William Shakespeare famously wrote, “When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.” As the father of one of the world’s greatest love stories, Romeo and Juliet, this guy had to know what he was talking about. The sequence is too familiar: two pairs of eyes meet on the subway, on the street, across the library, and registered on each person’s face are mutual levels of awe, bliss, and…love? This description of love as something that can happen at anytime, with any stranger, gives us a sense of hope, a feeling that love is a force greater than ourselves. The idealized concept of love at first sight has come to define what we think love to be and what we hope we will find ourselves. However, this illusion of instantaneous love, in my humble opinion, is nothing but a myth.
Think about it. What is love really? When you love someone do you love their image, or who they actually are? And is it really possible to determine who someone is with a mere glance? It is not that a connection cannot be made with a single look, but that connection is not love, but rather attraction. In meeting or seeing someone, you quickly create a first impression of them, which includes mostly surface information, such as their appearance, how they talk, etc. In the case of love at first sight, the first impression that you make of someone causes you to feel a very strong attraction to him or her. So why do we tend to confuse this cursory first impression with love? The reality is that we are a culture that bases a lot of its decisions, opinions, and feelings on appearance alone. It happens all the time: Oh I love your dress! I am absolutely in love with Ryan Gosling. We are conditioned to associate love with things that we find appealing, and as a result people (like poor Ryan Gosling) become objects of our affection rather than human beings whom we actually care for.
The truth is that it is easy to love people from afar. We believe love to be this illusion of movie screen perfection when in reality, it isn’t that easy. When we get close enough to genuinely understand someone, when the illusion of mere attraction is shattered and is replaced by a flawed reality, and yet we still feel a connection, that is love. Love means accepting and adoring all of a person, the secrets, the imperfections, the quirks—none of which you pick up in your first impression. The concept of love at first sight creates the false expectations of a perfect love story, which prevents us from understanding the real thing. No love is perfect because no person is perfect. If we keep making our decisions about who we love like how we decide if we love an outfit, how meaningful can that love be? As such, it is time that we stop viewing love as something we can find in a matter of seconds and realize that it is something that requires much more time and depth.
But maybe it has actually happened to you. You have lived William Shakespeare’s impossible proclamation of love and you have found your soul mate in one cursory but extremely meaningful glance. Many people would dismiss my hypothesis about love at first sight and claim, No one believes in love at first sight until that special someone comes along and changes everything. Yet, despite my lack of experience with love at first sight, I still stand by my belief that it is indeed a myth. However, I do not doubt that love can develop from a chance meeting or exchanged glance between two unsuspecting strangers. Victor Hugo once said, “Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only,” and I believe that he is correct. Everything begins with that first look. There is no doubt that a connection can be made in mere seconds, but love, that real can’t live without each other, dizzying, and all consuming feeling, only comes with truly knowing a person. There is no telling how many looks, conversations, dates, days, or years it will take to get to understand someone, but Hugo wasn’t lying when he suggested that it all begins with that first sighting. Believe what you want about love at first sight, but recognize that when it comes to the real thing, love is much more than a first impression.