When I was thirteen, I babysat with a friend at her neighbor’s house. Tacked to the front of the family’s fridge was a photo of a blonde-haired boy about our age. It was love at first sight.
It wasn’t just that this boy was gorgeous in that dreamboat, my-bangs-fall-in-my-eyes-and-I-don’t-even-care kind of way. It was something more—a cosmic connection, the opening of a new and important chapter in my life, I was sure. I still remember his name: Chris Kalmbach. (If you’re out there, Chris, please Facebook me.)
Of course, what I felt gazing at the photo on a stranger’s fridge was not love; it was attraction that led to a short-lived, albeit memorable, infatuation. Which begs the question, does love at first sight really exist? And if so, can you fall in love with a representation of someone, for example, an online profile? In this brave new dating world of eHarmony, Facebook, and Google, what if your first “sight” is virtual?
Love or Lust?
Your eyes meet across a crowded room and it’s an Emeril-style, “Bam!” Minutes later, you’re all googly eyes and weak knees. But is it love, or just animal attraction? When Lauren Carnighan spied the most gorgeous guy she’d ever laid eyes on at a party in college, she thought she was seeing her future. “That is what I want my husband to look like,” she remembers thinking. They dated for a while, but ultimately, she says, the guy she had pegged for the father of her unborn children was a “complete letdown,” not to mention a horrible hook-up. She realizes now what she had felt was lust, not love, and even that fizzled.
Filling In the Blanks
As a self-described realist, Allison Moss doesn’t believe in love at first sight. True love, she believes, is “when you know all of the good things and bad things about a person and still love him.” If you can get all that from a glimpse across the bar, then you’re a psychic. She does believe, however, in “intuition at first sight.”
