"Whoever said love is blind is dead wrong. Love is the only thing that lets us see each other with the remotest accuracy"
About this Quote
Martha Beck flips a tired proverb on its back and, in doing so, exposes how convenient that proverb really is. “Love is blind” has always been a chic alibi: it lets us blame attachment for bad choices, excuse red flags, and keep cynicism dressed up as wisdom. Beck’s counterclaim is more bracing: love isn’t a dimmer switch on perception; it’s corrective lenses.
The intent is quietly radical. She’s not praising delusion or romantic intensity. She’s arguing that most “accuracy” fails because we approach other people like problems to solve or risks to manage. In that posture, we reduce them to categories: attractive, difficult, useful, disappointing. Love, as Beck frames it, interrupts that mental shorthand. It widens the frame long enough to register the person as a whole, including contradictions. The subtext: detachment is not neutrality. It’s its own bias, often powered by fear, status anxiety, or the need to stay superior.
Her phrasing also sneaks in a humility check: “remotest accuracy” concedes we never fully know another person. Love doesn’t grant omniscience; it grants better faith. That small qualifier saves the line from sentimentality and plants it in the real world, where attention is scarce and misreading is constant.
Context matters: Beck’s work sits at the intersection of self-help, spirituality, and psychology, a lane where “love” is less a Valentine’s Day feeling than a practiced way of seeing. She’s making a cultural wager that the opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s the cheap certainty of thinking you already understand someone.
The intent is quietly radical. She’s not praising delusion or romantic intensity. She’s arguing that most “accuracy” fails because we approach other people like problems to solve or risks to manage. In that posture, we reduce them to categories: attractive, difficult, useful, disappointing. Love, as Beck frames it, interrupts that mental shorthand. It widens the frame long enough to register the person as a whole, including contradictions. The subtext: detachment is not neutrality. It’s its own bias, often powered by fear, status anxiety, or the need to stay superior.
Her phrasing also sneaks in a humility check: “remotest accuracy” concedes we never fully know another person. Love doesn’t grant omniscience; it grants better faith. That small qualifier saves the line from sentimentality and plants it in the real world, where attention is scarce and misreading is constant.
Context matters: Beck’s work sits at the intersection of self-help, spirituality, and psychology, a lane where “love” is less a Valentine’s Day feeling than a practiced way of seeing. She’s making a cultural wager that the opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s the cheap certainty of thinking you already understand someone.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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