Hi, I am here to ruin beautiful stuff for you.
There is nothing more beautiful than love! And what’s the most enchanting, the most romantic, the most magical kind of love? Love at first sight. That’s exactly I would be ruining for your displeasure today, by telling you that it’s likely a misconception.
Everyone has that one friend in their circle who comes to every get-together with their partner, makes googly eyes at them (the partner), and tells everyone how their love happened at the first sight. Most people listen intently, half happy and half envious and some roll their eyes, as if to say “oh please! don’t act like you are an authority on love!”. If I were at such gathering, I would tell the couple and the others how love at first sight can’t actually happen and would then proceed to present solid evidence to bolster my claim. It’s a good thing then that I am not invited to such parties … or have any friends for that matter.
First things first – terminology. How do we define “first sight”?
Scientists have found that human eye can process a scene in a timespan of as little as 13 milliseconds. Even if we took the “being aware of the scene” part and round up the number, it comes to be less than 100 ms. Is that the length of “first sight” then? Probably not because when most people describe their love at first sight moment, they play a little video of their eyes meeting the other person’s eyes, a spark coming on their retinas, a smiling flashing across their faces, and maybe even violins playing in the background. All that can’t happen in 100 ms! Surely, “first sight” is just a figure of speech and what it really means is the timespan from the point when you first lay your eyes on someone to the point when you got this feeling of fondness for them in your heart (well, actually the emotion processing center of the brain but you know!). And how long is this parameter? I think it can be several minutes, hours, days or maybe even longer. But let’s take the best possible scenario and say it was just a few minutes and you liked the other person almost instantly.
* Disclaimer: By using the word “sight”, I mean no discrimination or disrespect towards blind people. In this piece of writing, I talk about the concept of loving someone at the first instant you “experience” them, be it through sight, hearing, touch, smell, “sixth sense” or whatever.
Now, how do we define “love”?
Whoa! This will open a philosophic discussion! If the humanity has no definite answer to it after more than 2000 years of debate, surely we won’t find it any time soon. Plus, love is such a subjective feeling that everyone has their own definition. But for the context of this article, let’s consider the elements that most people will agree with – caring for someone, being happy in their happiness, putting their need above yours, mutual trust and respect. Of course, different people will put different weightage to this parameters.
Why love at first sight is a misconception.
The first sight is but one moment (short or long). In your first sight of someone, you can capture nothing but just get a “gut-feeling” about someone. This feeling is usually based on the other person’s looks, clothes, and how they are behaving in that moment.
Many people you see for the first time and have a good gut-feeling about will never reappear in your life. So, you have no idea if your gut feeling was right or not.
Of those who would venture in your life, only a fraction might be of the suitor category, someone whom you can fall in romantic love with and think of spending your life with.
Of those, you would likely to spend more time with to get to know them.
And of those, it would be just 1 (or maybe more but a really small number nonetheless) whom you would fall in love with. And that’s when you probably would assign the tag “love at first sight”. But it’s only after the fact.
Most people don’t decide to do something thinking it was a bad idea. At the time of decision, they weight their options and make the best decision they can using their mental faculties. Only when the outcome of the decision is known can they say if the decision was good or bad. Of course, sometimes people knowingly choose the wrong thing at the moment of decision making but then they never claim that it was a good decision.
When calling our relationship “love at first sight”, we forget about all those forks in the roads that didn’t work out, for example, those great first impressions that never developed into love because (a) we never saw that person again, (b) we decided to not pursue them for some reason (going after someone else or not being ready for relationship at the time), or (c) we hung out with the person but the relationship ended poorly.
In psychology, there are a few concepts related to this. One is called the “hindsight bias” or the “I-knew-it-all-along bias”. It’s when people look at some past events and say “see, I told you” or “I knew it all along” even though the events could’ve turned out very differently. Only after knowing the outcome of something they claim to have known it already. It’s like when after a cricket match of the Indian national team, my sister used to say “I knew they would lose today! Anyone who loses the coin toss, loses the match!”. Another is called the “confirmation bias” where we choose the case(s) that supports our theory but ignore the other cases (i.e. the forks that didn’t happen)!
And of course, it might also happen that we fell in love with someone of whom we didn’t have a good first impression or had only an “ordinarily” good impression. You would think that we wouldn’t claim a love at first sight in this scenario but some of us do. Why?
Through the books, plays, movies, folk legends, and other art and culture stuff, most of us humans have come to romanticize romance and love. We want the origins of our love stories to be like Romeo and Juliet (we don’t want the same end though, of course!). We want our love stories to be grand, flawless, and worthy of being turned into movies. And we don’t get them, we convince ourselves that our love-stories are not as humble or ordinary as they seem. So, we believe in romantic concepts like “love at first sight” or “soulmates” (topic for another rant of mine?).
Believe it or not, I have been in love … with a person who is kind, who shares a lot of my passions, has a life philosophy similar to mine, and who inspires me to be a better person everyday. Still I know that our relationship is far from perfect (whatever “perfect” would be). We have our fair share of flaws. And I also know that the relationship didn’t happen momentarily. It took years to build. When I look back to the moment of us laying eyes on each other, I see nothing magical. Hold on … I was just trying to look back on that moment and realized that I don’t even remember it. I remember the moment we bonded for the first time, the moment of first kiss and such, but I can’t remember the moment of the first sight. Huh!