This may be an unpopular opinion. A specific movie scene I can think of where love at first sight is spoken of is the scene in "Good Will Hunting" where Robin Williams’ character tells Matt Damon’s character about how he met his wife. He saw his future wife and just knew that she was the one.
He even gave up his World Series ticket so that he could stay in the bar and spend hours talking to her. It worked out for him, and they were happily married until her death.
Despite this scene and other stories of how other people “just knew” from the very first time that they met their partners, I have a very hard time believing that love at first sight is a real thing.
I could look at someone and think that they are attractive, and I could talk to them and feel the butterflies that you feel when you have a crush on someone, but I don’t understand how people can simply look at someone or meet them once and fall in love with them.
I, personally, am very attracted to personality, much more so than anything else. This means that I have to know someone for at least a little while before I decide that I like them. Maybe I’ll think that a guy is cute, but then he turns out to have a crappy personality and isn’t very nice to everyone. It doesn’t matter that he was attractive the first time that I saw him; his personality would automatically make him unattractive to me.
In a world with Tinder and other forms of online dating (I admit that I do have a Tinder, not that I ever use it), so much is determined by appearance. Many of us swipe left and right based on how attractive a person’s photos are, yet except for a few sentences, we know absolutely nothing about these people. This ties back into love at first sight. If you fall in love with someone the very first time you meet them or decide that they are “the one” that you had to go and talk to just from looking at them, aren’t you just initially falling in love with their appearance?
When people speak about how they fell in love at first sight, it almost always begins with “they looked so beautiful/handsome, beautiful smile, etc.” Had they been less physically, attractive, would you have even made a move on them in the first place? Do people fall in love with personality at first glance or meeting, or does it really come down to their outward appearance? Even if you find love on Tinder, the reason you swiped right in the first place is probably that of their appearance.
I like knowing stupid things like what someone’s favorite color is or what their favorite book is. I want to know what makes them happy and unhappy and what their favorite movie is. I want to know if they like to be outside and what they are afraid of. A lot of times, learning these things about people takes more than one meeting.
I need to fall in love with who a person really is, not who I think they are. First impressions can be important, but they aren’t everything.
I understand that a lot of people believe in love at first sight, and I won’t try to make anyone believe anything otherwise. It simply isn’t for me.
