The following blog is from author Ellen Rosner Feig:
Soon after it became clear to me that my 17 year marriage was truly over, I began to reach out to others who were going through separation and divorce. I have never found support groups to be of much benefit as they tend (and this is simply my experience) to become whine-fests filled with complaints, unresolved anger and pity. So instead of spending evenings on hard backed chairs listening to sad tales of lost love, I began to chat up people in grocery store lines; emailed old friends and their friends; talked to parents at school events; and sent out lengthy questionnaires to a list of hundreds. Before I knew it my head was spinning with story after story and my email inbox was full. As I read through my notes and the responses it became clear that we had all suffered from the same disorder – the “blinded by love” disease usually also accompanied by the “blinded by lust” disorder. When we first meet someone who we have an attraction to, every chemical in our body, every nerve ending, every endorphin is activated. Our palms sweat, our heart beats faster, our head spins, and our eyes lose focus. All clear thoughts leave our minds, all reasoning flies out the window – we are truly “blinded” by the person who stands before us. I will never forget the moment I fell blinded by my ex husband. We were sitting in the outer area of a downtown NY tennis center and I had placed a Velomint into his open mouth – a simple and yet life-altering event that led to marriage, children and ultimately divorce.
While these feelings are truly wonderful at first (and can cause us to do things we never would), they also can lead us into the proverbial lion’s den. The reality is that the “blinded by love/lust” phase ends, sometimes sooner than anticipated, and with its demise comes focus and truth. Life is not lived in a perpetual state of romance, flying angels or red hearts. The harsh truth is that once the blinders are removed we may see things that we had ignored, that we had been blind to. A man who truly could never commit (but was forced into marriage); a woman who is fiscally irresponsible and immature; a man who harbors strange sexual addictions; a woman who is unable to break down long held barriers. If one is able to acknowledge and deal with these red flags early on in a relationship, the long-term survival for that relationship increases ten fold.
While I will be the first to admit that I love that magical feeling of being ‘blinded by love, blinded by lust”, I also have come to realize that it is okay and important for love to be based in reality, truth and honesty. Once the blinders come off, we are able to enter into a relationship with our eyes wide open.
Ellen Rosner Feig is the author of “The Ex Files: Women, Litigation and Liberty” (Adams Media, June 2006), a non-fiction look at dating, marriage, separation and divorce. For more on Ellen visit her website: http://www.exfilesbook.com. You can also read her blogs on http://www.mylovebytes.com.