Love, admiration and illusions

I was reading this article on why marriages which last, do. They made an interesting claim, that marriages which go the distance rely on illusions. The people who stay married tend to do so by creating an illusion which lets them overlook their partner's faults. It was an interesting conclusion coming close on the heels of how distraction helps your will power(see previous post). It reinforced a view I've held for a long time, that your mind works by simplifying your surroundings. Your mind is very practical, but your concious cannot possibly take care of all the parameters involved in everything. Your subconcious tends to do some, lets say background work, to help you cope. Maybe these distractions and illusions are examples of our subconcious at work, it's way of telling us that the positives outweight the costs.

Which brings us to love. Interesting thing, most stated cheezy opinions about it tend to say that it makes us do somewhat unfathomable things, things no sane person would do. Applying the aforementioned conclusions, it would seem that love makes us work the same illusions that married people supposed have, illusions to distract us from all that might be negative. That is, obviously discounting the massive chemical and biological things that might underly all this. It seems to be fair to question the logic a mind would have for this. A mind is fairly practical, everyone weighs the pros and cons of everything before deciding, so there's no reason to believe our minds wouldn't either. So, under it all, to love someone, we would have to see some extreme positives to help us develop a justification for masking all the bad things. And this justification, heightened by hormones, would still have to be fairly superlative. But if you look at love in general, not just puppy love, I mean people you like and love for a long time, like family, you'll notice you can see these justifications quite simply. You'll see that one or more thing that make you admire the people you love. Even the people you're friends with, you'll find qualities in them that you admire, qualities you wish you had. And so it doesn't seem too forgone a conclusion that admiration is a cause and justification, if not the cause. Which would explain much of a leader's charm, admiration, it seems, can lead pretty easily to love, or maybe lust too. And it would also explain the reason why people break up. The admiration which lead them to love in the first place, is gone, or probably was not as superlative to begin with, but simply heightened by, well lets call it chemistry.

I like to believe that behind every face, there is this cold practicality, dealing in reasons we may not be aware of. Like when you meet people the first time, you make up your mind pretty quickly whether you're going to like that person or not, first impressions. It seems plausible, and this research suggests, that we look for clues to whether this person has something that would be useful to us, something that we like, and then we create conditions for that logic to prosper, which would make these people amenable to us, and us amenable to them.