Do I believe in love at first sight? Of course I do.
What if we all do, but our brains have become automated to talk ourselves out of it before we even register what we’re feeling?
Stay with me, skeptics—I want to deconstruct this a bit.
For a start, I think many of us are so prejudiced against the idea of love at first sight that you might have assumed I was talking about falling in love with a person. How about if the same principle is equally transferable to things, or places?
Right now, I’m in Mumbai; I fell in love with this city within seconds of arriving. I knew right away this is somewhere I wanted to be, to learn more about, to experience. I was in love with Paris even before I was ever there (and again, more thoroughly, on my very first visit). I felt the same way about Nice; I visited once for a day, and moved there several months later. I followed through on every one of these loves; the stakes were arguably as high as loving a person, and they were deeply significant chapters of my life.
I don’t think falling in love with a person is any different. Just like these places were foreign to me at first, a person is a stranger to us upon first meeting. We’re not falling in love with who or what someone is—we can’t possibly know that until we actually get to know them. What we’re falling in love with are possibilities, and that tells us something very important about what we want for ourselves.
So when we fall in love at first sight, what we’re really falling in love with are our own ideas, our own capacity to dream. And I don’t think that is so far-fetched. Whether we grow to actually love the person as we get to know them is another matter, but that’s not to invalidate the love that we initially feel—whether directed inwardly or outwardly, rooted in reality or imagination—when we meet someone for the first time.
Then I think we get caught up with the idea that the love in question has to last or go somewhere. So, naturally, it seems preposterous to fall in love with someone based on first appearances. If we let go of these expectations, we could fall in love constantly and without fear. Because, surely, that’s what stops us from falling in love: caution. Caution that it might not work out, that it might not be what we thought it was, that we might get hurt, that it might not be reciprocated.
Why are we afraid of losing what we don’t even have yet? I personally love easily and constantly because a) I love to love, and b) I’ve found that the more I let myself, the closer I become to myself; and that every heartbreak is, in fact, a heart opener. I get hurt, of course—I’m hurting right now, as a matter of fact—but it’s a cleansing pain that will pass, and leave me better for it. Loving more has rendered my heart elastic, where it used to be fragile. I used to get shattered a lot more, for a lot longer, before I realised how much expansion loving brings me. That the love was not about the other person to begin with, rather my innermost desires and shadows; so what does what I love tell me about myself, and what I need to work on?
This extends, too, to platonic love. Actually, my capacity to love isn’t contingent on a romantic development—that is far rarer, although it does happen. Non-romantically, I very rarely meet someone whom I don’t find loveable in some way—although I’ve learned that in many cases, I don’t always have to get closer to those people, and it suffices to love from a distance. Simply loving in passing is also a great practice; frequently reminding myself how much there is to love about one another offsets how much—perhaps too much—there is to abhor, particularly in this age of relentless bad press; so it helps to focus on the love part.
Opening my heart has only ever caused me real, corrosive pain when I closed it again; allowing myself to love frequently and openly connects me deeper to other people and to myself, and to discovering all the possibilities I would have missed otherwise.
All this to say: maybe we’re closing ourselves off to love at first sight because we think it has to be one thing, and missing all the other things it could be. That maybe it’s less about loving others and more about loving ourselves—and an opportunity to examine our willingness to do just that.
Or, you know, maybe we meet the love of our lives and recognise them at first sight. I believe that too :)