You See What You Expect: Love Is Colourblind in the Wrong Way

There's a myth most of us carry about dogs — that they see the world in black and white. Shades of grey, no colour, a dull monochrome existence. It's repeated so often, so confidently, that it has become one of those facts nobody checks because nobody needs to. The truth is more interesting: dogs see colour, just differently. They see blues and yellows clearly. They miss reds and greens — those wavelengths simply don't register. Not blind to colour. Blind to *specific* colours, while seeing others with perfect clarity.

I thought about this for a long time after I read it. Not about dogs. About people.

Because I have sat across from enough couples in my clinic to know that this is exactly how most of us love — not blind, but selectively sighted. We see certain things with extraordinary precision. The way he remembered your coffee order after one date. The way she laughed at exactly the right moment. The warmth, the charm, the beautiful surface. And we miss, completely, the things right in front of us that we are simply not calibrated to see: the contempt disguised as a joke, the control dressed as protectiveness, the emotional unavailability styled as mystery.

The question isn't whether you can see. You can. The question is which wavelengths you've learned to register — and which ones you've spent a lifetime filtering out.

I know a version of this intimately. Not from a textbook. From a marriage to a man who had everything — the face, the confidence, the gift of making you feel like the only person in a crowded room. I was not naive. I had a psychology degree and a clinical internship and an entirely misplaced confidence in my own perceptiveness. I saw what I saw: someone extraordinary. What I could not see — what I was not yet built to see — was the structure underneath it. The way charm can be a hunting strategy. The way being chosen by someone magnetic can feel so much like love that you don't notice the cage going up around you until the door is already closed.

We don't fall for people we can't see. We fall for people we see *selectively* — and we fill the gaps with imagination, with hope, with the story we most want to be living.

This is not stupidity. This is neuroscience. The brain is a prediction machine. It takes incomplete data and renders a complete picture, using pattern recognition and past experience to fill in the blanks. When you meet someone new, your brain does not gather neutral evidence. It generates a hypothesis — *this person is safe*, *this person is exciting*, *this person is different* — and then it filters incoming information to confirm that hypothesis. This is called confirmation bias, and it is not a character flaw. It is how all human cognition works. It just happens to be catastrophically unhelpful in romantic contexts.

The red flags you missed were not invisible. They were simply outside your current spectrum.

What changes this is not trying harder to be objective — you cannot think your way out of a neurological process. What changes this is time, and friction, and the willingness to stay in discomfort long enough for your eyes to adjust. Every relationship therapist will tell you the same thing in different language: the early months of a relationship are not evidence of anything except chemistry. The real data comes later, when the projection wears off and you are left with an actual person — not the story your brain wrote about them, but them.

The dogs who can't see red aren't wrong about what they see. They're just missing a frequency that would change the picture entirely.

Most of us have spent years in relationships missing a frequency. Sometimes it's learned — you grew up somewhere where anger was love's vocabulary, and so aggression registers as passion and gentleness registers as boredom. Sometimes it's experiential — someone once weaponised your trust so completely that warmth now triggers alarm, and alarm now reads as safety. Your calibration is not random. It was built, carefully and unconsciously, by every relationship you've ever had.

The work — the actual, unglamorous, necessary work — is not finding the right person. It is adjusting your spectrum. Learning to see what you've been missing. Learning to sit with the discomfort of not immediately knowing what something means. Learning that the feeling of *certainty* in the first month is not evidence of compatibility — it is evidence of how good your brain is at telling itself stories.

I am better at seeing now than I was at thirty.