Love may be blind,
But to find it, twenty-twenty vision is a big help
Hampered with rather poor eyesight (with my good eye it’s a stretch to read the third row down a Snellen Chart), I’m perhaps a little more aware than most when it comes to the ocular difficulties of others around me. Wherever I find myself I can usually sniff out one or two similarly afflicted souls
In my mid-twenties, as a fresh-faced, freshly minted IT consultant, I found myself passing through a few different companies in the course of a year. And in each one I quickly found the office Moley.
And, encountered in rapid succession, something about them suddenly struck me. They were all at least a little, er, odd.
Which bothered me more than somewhat. After all, I’m one of them. So is that true of me too?
Seeing the visually impaired
Running back over my life to that point I managed to put together a list of around two-dozen people I’d met with seriously dodgy minces. My yardstick for this list was people whose eyesight was so bad they couldn’t drive a car. Their afflictions ranged from the purely ocular – massively short sighted, albinism, extreme colour blindness or RP – through to more wide ranging birth defects and conditions afflicting other parts of the body and mind.
In the conventional, social sense, a handful of them were starkly odd. Most though were just a little odd, not enough to be singled out or shunned but very much on the outskirts of social normality, often quiet, a little unconventional and a little socially withdrawn.
Then, something even more disturbing struck the testosterone-fuelled twenty-something me.
Of those 24 people, only one was married.
Seeing the pattern
For sure there’s a flaw in my analysis. I’m going off the two-dozen people I’d identified as sharing my serious vision problems but there could have been many more of them who, behaving in a totally normal way, had managed to evade my net.
Nonetheless, based on my observations, there was a stark pattern here. Almost all the people I knew with serious vision problems were to some extent socially maladjusted and almost all of them were loveless.
And yes, in fairness, so am I. I wouldn’t consider myself in the “starkly odd” category but I’d certainly say “quiet, a little unconventional and a little socially withdrawn” just about sums me up.
Why?
Seeing the light
Fortunately the penny dropped pretty quickly for me and I do believe I understand this. It comes down to one, very simple thing.
Body language.
And, most notably, eye contact.
In those early stages of our development, when we start to interact with people more, become more aware of those around us, when we start school, fundamental aspects of our personalities form as a result of those interactions with the people around us.
On a subliminal level you know something’s wrong but you don’t understand it. Even if someone told you, you still wouldn’t fundamentally understand it. You’re just aware that something isn’t quite right.
It seems to me that under these conditions a child’s development can go one of two ways. You either close in to some degree and become a little more guarded and cautious around people (which from my unscientifically gathered pool of research subjects would seem to be more usual) or you overcompensate to some degree, becoming somewhat overconfident in yourself without adjusting fully to the society around you. This seems to fit in with the fewer, more starkly odd souls I’ve run in to down the years.
It’s interesting to note that the one guy I met who had RP – a degenerative eye complaint that wouldn’t have afflicted his childhood – was one of the more normal and well-adjusted seriously visually impaired people I’ve encountered. In spite of the severe limitations of his eyesight at that time he was one of the most proactively sociable.
And I wonder too, for just how many of those starkly odd seriously visually impaired people, were their eyesight problems a symptom of another underlying problems or in fact the sole cause. I know that for one or two of them their vision difficulties were a result of something broader, but human nature has a nasty tendency to tar them all with the same brush.
Seeing the end
Other than a few crumbs of comfort gained from self-knowledge, this conclusion doesn’t offer much help for the lovelorn Mr. Magoos amongst us.
One of the biggest reasons I have few encounters with strangers or strike up conversations with women I don’t know, is that I naturally avoid situations where I’d make eye contact with people. My nature is to avoid face-to-face contact with the people around me. This isn’t a naturally anti-social thing, but I believe simply a behaviour I learnt as a child to avoid awkward situations where I’m risking not returning eye-contact or responding to eye-contact that wasn’t there.
I’ve also long been aware that while I’m a comfortable conversationalist in a group of two or three, I tend to become near silent in larger groups. And again I’ve come to understand that it’s the inability to respond to visual cues that makes those situations awkward for me. If you met me in a group of three you would come away with a totally different impression of me than if we met in a group of say six or eight.
I’ve tried consciously to conquer this from time-to-time by purposefully looking at other people and deliberately taking a lead in connecting with them, but doing so fights something deeply ingrained in my nature. Without that conscious, positive effort, I always revert to my normal, quiet avoidance.
So I guess it’s back to the shelf for me. But hey, at least I understand a little better why I’m there, and how to get off it if I really want to.