When love is blind and stupid

“Watch over your heart with all diligence, For from it flow the springs of life.” Proverbs 4:23

HE WAS THE high school Don Juan. Good looking, charming and brilliant. Teachers loved him, and the girls loved him more.

Back then, if he paid you any attention, your status increased and people found you more interesting. We were too young to know any better, and as a result he broke our hearts with the ease of a dropping plate. I suppose I should count myself fortunate that he never noticed me or else I would have had a bleeding heart on his wretched path. Another casualty. Another fool in love.

With time, he earned a reputation as a heartbreaker but if you thought that discouraged the girls, you are wrong. For some strange reason, many girls were intrigued, viewing him as a conquest and themselves as the damsel who would bring him down. They were wrong every time. I watched keenly, studying Don Juan’s tactics.

How he would zero in on a target, work his way into her life and before long, he was telling her the same sweet nothings he had told the girl before. He was too lazy to come up with new pick up lines. And why bother, when the old ones worked like magic?

That’s when I understood that love could be both blind and stupid. Since those precarious teenage years, I have found myself in many foolish and blind spots. It would happen when my child spun a tale so incredible that it wouldn’t hold up in fiction but I would fall for it. Blame it on love. It would happen when a friend would repeat a hurtful act over and over, even after we had talked it through. Eager to believe the best, I never saw the blows coming.

BENEFIT OF DOUBT

And then I started listening to the journeys of others and realised that anyone could be affected by blindness and stupidity.

They were equally gullible in love, business or relationships. Sometimes we fall for the lies because we desperately want to believe they are true. We have a vision in our head of who a person is and even though they tell us something to the contrary, we keep auto-correcting them in our heads.

“She didn’t mean that. What she was really saying was…” or “He cares. He just doesn’t know it yet.” The Bible says that love, “believes all things and hopes all things.” In many ways, love hopes against all hope. This unrelenting faith is love’s enduring quality and perhaps, love’s greatest flaw.

However, there are instances when one must walk away from love for the sake of their well-being and sanity. There are times when one must face the hard facts with steely resolve. Facts that say, “He may never come home. She may never quit drugs. He may never change. She may not live.”

As difficult as it is, in those moments, the compromise would be to still feel with the heart and then choose with the mind. A mother’s heart may never give up on her errant child, but a mother’s mind knows that by continuing to enable him, she feeds his bad habits and lack of growth. The healthy way would be to hold two conflicting emotions and thoughts in one body.

She can find peace in loving her child and yet walking away to allow him face the consequences of his choices. Difficult? Perhaps that’s why it is said that “love must be tough.” It must be courageous enough to face the truth about a person or situation and yet soft enough to still believe in the best.

One of my friends who runs a thriving business was devastated to find out her staff had been swindling her of money for years. What hurt her the most was the betrayal, the feeling of being taken advantage of.

Fortunately, she emerged from that experience stronger, and surprisingly, not cynical. However, she goes through her balance sheet with a magnifying glass.  So yes - love can be blind and foolish but love must grow up and learn to be tough and wise.