The people that we love

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I’ve been thinking lately about how we view the people that are dear to us. I don’t mean in terms of not seeing their flaws, or painting a pretty picture of them in our heads. Maybe women tend to do that more than men, I don’t know, but being male (not to mention being myself) it’s not easy to ignore what I see, therefore making for some rather sharp critique sometimes – though I am working on it, I’m glad to say.

No, I mean about how we actually perceive the people that we love, the people that we care for. What is the image of them that we form in our heads, what is our representation of them in our minds. I do not think we can ever see people that are close to us completely objectively, we cannot see them for what they are. I think we create an image of them in our head and this is what we see every time we see them, every time we talk to them. You do not talk to your girlfriend directly, what she says gets filtered through your perception of her in your mind. You might hear her say something, but the way you interpret that depends on the image that you’ve made for her in your mind.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, though it might help to reinforce the notion that love is blind, as (to paraphrase the Gorillaz), “we don’t see with our eyes, we perceive with our minds”, hence you usually have quite a different opinion of your friend’s girlfriend/boyfriend than what they have. We use that every day and with (practically) everyone, as it makes the whole task of processing information and reacting accordingly much easier and faster. Nothing new so far, and you could have picked all this up in any basic psychology book – well, I wouldn’t know, but it sounds reasonable.

The twist in what I want to discuss here with you is the apparent (or perceived) age of those around us that we feel some affection towards. That’s right, their age.

See, this “avatar” that we create in our heads seems to me to always be somewhat younger than the people in consideration. The best example is perhaps the way parents always think of their children as being twelve years old (or there about), even if that age has long gone and their children now have families of their own. It is the same way that you might view your siblings (the younger ones, anyway), as always being ten years old – that’s how I still view my brother, for example, even though he is in university and drives his own car. This perspective is always switched on, even if we are not aware of it. Ok, it’s easy to observe this when, for example, lovers are being “cute” with each other; you know what I mean, all that “my sweet honey bunny” and stuff, where the level of communication usually drops to pre-school ages. This is, perhaps, because the grown-up world of words and grammar cannot effectively contain and convey affection, but I think this extends to other situations as well. How do you think of your loved one when she is happy (I am talking to guys here, as things are maybe different for women, do feel free to enlighten me on this), when she is laughing? Do you have this image of a strong congruent adult smiling about something amusing, or do you see a young girl smiling with all her heart and shining eyes?

One of the easiest ways to test this is to give her a sparkler. You’re out in the garden/back yard/beach/desert, and you give her a sparkler and light it (assuming she doesn’t have a phobia of them, of course; that would be just cruel). How old does she see when she’s swinging that sparkler around, when she’s just happy with something simple and fun?

What about your very best and dear friends? Do you honestly view them as grown up, well-formed, well-rounded individuals? Are you butch and manly about them, or do you feel as these are the people that you could go on a childish adventure with, to roll around in the sand playing football on a sunny day at the beach, to share your toys/DVDs/PS3s/music with as you did with your Hotweels so many years ago?

It might be, of course, that I am simply immature, that I have missed out on an important part of my personal growth and evolution, and that is why I find this normal. But if not, is it a consequence of affection that we view some people to be so much younger than us, or is it simply our paternal/maternal instincts that surface under such circumstances? Is it that we are “programmed” by thousands of years of forming families in order to survive to perceive our loved ones as children in order to awaken those instincts and reactions that will be necessary when dealing with our own children when they come?

Questions, questions...