Hey! Careful With Those Arrows!

Love is many things, but its quite famous for being blind. That’s right, love is blind! It’s February, and you can be sure that this phrase will be repeated at least once before February 14th, but what does it mean exactly?

It certainly doesn’t mean that love has super-human hearing, or the ability to detect an individual’s heartbeat, as some blind super hero’s exhibit in the comics, or the ability to cut down an opponent by judging where they might stand based on their smell like the legend of the blind swordsman.

If you Google a definition of the phrase, you come up with two basic meanings. The first interpretation is that when a person is in love, they are unaware of their surroundings. As an example: Romeo and Juliet followed some crazy schemes in order to be together. Anyone cold of foresaw their tragic end. Well, you know what they say, love is blind...

The Second meaning refers to a person’s inability to see the flaws in the person they are in love with, for example: I don’t understand what Juliet sees in that love sick hoodlum Romeo, he certainly isn’t very attractive. Well, I guess love is blind.

Whichever interpretation you use, one common theme is quite clear: love is like blindness, and the comparison isn’t very flattering to love or lovers.

As unflattering as the phrase is to lovers, we don’t often stop and think how unfair it is to use such a phrase when we refer to the blind. After all, blindness is just another way to express metaphors; darkness and light, knowledge and ignorance, these are simple figures of speech not to be taken seriously. And, blind people know this as well, don’t we?

These types of phrases are not uncommon. In the same way that love is blind, justice is blind as well. We turn blind eyes toward the truth, and we have been assured that in the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king.

After so many years of blindness being used as a metaphor for unawareness, is it fair to ask if this should still be a comparison we should be making? blind people can lead everyday lives, raise families, grow crops, fish, work, play, own their own business, contribute to their community, sports and academia, and on the other hand, deceive, steal, get in trouble with the law, in short, blind people and their abilities fall all over the human spectrum.

Ask yourself, when a person goes blind, when they start to lose their useful vision, do they start comparing themselves to the blind swordsman, do they start to think that they are now on their way to achieving super-human hearing, or do they begin to despair and start to see themselves like those poor lovers, helpless, unaware, and naive?

For every positive stereotype about blindness out there, there are about 10 negative ones going around. These are the stereotypes which the clients at the Nebraska center for the blind eventually have to face for themselves. Through the time they spend in training, and out of it, they have to question these perceptions of blindness which society holds. They must decide if blindness leads to superpowers, despair, or simply, managing one’s life in different ways.

While our clients are in training, they must learn to navigate their physical environment with non-visual skills, and at the same time navigate through society’s misperceptions and stereotypes about blindness. Sayings such as love is blind, might seem innocent in a conversation, but on St Valentine’s Day, or any other time in which we might say the expression, again, what are we really saying? What do we really mean by love, being blind?

By: Alex Castillo