La Vie En Rose
There have been countless experiments to understand the peacock feathers of human mating, the swish and swagger that advertise sexual interest, the courtship dance at bars - all to reduce a complex primitive wonderful emotion called love into a science. One such study found the "pink lens effect" - when newly smitten lovers idealize their partner, magnifying the other's virtues and explaining away their flaws: She is the funniest person I've ever met. He's moody because of his job.The couples who stayed together the longest? They also idealized each other the most, and for longer.
Call it the pink lens if you want. I call it trust - that stage where the other is just absolutely pristinely perfect till proven otherwise. "Trust" is a funny word. It's not as misused, overused or abused as "love" - we don't go around telling our lover we trust them; But it's more important as a foundation to any relationship than even this dopamine-triggered burst of passion and intoxication we call love.
And whether the lens come off at one go or it chips off bit by bit, when it's gone, the world is a little less pink, a bit more gray and a lot more dull. Not even the strongest love can bring the "pink lens effect" back. It's the most precious gift of a relationship and when it's broken, it shakes even the core of what we believe in as persons, because it shatters not just the ideal partner but the ideal of love.
What actually hurts like hell in a break-up (apart from all the singular behaviors towards the end that sadly, shouldn't define the relationship or the person but often do), is that the person we continue to idealize has stopped feeling the same way about us. And conversely, that the person we thought was perfect was in reality, not. Coming back down to earth and realizing our and the other's humanity, has never been more painful.
I miss the blindness, the bliss, the ignorance of that single leap of faith - the trust that one person can embody all that is good and perfect and right in this world. And when it comes again, I'm keeping the glasses on and seeing la vie en rose for as long as I can.
posted by moan @ 2:30 AM
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