Transcription
Why do some people swear that they've experienced love at first sight with their partner? Is it real love or is there something else going on underneath the surface? Let's break it down.
Before I get started, I'd love to hear, have you ever felt like you've experienced love at first sight? Let me know down in the comments.
Before we get into love at first sight, let's review very briefly what love typically refers to in psychological literature. Per Sternberg's triangular model of love, which I cover in a lot more depth in the connection course, consummate love, which is like romantic love between two people that contains all the components of love, involves intimacy, passion, and commitment. Passion can definitely exist when you feel a powerful sudden attraction towards someone you've just met. Intimacy can occur on a first interaction if you end up really going deep with someone, but it's not necessarily a reliable indicator of long-term intimacy because in one interaction, you could go really deep with someone and it just be love bombing, for example. And commitment, obviously, is not present when you first meet someone unless you can completely lock in with someone that you don't know very well at all, which I wouldn't particularly recommend. So, at least per this model of what constitutes love, no, it's not really consummate love as we conceptualize it when someone says they've fallen in love at first sight.
So, what is it then? Essentially, it's romanticized lust at first sight. You feel this instant attraction towards someone and you attach certain assumptions to it. For example, let's say that this person seems to you, based on how you observe them in that very brief interaction, like maybe they're a quiet intellectual or a funny life of the party. But really, you don't know them very well. The former could be a party girl, the latter could be a depressed introvert. You really have no idea because people do sometimes, you know, wear different hats in different contexts. Someone could be presenting as really funny in this particular interaction or on this particular day, but otherwise they could spend 90% of their time just, you know, introverted at home, very quiet. So, you're making certain assumptions about people that you don't necessarily know are true because you don't know this person.
Love at first sight involves a lot of idealization. These beliefs that this is a perfect person, that they're perfect for you, so on and so forth. Idealization in the early stages of dating, I would say is pretty normal and healthy. And even later on in the relationship, I would hope that you think that your partner is just the bee's knees, the most wonderful person you've ever met. They should be your favorite person. But in the very first interaction with someone, it's unfortunately not really rooted in reality if you make all these assumptions about them. Cuz again, you don't actually know this person. And you certainly don't yet have an established relationship with commitment, trust, respect, kindness, reciprocity, even if it seems like you do based on like a 5-minute interaction or maybe even 2-hour interaction. Anyone can fake it for that long.
The feeling of love at first sight involves a neurochemical cocktail that sometimes happens when you feel a very intense attraction to someone from the beginning. You get a lot of dopamine, which is the happiness neurotransmitter, and you're suddenly flooded with this just good feeling. Then you also get a lot of oxytocin, which is the connection hormone. It's the same one women get flooded with during childbirth, during breastfeeding. Your brain is sending you the signal that you need to connect with this person, you need to attach to this person, you need to lock in. And this is likely an evolutionary adaptation meant to increase our chances of procreating. Because if you think about it, if you meet someone, you suddenly feel a lot of attraction towards them, if your brain convinces you, I must attach to this person and this person makes me happy, which you interpret cognitively as love, it makes it more likely that you're going to sleep with that person and maybe have babies.
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Now, back to the topic. What sometimes confuses people about this concept of love at first sight is it's not always the most attractive person in the world. So, it's like, how could it be lust at first sight? There's a more attractive person over there, but I feel this sudden pull towards this person. What people are strongly attached to is rooted a lot on their past experiences. Someone who's wearing the same perfume as the first crush that you had, like your first grade teacher or something. Someone who seems to have a personality or an appearance that matches an ex you never got over. Someone who fulfills an unconscious psychological need for you. You know, when I was a kid, um this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I used to feel that love at first sight feeling a lot, and I'm very conscious of the reason now. It was a certain look that certain people gave me. It was this look of suddenly seeing truly knowing me, deeply seeing me for who I was. Cuz as a child, when you're going through all these identity issues and you just want to be invisible at school, and your self-esteem is in shambles, and you feel like maybe other people in your life don't really truly know or see you, even a split second of someone looking at you in that way where it seems like they see something about you, they can see sort of deep into your soul, it can feel like your entire being depends on that. And it's very easy to misinterpret as love, when really what you're dealing with is an unmet psychological need, or a feeling, the feeling of being seen, the feeling of nostalgia, the feeling of déjà vu. These are really powerful moving feelings that if you're suddenly feeling attracted towards someone and you feel one of those feelings at the same time, it can feel like, "Whoa, this is like sparks flying. This is love at first sight."
But sometimes, it is a very attractive person that you feel love at first sight towards, and that makes sense because of the halo effect, which is that we tend to ascribe positive traits to people who are highly attractive. Like we tend to assume highly attractive people are more intelligent, kinder, more competent, any positive trait that you can think of, really.
