I had an interesting dialogue today about following your heart or your mind in the matters of the heart. My belief is that we must follow both; there must be a careful balance in order to achieve a healthy attachment. I ran across this article that I thought summed up this discussion perfectly.

LOVE IS BLIND It all started with a collection of my hurt and dismayed patients who thought they had the best partner, only later to discover that they had either overlooked or minimized significant problems. I was in the habit of asking them to look back on the early stages of their relationship and tell me if they could see any signs of these problems. Invariably, they said yes. Haven’t you wondered why so many people overlook issues and differences in their dating relationships only to have them plague their marriages years later? You are dumbfounded when your friend forgives her boyfriend (or his girlfriend) for that destructive and repeating pattern of behavior that everyone else can see… but then it happens to you. You become struck by love and everything blurs. Not until after a breakup (or sometimes after the wedding) does the light bulb come on, and then you feel really stupid because all those warning signals you ignored in the beginning of the relationship seem so clear in hindsight. Why is it that love is blind?Two reasons emerged when I asked my disillusioned patients why they did not pay attention to those early warning signals. Combined, they capture the essence of what causes the love is blind syndrome.First, many said, “If I only knew then what I know now.” They lacked the head knowledge of what to look for in a prospective partner. It is not surprising that most of us are greatly misinformed about the characteristics that predict marriage-material, seeing that few of us have ever been formally taught about relationships. Our classrooms have been our families, friends, romantic movies, trashy novels, and our own trial and error experiences. While some of you gained clarity on this subject from matriculating through these courses, most have become more confused and apprehensive. As my curiosity deepened I started digging through the annals of research on love, romance, dating, mate selection, and predictors of satisfaction in marriage. I read more than a thousand articles, dozens of self-help books, and endless writings from popular magazines. I had taught advanced marriage and family graduate coursework and was well aware of the plethora of research on the premarital predictors of marital happiness. I pored over these studies and found that most of the predictors grouped into five categories:• Compatibility potential, including the balance between the similarities and differences of personality, values and interests between you and this person. In other words, how you “fit together.”• Relationship skills, including communication, openness, conflict management and resolution, and others.• Patterns from other relationships, including both relationship patterns from other romantic and non-romantic relationships.• Family patterns and background, including the quality of parental marriage, the family’s expression of affection and emotion, development of roles, and interaction patterns.• Character and conscience traits, including the emotional health and the maturity of conscience.The first two categories are fairly obvious and likely to be identified and understood early in a new relationship. The other three, however, are more subtle and usually remain hidden for much of the premarital time. It was these three categories that were most often referred to as being overlooked by my dissatisfied and reflective patients.The second reason that these patients minimized crucial signs of problems was summed up in a phrase I most often heard them say while sighing- “I guess I was just too much in love.” Rather than lacking an understanding of their partner, they experienced an over-developed emotional attachment that resulted in a severing their head from their heart. Embedded in this latter reason were thoughts like “things will get better,” and “I know this is a problem but he/she loves me, and that is all that matters.” I refer to this as a lack of heart knowledge.We can laugh when we see this kind of over attachment in popular television programs about singles because we relate to them. But the sobering reality is not funny at all, especially if you’ve been in a series of relationships that felt like true love but ended up as anything but.