Do you have to know a person well to be in love?

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What you have is infatuation. Infatuation is a great and wonderful thing, and it can lead to love, but it more often doesn’t.

Our minds are wonderfully plastic. If we don’t know something, our minds will come up with a ‘best guess approximation’ of what that thing is and why it’s there. Infatuation is the inborn programmed predilection to do this to the nth degree in the pursuit of sex and babies.

What we’re “best guess approximating” in this case is the wonderful traits of another person. It’s a giant biological kick in the pants, forcing you forward into possibly hostile territory. You really don’t know what’s out there. Bears, snakes, bottomless pits, problems committing, intimacy issues, past traumas.

If you’re lucky, you come out on the other end of it and you’re still with that other person, on reasonably good terms.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of lovers in the world. Those who can take imperfect circumstances and reify a sense of wonder and delight onto those circumstances. And then those who take imperfect circumstances and work hard to change them to become more perfect.

The point of all that is to say, you can’t not have imperfect circumstances. Our lovers never match us completely, and will never be able to. At some point, you just have to make a decision about the imperfection. The mind hates it, and that’s why a lot of couples fail to make it through. There’s always this nagging sense of “it could be better,” until you’ve had enough experiences to be able to tell that voice that it’s being stupid.