Falling in love is one of the most thoroughly researched yet least understood human experiences. Poets have tried to explain it for centuries, and scientists have even mapped the neural activity that corresponds to it. Still, anyone who has been in love can tell that the descriptions by poets and scientists don’t quite capture the reality of the experience. What is not talked about as often is what falling in love causes us to stop noticing. The experience has a narrowing effect on our perception that is well documented but almost never honestly talked about in terms of actual relationships. When a person is falling in love, a specific and strong type of selective attention takes over. Things that might have been concerns, patterns worth re-examining, information useful to a clear-eyed evaluation of the other person become weaker signals. They are not totally gone. They are just trumped by everything that feels great and the brain’s strong desire to keep the feeling of something extraordinary going.
Inconsistencies In Their Behavior
Something that in any other situation would clearly stand out as a “red flag” becomes insignificant when you fall in love because of the tendency to see the best sides of the other. Discrepancies between their words and actions, the contradictions between the person they portray themselves as and their occasional ways of behaving, all of these get attributed to “no one’s perfect” instead of being understood as warning signs or potential indicators of something deeper that should be understood.
How They Treat People With Less Power
The way one treats a waiter, a delivery person, a customer service worker, or any other person in a less privileged position is one of the clearest signs of a person’s character that exist. Unfortunately, when someone falls in love, this kind of information is typically given extremely little weight. The smallest show of impatience with a server gets rationalized. A rude tone at a service person gets blamed on a bad day. If it is a pattern, it is not given the recognition it deserves.
Their Relationship With Accountability
Persons’ responses to mistakes, harms, or failures to meet their own values offer significant insights into one’s character. However, during the early phases of falling in love, people are emotionally very vulnerable, and pushing back on someone’s accountability is very costly, either emotionally or relationally. Partial apologies are deemed good enough. Deflections are overlooked. This period, when the pattern of handling “being wrong” begins to reveal itself, is the one when the pattern tends to be treated most lightly compared to how seriously it later turns out to deserve.
The Frequency Of Certain Complaints
If somebody keeps on telling you how unreasonable their ex was, how friends always let them down, colleagues never appreciating them, or family consistently failing in understanding them, there is very important information contained in that repetition. Falling in love easily allows you to interpret those complaints as a sign of a person who has been unjustly treated rather than a hidden pattern that deserves a review before deciding how much of yourself you want to invest in the relationship.
How You Feel After Most Interactions
The dominant feeling you take away after most of your interactions with a person, whether that is feeling energized or drained, seeing or performing, at ease or on edge, is often masked by the high intensity moments when you’re falling in love. One special night can literally undo the memory of several encounters where you felt off, and this kind of “resetting” is one of the biggest ways that significant information is lost during this time.
Their Availability Patterns
The irregularity of when and how a person appears tends to get put on a pedestal during the falling in love phase instead of being questioned as to what it may actually stand for. Sporadic contact is understood as the back and forth of exciting chemistry rather than a possible sign of ambivalence or avoidance. The brain in this phase is amazingly good at putting together stories that make inconsistency seem interesting rather than worrying.
Differences In Core Values
Two people sharing a number of core values is clear enough, but differences where people genuinely diverge in their belief about how life is to be lived get the most minimized in the early stages of love. Those differences that will significantly affect the living together aspect are noted and then immediately pushed aside for the sake of focusing on the connection that is felt so powerfully in the present moment. The reasoning is that the connection is so strong that it will be able to overcome those differences eventually, and that line of reasoning is one of the more bullish and least reliable guesses that love makes.
Their Relationship With Their Own Emotions
Judging someone’s emotional management style, whether they respond by reflecting or reacting, whether they take charge of their feelings or continually blame others, whether they understand their own patterns of behavior to some extent, all these are basic pieces of knowledge about what it will be like to have a lasting relationship with them. Love at first sight simplifies things so that you see their emotional heritage as just a part of their character rather than the one that will impact the everyday nature of your life together.
Warning Signs From People Who Know Them
The friends who are a little wary. The family member who can hardly hide their lack of enthusiasm about the relationship. The person colored by the past whose words make an impact, but you decide not to take it further. People who have known someone longer and in different settings have information that the love-struck mind is actively defending itself against taking in because if it did it would be forced to amend the story the two of you have begun to construct and that story is just too good to challenge.
How Often Your Gut Sends You A Signal
The immediate feeling or thought that you get before your brain has had time to come up with an explanation is the one that most often turns out to be correct. However, when you are swept up in a strong, positive emotional experience, you tend to undervalue your gut. Most people looking back at relationships that ended up being very problematic are able to identify the first few occasions when “something was not quite right.” Those earliest signs were not ignored because the gut feeling was wrong but because the rest of the situation was so good that a little voice was silenced.
Their Capacity For Genuine Listening
It is quite a quick reveal whether someone is really listening to what you say or if they are simply waiting for the moment to come up with a reply that will steer the conversation back to them. However, it is very difficult to keep a keen eye on this when you fall in love because being with that person is so enticing that their quality of listening usually escapes the scrutiny it deserves. Usually, it only dawns on one of the lovers after the honeymoon phase is over that the other person has been the one doing most of the listening all the time.
The Absence Of Curiosity About Your Inner Life
An attentive partner wants to know who you are at a deeper level so they will ask questions beyond the surface, will follow up on things you have mentioned before and will show through their questions an ongoing interest in understanding you more.
Financial And Practical Incompatibilities
Behaving towards money, safety, responsibility, and any other aspects of managing the less romantic side of grown-up life alongside one another usually predicts the main areas of disagreement in a couple’s relationship. These are also very often the factors that are completely overshadowed by the emotional rush of falling in love. The individual who struggles with money becomes the wonderfully carefree one. Their lack of control is transformed into an exciting spontaneity.
Patterns From Their Previous Relationships
It’s not the substance of their disclosure with regard to their past that matters here because what they say is always somewhat edited anyway. It’s the patterns that make up the various relationships they recount, how they broke up, what part they had in those endings, what they did or neglected to learn from each, and the way they talk about their former partners, that provides the kind of information that is normally ignored quite a bit more than necessary when one is in the throes of love for a new person.
How The Relationship Actually Makes You Feel About Yourself
The most significant aspect that love blinds us to is often our honest evaluation of how it affects our relationship with ourselves. Do we find ourselves expanding or contracting in the presence of our partner? Do we feel more aligned with our true selves, or are we, perhaps unconsciously, morphing into a self that our partner finds more agreeable? This fundamental question about the impact of love on one’s self-experience is not only highly insightful but also typically the last one we ask.
Final Thoughts
This is not to say that one should never fall in love or that new relationships should be approached with the coldness of a business deal. Falling in love is genuinely one of the most amazing things that a human being can experience, and it would be a pity to go through it while being so aware of the defenses that the pleasure never really quite arrives. Rather, what it is a case for is the awareness that the return of clarity following the love-struck period is not a sign of failure or a situation going awry. The clarity is the revelation of the information that was always there, only inaccessible through the extreme intensity of love. Those relationships that manage to move beyond the initial attraction and choose to continue with intention are usually also the ones where the deeper understanding reveals something worth remaining for. And the ones that do not continue are usually those where the deeper clarity simply supports what the less love-tricked part of the person was attempting to communicate all along.
Ask Me Anything