Now, sometimes you'll see couples who lasted the test of time saying, "I knew the moment I laid eyes on her that she was the one." Or "It was love at first sight." And that can be a little bit destabilizing to hear cuz it's like, "Oh, so I guess love at first sight really is a thing." If you're hearing this from couples who made it or survived long-term, you're listening to an asymmetrical segment of the population. The couples that didn't last long term, that did experience love at first sight, they're not the ones telling you about that cuz they've moved on to other relationships. And if you were to ask them about it, they might tell you that hey, I actually made some faulty assumptions about that person or actually it was lust. I don't know that I actually really loved them looking back on it. Or there were certain things that I didn't really like about that person and once the idealization wore off, that became very obvious.
Now, that doesn't mean that people who experience love at first sight can't have it turn into a beautiful long-term relationship. Of course they can. You know, like when I think about meeting my husband, the night that we first met, there was something about him that I just felt very magnetizing to the point where I actually took a video of the back of his head. It was like an artistic video cuz he was like filming a music video. There was just like smoke in the shaft of light and I, you know, took this video of him from behind. And actually even before that, I remember I saw his account popping up on Instagram. I was like, "Whoa, who's that? He's cute." But it doesn't mean that our long-term relationship success was necessarily caused by love at first sight. There was instant attraction for sure, but our long-term success is probably more linked to compatibility and good relationship skills than the initial attraction.
Now, there is an exception to the rule here and that is that sometimes people do truly see each other right away in those initial moments. It's almost like your soul kind of recognizes their soul. Maybe some sort of gentleness in their gaze, a cultural similarity that you know is probably going to be very compatible with yours. And in some cases, those assumptions that we make about people turn out to be true. But it's still not love yet because you again don't really know that person. You don't have confirmation that like this is just this is really who they are. You're just kind of guessing. You have maybe like accurate discernment combined with an intense attraction, but it's still not quite love yet.
Aside from Sternberg's model, which is just very simple, you know, that consummate love includes intimacy, passion, and commitment, there are other components to love as well. To me, when I think about how do I define love, the first thing is it's this feeling of I know you well, and I really, really like who you are. And that requires emotional intimacy, which gradually builds over time as trust deepens. So that as a person reveals more aspects of themselves rather than just the persona, as Jung called it. It also requires compatibility of values. Because we tend to like people who really match our values. Like you wouldn't like someone who's really rude if kindness is a really important value to you. So that's one thing, I know you and I really, really like you.
I know what's best for you. When you love someone, you don't wish for something bad to befall them. You don't pray for their downfall. You don't try to hurt them on purpose. Instead, you try to consider their well-being when making decisions. What restaurant would they enjoy going to, not just you. Would it hurt their feelings if you flirt back with your coworker? Should you stand up to them when your family members disrespecting them? And even if the relationship becomes untenable, you don't suddenly want to hurt them just because they're not with you anymore. Someone once told me that if you ever stop loving someone, I'm not sure that you ever really loved them. And I'm not sure if I can entirely agree with this, but I do sort of agree that in the relationships that are most characterized by love, breakups tend to be amicable. Because if you truly love someone, you don't suddenly want to hurt them. You still value their well-being. Um and sometimes when that's not the case in really ugly breakups, I think the reason for that is because maybe they were in love at some point, and that completely ended. So that's the second component of love.
Another component is I want to spend all my time with you. I once asked a friend of mine what made him fall so hard for a girl that he was hung up over, because I just I didn't really see it. I was like, he seems like really, really smitten, and I don't really get why. And he couldn't pinpoint anything specific. He just said, "I don't know. I just want to spend all my time with her." When you find yourself wanting to increase the frequency with which you see someone, and it's not just about the initial spark, but a genuine enjoyment of being in their presence as you learn more about who they are, that's love. But, all of these things can be platonic, too. You can really like and know your mom. You can want what's best for your best friend. You can want to spend more time with the friends that you love more than the people you're not so close with. So, what turns something from love to being in love? For many people, that's simply the element of physical attraction and passion, and also exclusivity. I want to share my life with you in a way that is deeper than the way I share my life with anyone else. Like, you can have as many friends as you want that you love, but most of us truly only want exclusive access to being in love with a romantic partner.
In conclusion, love at first sight is largely a myth. What's actually happening is intense attraction or lust combined with certain idealized assumptions about that person. We are evolutionarily programmed to feel a surge of happy connected feelings with someone we're strongly attracted to because it theoretically increases our chances of reproducing with them further on. We also tend to idealize attractive people more, but not always. Sometimes, we idealize a person based on an unconscious need that we perceive them to fulfill or a heightened emotion that we feel at the moment when we meet them. When people in happy long-lasting relationships say it was love at first sight, they give too much credit to the initial attraction. Their longevity is probably a lot more related to compatibility and relationship skills than the initial spark that they felt. In order for something to truly be love, you have to truly know someone and like them for who they are, which is not possible if you've just met them. Sometimes, our assumptions about a person might be right, in which case we can come to love them, but it still doesn't mean that we already loved them when we didn't yet know them.
Don't forget to check out Educated for top-tier sex and intimacy courses. Thank you for watching.
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