The first deception is obvious. We fall in love and the other person becomes radiant. Their flaws become endearing quirks. Their silences become depth. Their habits, even the annoying ones, carry a kind of charm. We are constructing a version of them that serves our happiness, and we do not even know we are doing it.

The second deception is crueler. When disappointment arrives, when the gap between who they are and who we imagined them to be becomes impossible to ignore, we swing to the other extreme. Now their quirks are irritations. Their silences are neglect. Every small failure becomes evidence of a fundamental deficiency we should have seen from the start. We are constructing again, this time a version that justifies our disappointment.

In both cases, the real person is somewhere in between. Not as wonderful as we first believed, not as terrible as we later decided. Just human, complicated, trying.

Camus wrote this in his twenties, and it reads like something that takes most people decades to learn. Loving someone authentically means resisting both deceptions. It means looking at the person beside you and choosing to see them clearly, not as everything you imagined or nothing you hoped for, but simply as who they are. And deciding that is enough.