This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at UFL chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

You feel it upon the first glance—it’s an instant spark, that immediate clench of the heart followed by a radiating heat in the tips of your ears. You bite your lip, trying not to smile—play it cool, play it cool, your brain says. Look at them, talk to them, compliment them, your heart says in ecstatic opposition.

It’s love at first sight—what else could it be?

The trope is endearing: to know your destined other half in the first second of conversation, or even as soon as your eyes meet theirs.

It’s also a fairytale, I must regrettably admit. For what else is there to base your attraction for the other person upon other than their physical state from just the first moment?

Unfortunately, that’s simply the definition of lust, not love, even though so many desperately imagine it to be.

It’s understandable; the trope has been popularized from romantic novels and most Disney princess movies we grew up with as children. However, I would disagree with the trope’s purity. It does a dishonor to the true definition of love, something that takes a lot more time to feel than from only the length of a quick passing glance.

A Love Letter to You

When I first read the play in high school, I immediately despised Romeo and Juliet—as a play, not as a movie, not in any form—because it was absurd. For Shakespeare to spoil the tale before the play even started, my high school self took it only as a warning: falling so quickly in love would only end in tragedy. The play was a vow to the bitter inevitable, not some profound, sorrowful display of love between two individuals.

I understood the play differently than my peers. I thought of the contrast as me housing a unique, unorthodox perspective. That is, until I saw a scene from the children’s TV show Steven Universe. In Season 2, Episode “Love Letters,” the character Jamie, an infatuated mailman, confesses his love to the character Garnet, asking her out on a date. Garnet declines for multiple reasons, but her specific response has stuck with me to this day: “Love at first sight doesn’t exist. Love takes time, and love takes work. At the very least, you have to know the other person.”

I saw that, and I remember thinking, Yes, that is exactly it! That is how I feel!

Garnet voiced what I had known for years: love is not an emotion that can be cultivated within seconds. It is something that takes much longer than the length of one conversation.

Love at true sight treats love as a destination, a feeling that one arrives at after an easy decision or a single trip of the heart. It is not. It is a state of constant highs and lows where, more often than not, it does not feel like love. It feels like conflict: sitting on your bathroom floor rereading texts. It feels like regret: never wanting the next morning to come, wishing the present could last forever. It feels like frustration: arguing over the little things that you will forget about years later, but that feel so monumental in the current moment.

Love is ultimately an amalgamation of thousands of tiny experiences that house their own mixture of emotions. Love is something beautifully complex and intricate—it can’t be grown between two people in a single conversation, much less the first exchanged look.

The Patience in Respect

There is some dishonor in the trope itself. While its sentiment is thoughtful, in reality, it’s disrespectful to the other person. When you claim to be in love at first sight, you are admitting that what you are attracted to is surface-level, and therefore, your feelings are shallow—disingenuous, even if flattering.

There is a care in genuine love, one that takes time.

I like the analogy of a letter. If it was written carelessly, the handwriting will clearly appear messy. The words will be rushed, and the language will be blunt. One written with care, on the other hand, will be much more pleasant to read. The writing is consistent, the tone of the writer shining through clearly.

The latter takes more time, though both have the same sender address. Both were mailed and flown across the country to be given to the same person.

If you were to receive both, however, it’s obvious which letter you would come to care for more.

Love Starts as a Seedling

Instead of dismissing the ‘love at first sight’ trope entirely, approach it with a new perspective: understand that what you may feel at first sight is based on physical attraction only.

Admitting that you are physically attracted to someone is not as awful as society sometimes stigmatizes it to be. It only becomes distasteful when we let it cloud our entire judgement towards how we view the person—that is infatuation.

Awareness solves half the problem. The next step is to then cultivate the relationship with honesty, patience, and respect. This is important: you should not place them on a pedestal nor reduce them to their looks.

You lack information about what they are like as a person, so learn who they are with genuine interest. That is when love truly begins to grow out of sincerity.

A Lifetime’s Commitment

Love feels so big compared to every other human feeling because it is. Ultimately, it is a mosaic of every single emotion, experienced alongside another person across a prolonged length of time. As cliche as it may be, love is a journey, not the destination.

And so, it being instantaneous is a paradox. To love means to live and living takes a lifetime to fully experience, and even then it sometimes can’t contain the entire journey.

Lust at First Sight

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