I was reading an article today at work on my lunch break, and it was saying how love blinds us. It said that love can make you blind, quite literally.
There's this guy at Florida State University that did a survey. Well anyway, he and some of his collegues asked 57 students in heterosexual relationships to write about occaisions when they felt extreme love towards their partner. Another 56 students wrote about feeling extreme happiness.
The students then viewed 500 microsecond flashes of 60 photos, comprising equal numbers of highly attractive and average looking guys and women. As the faces disappeared, they had to rapidly identify shapes that appeared on the screen. It was pretty much a measure of their subconscious visual attention to the photos.
Well anyway, to make a long story short, students primed with thoughts of love took significantly less time to identify shapes after viewing an attractive face of the opposite sex, compared with those who had written essays on happiness. It was as if being in love meant that they were repelled, rather than grabbed by attractive faces.
He was basically saying that this study could possibly explain why people in love don't seek out other mates.
I thought it was a great article.
