there was language to reflect on what it means to fall in love.

In our contemporary post-Freudian world, where the notion of an unconscious gives us new tools to understand our lack of awareness, the phenomenon of love blindness still seems to plague us and vex us just as much as ever. Popular literature offers up numerous stories where the mystery centers around the hidden—and often monstrous—true identity of a loved one. In fact, an entire thriving genre, the domestic thriller, could be said to stem from the universal fear of, and fascination with, misjudging those we love.

Meanwhile, in our personal lives, most of us experience instances of wildly misjudging our romantic interests. In fact, the very term “to fall in love” suggests our lack of balance and sense of disorientation at such times, and not even the best attempts by our market culture to rationalize choice (dating apps, etc.) can keep us from picking partners that end up feeling like big mistakes. Is there anyone who hasn’t kicked the door closed on a lover with the thought: What the hell was I thinking?

Are we thinking when we fall for someone? And if not, then what gets in the way? What does psychoanalytic theory have to teach us on the subject?

Freud’s Foundational Theories on Love

Though later theorists have much to add, Freud laid the foundation for most of our enduring ideas about romantic choice. Freud had very specific reasons for believing that we can never see romantic matters clearly since, according to his theory, love operates under disguise, and the task of choosing a love object is led by the unconscious.

So what is the nature of this driving unconscious force? For Freud, all passionate love is an attempt to retrieve that first love between a baby and its caretaker. “There are… good reasons why a child sucking at the mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is, in fact, a refinding of it.” [1]

Since anxiety around the incest taboo prevents us from choosing a parent or obvious parent stand-in for our lover, we must disguise the resemblance. The real attraction to our romantic choice is therefore repressed or out of view—so that we can never truly know what we love about the person when we love them. Add to this befuddlement the fact that we tend to idealize our romantic partners, just as we idealized our parents in early development. For Freud, new lovers desire to experience their romantic objects as perfect, something that also gratifies our own narcissism—someone so wonderful loves me!—increasing our euphoria and unwillingness to let a more sober view of our beloved take shape. [2]

Post-Freudian Thinkers on Love: The Object Relations School and Ronald Fairbairn

Much of Freud’s view has infiltrated popular understanding. Today, it’s hardly shocking when partners complain—You’re just like my father or mother! But questions remain: What makes one unconscious resemblance the glue that happily binds, while others lead to torturous attachments?

Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn, a prominent figure in the development of object relations theory, offered a framework for understanding what’s going on when painful aspects of a primary (parental) relationship get repeated in adult romantic choice. Fairbairn emphasized the critical significance of maintaining attachment to caregivers, no matter how cruel or abandoning the caretaker proves to be.

According to Fairbairn, when faced with an abusive caregiver, a child will do anything to protect the caregiver’s image as good, including disavowing awareness of his or her flaws. The child thus takes the only available alternative step: to locate the badness in herself (If I’m being yelled at and beaten, then I must deserve it).To quote Fairbairn’s most famous statement:

“It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the devil.” [3]

Given this set-up, when such a child grows up to seek a romantic partner and inevitably (as established by Freud) finds one with a resemblance to the original caregiver, they will be blind to the lover’s flaws and even compelled to adhere to playing out old, familiar patterns: suffering mistreatment and blaming themselves for it. In short, Fairbairn explains the confounding behavior of people who find themselves with abusive partners and who remain blind (or partly blind) to the abuse.

Recent Psychoanalytic Elaborations on Love and Distorted Seeing

More contemporary psychoanalysts (relational/interpersonal and attachment-based therapists) have developed further tools to help us understand how it is we can both know—yet fail to recognize—the faults in our romantic objects. Many have traded in the language of repression for one of dissociation, choosing a model of mind in which we have different parts of us, or self-states, that come in and out of awareness. According to Philip Bromberg, the analyst best associated with the self-state model, in cases of violence, for instance, where it’s impossible to hold the idea of the loving partner in conjunction with their cruel or frightening behavior, the mind acts to preserve the attachment by denying conscious access to the threatening experience. [4] To put it bluntly, we can literally fail to process—to think and remember—the hurt our loved ones cause us.

So then, if Bromberg and others are right, and our minds are so armored to blind us to the faults in our loved ones, are we all doomed to stumble through romantic misadventures?

A Way Out of the Darkness

Despite the challenges of dealing with love blindness, psychodynamic therapy offers hope. For people continually drawn to destructive partners, the solution is to become aware, with the help of a sensitive analyst, of early patterns with caregivers and of how they repeat in current relationships. As Fairbairn and Bromberg suggest, distorted seeing will be far more prevalent in those whose primary attachments were problematic and involved dissociating negative experiences. Treatment therefore includes becoming attuned to feelings and fantasies excluded from awareness, and facing the pain and disappointment around how our caregivers—present and past—have failed to love us as we needed.

In the end, to see clearly in love, we must stop seeking to revive and repair our early attachments and shift from the wishful romantic mode to a more tragic one, where greater acceptance of reality grants us the power to alter our romantic destinies, but also lands us in the mature territory of ambivalence and grief.

To learn to love without illusion—or with not too much of it—is also to grieve. We must let go of the fantasy that we can achieve the perfect wished-for love we never had, and only then can there be hope for new experiences, where to love is to be able to see and know the other, truly, by first seeing and knowing oneself.