by Lynne Griffin

Created on: May 27, 2009

When a love affair is fresh and new, it's tempting to delve into that secret drawer in your mind and dust off the rose colored glasses. Visualizing your new love as the person you've always imagined would be your soul mate is almost too delicious to pass up.

In love's unsullied beginning, each party is presenting his very best side, trying hard to be what he envisions the other one desires. Each half of this wonderful new union locks itself securely to the other, as if pieces to an intricate puzzle. It's merely instinct. Survival of the species, if you will.

The first few months of a great love affair are marked by soaring passions, and the sensation that you are the luckiest person on the face of the earth. You imagine you know every aspect of your lover's heart and soul. You dream that your lover accepts every dark nook and cranny of your existence. You rejoice in the fact that finally you have found someone who truly understands the deepest parts of you, and furthermore is deeply in love with every aspect of you. You feel pity for the rest of mankind because you and you alone have found this wondrous connection.

But the problem with rose colored glasses is that they tend to blur the details of a person. Important details.

As time progresses, reality happens. Life happens. The glasses fall away. You struggle to locate them, but the light is too dim to find them again. Frantically, you search on hands and knees, grazing your fingers and hands over the floor, under the bed, in the trash, under the mattress. There is nothing you would not do to find them. Where is your fantasy? Where is the amazing person you fell in love with so intensely?

The search is futile, as you accept the fact that there are things about your lover you did not expect. Hard things. Hurtful things. Reality crashes in despite your best efforts to hold back the door. It's like a vapor that permeates the room despite every attempt to banish it. The smell is bitter and uninvited. The grit in the air burns your eyes and elicits tears meant to cleanse, but they keep trickling, hot and salty down your cheeks, long after your eyes are clear. The mist of reality is cold, like a stiff December wind. There is no soft security blanket to be found.

Your fingers stumble upon something hard and cold. As you struggle to see, your heart soars. It feels like glasses, vaguely looks like glasses in the faint light. Hurriedly you slide them on.

But wait! These glasses aren't rose colored. They are magnifying glasses, designed to amplify and enlarge every flaw and aspect about a person. No lover could ever pass the inspection of these spectacles. Yet, that is all you can find to wear in your injured state.

Every wounded lover wears these glasses for a time. Other's faults seem bigger than life. Cynicism creeps into your emotional state. It's the armor for protecting yourself the next time around.

Is there a lesson to be learned here? What if we resist the temptation to don the rose colored glasses from the beginning, and not set ourselves up later for a nose dive off the cliff of idealization?

Maybe, just maybe, we should conquer our fear of opening ourselves up to an actual human being with real faults and quirks. Instead of fuzzy fantasy, a clear objective vision of our beloved might hold saucy, unexpected, yet brilliant detail.

Maybe the rose colored glasses are just a crutch. A crutch that should be firmly placed back in the drawer and stored away forever....

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