Several years ago, I fell very irrationally in love. Doing so dramatically altered the course of my life, because my sense of self, my beliefs, my perception of reality, all shifted quite violently. Falling in love on that occasion turned out to be very important for me.
But time and all things moved on.
Now, with the dust more or less settled on the newly constructed landscape, it’s compelling to look back with an unattached gaze at how that fall came about. To be sure, I obsessed over the details at the time – it couldn’t be helped. But I also consciously ignored them whenever I could, understanding that there was some process going on far beyond the reasoning of it that my soul just needed. To try to understand why was too much like trying to escape it. But I digress…
My point is this: Because I ignored the details to a large extent, I am able to examine them without the tarnish of a thousand previous visits.
What do we see in another person that causes us to love them? What do we see that causes us to desire them? How much do our circumstances dictate our connections?
It’s clear that I made assumptions about another person, and those assumptions framed my opinion of them. And I will never know if those assumptions were correct.
Assumptions are inevitable – as much as we may try to reserve judgement on somebody, we just don’t work that way. And no matter how intensive our communication, it takes a long time to get to know someone, if we ever really do. So we have to operate on a whole host of assumptions in pretty much every relationship (or interaction, even) we engage in.
What is interesting to me is that I would make different assumptions if presented with the same information now. And I have no idea which assumptions are more accurate.
On the one hand my perceptions could have been clouded by love, or loneliness, or hope…on the other, it’s possible that I, in fact, fell in love with a moment of serendipitous clarity. I probably like to think that it is both.