It was explored by the ancients Greeks, pondered by Chaucer and Jane Austen, debated ever since Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and featured time after time in movies such as “West Side Story,” “The Godfather, “Gone With The Wind” and “Sleepless in Seattle.”
Is love at first sight real? If so, does it happen even a fraction as often in real life as depicted in film and novels? And is there a special ingredient that just lands out of nowhere on a chosen few while eluding the rest of us? The truth on all counts is a lot closer to “no” than it is to “yes.”
While science and psychology can point to occasional examples that appear to bear out the idea, the overwhelming evidence shows that love at first sight is more fantasy than fact.
“The feelings can mimic what love is, but, typically, without some passage of time, love at first sight is better described as attraction at first sight,” said Mike McCall, senior instructor of psychology at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. “Love at first sight can feel like love at that moment, but is it the same thing as love? Is it going to be a long-standing attachment? Is it something that’s going to be returned?”
Trying to equate real-life claims of love at first sight to marriage, divorce and breakups in general make the idea even more puzzling.
Dr. Susan Albers, a psychologist with the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, reported in February 2023 in an online article for the clinic that “[o]ver 60% of individuals indicate that they have felt love at first sight at one point in their life.”
She explained that there are three components to true love: intimacy, passion and commitment.
“Love at first sight is only one aspect of the triangle, which is passion,” she said in the article. “If you think you are experiencing love at first sight, it’s important to pause and make sure it’s going to be a lasting connection.”
Dr. McCall further explained that love at first sight doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the endurance of relationships.
“Love, marriage and divorce are not perfectly correlated with each other,” he said. “People who experience love at first sight may not always get married – just as people who marry may not always stay together, even if they love each other. Just because one person fell in love at first sight doesn’t mean that the partner experienced the same feeling.”
He further added that it is almost impossible to reconcile the high reports of love at first sight with the high number of divorces. For example, the National Center for Health Statistics reported a divorce rate of approximately 34.7% in 2021. And the American Psychological Association said in November 2023 that “more couples are divorcing after age 50 than ever before.”
“Divorce rate statistics are tough to nail down because they don’t tell the whole story about who and why divorce is happening,” Dr. McCall said. “It is possible to love without marriage, marry without love, marry with love, divorce with love, divorce falling out of love and separate and never count as a divorce statistic.”
So where does that leave love at first sight as a recurring attraction?
Consider the following examples:
• The Real One – John Knox. In a 2019 story for the University of Georgia school publication The Red&Black, UG geography professor John Knox recounted the following: While searching for a graduate school to attend in 1988, he wrote an open-ended letter to the University of Wisconsin and received a long reply from a graduate student named Pam. Knox arranged to meet her on a campus visit to discuss the matter, but when he arrived at the place, he saw someone sitting at a table drinking wine. That someone was Pam and … “it was love at first sight.” They have been married since 1991.
• The invented one – Sleeping Beauty, 1959. This Walt Disney film is hard to beat for its classic portrayal of love at first sight. Though the film’s villain curses Princess Aurora with the promise that on her 16th birthday, she will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die, a good fairy ensures that Aurora will only fall into a deep sleep until a kiss from her true love awakens her for the happy-ever-after ending.
Both of these examples – the true one and the fictitious one – have one thing in common: a rare experience that most of us will never know.
“To really love is to accept the idea that your heart can be broken,” Dr. McCall said. “I definitely think our view of love is going to continue to evolve; however, I think one thing that won’t change is humans being drawn to the feelings of new attraction’s excitement. Once we give the initial spark enough fuel, space and air, that’s when attraction can turn into the full fire of love.”
By L. C. Leach III
