Tom's Views

I believe in  and have insisted on the presence of love at first sight (LAFS) in my love relationships, because I’ve found that people   never   grow attractive over time, if they do not appear so in the first moments of first meeting them. Indeed, we should not have to sit and scratch our heads, weighing the pros and cons, and wondering, “Hmmm, do I really desire this woman?” Now we might ponder her trustworthiness that way, as we should; but not her sheer desirability. Love-at-first-sight represents an  instant recognition  on both conscious and unconscious levels, that the beheld woman might be a good candidate for further consideration as a potentially great lover. Love-at-first-sight efficiently considers the following:

• Her bodily shape (a great indicator of health, age, and vitality),
• Her body language (tells if she might be interested in us, her social status, and her overall manner (rough, gentle, sensitive, or oblivious)).
• How she walks and talks (good info on her breading, upbringing, and potential irreconcilable cultural and value differences).
• Her waist to hip ratio (hints at whether she’ll have greater or fewer complications during pregnancy).
• How she smells (tells whether she’s likely to be habitually clean, or dirty, or if she smokes or is diseased)
• How we react to her sexually (a cue as to how sexually satisfying she’ll be in the bedroom).

Now we’d rather avoid dating people to whom we’re not attracted, and love-at-first-sight guides us in this aim. If we only date those for whom love-at-first-sight is strong, we’re less likely to be disappointed once she finally removes her clothes.

Of course, love-at-first-sight cannot reliably be used as the only basis for eternal happiness, because it offers no guarantees. We can’t know for example, if we’ll want to marry someone tomorrow whom we’ve just met today, regardless of the intensity of the love-at-first-sight we feel. Women especially site this limitation as good reason for completely dismissing love-at-first-sight as a useful tool for detecting the most suitable mates. But whoever said that love-at-fist-sight works like a crystal ball? It does not. All it suggests is possibility, and nothing definite.

More specifically, love-at-first-sight is, in my view, a necessary first step in building a long-term fulfilling relationship; especially for males. Men are more likely to achieve maximal satisfaction in love with ladies they initially deem absolutely stunning and thus, where there’s a strong initial attraction.  Unfortunately, women who only move men to feelings of trusting and comfortable friendship will typically never become the highly intriguing or explosive lovers that so many of us are looking for. 

While we can’t know based on love-at-first-sight alone that a relationship   will indeed work out,   we can rest assured that without love-at-first-sight, it will likely fail. Or, if it succeeds, then it will for the wrong reasons.  The relationship born of friendship will have started on those same shaky grounds that will not sure up over time. The presence of love-at-first-sight does not assure that we’ll be able to achieve lasting and gratified intimacy with the candidate, although it helps immensely. It’s hard therefore to imagine couples lasting very long who did not feel love at first sight early in their associations.

Further, by definition, the magnetism of love at first sight appears immediately.  Yet contrary to popular belief, these initial love feelings typically can last indefinitely, so long as the combination of variables that founded love-at-first-sight doesn’t change much.  These include personality, behavior, habits, physical appearance, health, and so on.

It’s interesting how so many women believe that that the shorter the time that love takes to appear, the less substantial it is. Easy come, easy go they think.  But I would argue otherwise — that the more quickly love lust appears (as it does in love-at-first-sight), the greater the chances of the attraction lasting a very long time. You’ve heard the saying that the quicker they fall, the harder they fall. This is so true in love.  My experiences with   [First Love]   make that crystal clear in my mind. I fell immediately, and stayed in love for decades.  Indeed love-at-first-sight began every one of my own long-term love interests. 

So you’ve probably guessed by now that I believe strongly in love-at-first-sight, and recognize how essential a component it is in attaining lasting satisfaction in love.  I would never begin a new love relationship without it.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• The Lovelorn, Antisocial?
• The Pitfalls Of Pity Love
• We Don’t Live Happily Without Love
• Why Resist Love At First Sight?

References

• Love-At-First-Sight   definition on Wikipedia

Love at first sight seems so right for guys.  When I feel it, I so want to immediately get down and boogie with my new fancy.  But many women resist love-at-first-sight; even going as far as to deny its existence altogether.  I personally however, am a love-at-first-sight proponent.  I’ve seen it appear in my love live numerous times through the years.  So for me, love-at-first-sight definitely exists.

However, while there’s little doubt that love-at-first-sight exists universally, women have good reason to resist this quickly-appearing impulse, because acting with abandon can get them killed if they immediately trust a bad fellow.  So, before women should respond to such feelings, they ought to thoroughly vet that new man in their lives, and make sure they can trust him.

Keep in mind that trust is not the same as love, so that while feelings of passionate love can occur at first sight, well-founded trust cannot.  It’s important not to confuse love-at-first-sight with trust, and understand that thought trust at first sight does not (or at least, should not) occur, love-at-first-sight happens all the time.  So for women, love-at-first-sight should be resisted, at least at first.

The lady needs to feel that she can trust the man, not only to do no harm to her, but to stay around to protect and support both her and her children. Again, this type of trustworthiness is difficult to assess quickly. Certainly, it cannot be gleaned within the first few minutes of meeting a potential lover, and so this may be another reason so many women resist love-at-first-sight. For them, the thought of loving someone who hasn’t clearly demonstrated unswerving desire and moral makeup to stand by them and their children, is fallacious. They can’t feel love (or at lest, they should not act on the love they feel) until the safety and welfare of themselves and their children has been assured.

However, once again, men need give much less thought to this sort of trust. Men need not resist love-at-first-sight as cautiously as women.  Fathers are not for example, generally as intimately connected with the child’s proper development as is the mother. A quick scan through the news in fact, shows that the problem of the so-called deadbeat dads far surpasses that of mothers who aren’t doing their fair share at caring for the children. We hear much less these days about “dead beat moms.”  It’s much more likely therefore, that a man will abandon his family than will a woman. So once again, the woman has far more to worry about from men then men do from women; especially if her goal is to raise a healthy nuclear family. It’s no wonder women insist so much more on knowing a man’s “inner essence” than men are of knowing women’s. Men have less to lose by not knowing their mates well, than do women.  Men can afford therefore, to more indulge their love-at-first-sight feelings than can women, who must resist them at first to ensure their safety.

In light of all this, I fear that I’ve wrongly expected women to love me quickly. According to David Buss in his book   The Evolution of Desire, men and women have necessarily very different, and yes, even conflicting sexual strategies. What’s right for one is often very wrong for the other. Women understandably, must take their time. But for men, taking time to select well doesn’t offer the same reproductive advantage. In fact, a man may hinder his chances of reproducing if he spends too much time waiting around for the female or trying to get her to love him before sleeping with her.

Perhaps in my 20s, I’ve been insensitive to the female perspective here. Rightly so because with   [First Love], whom I gave   seven years, all I got for my patience was a mere four months of happy togetherness. For the rest of the period, I carried anxiety and was notably unhappy as she repeatedly turned me away, withholding her love. In this case, if I had moved on after the first couple years, I might have been happier with other women and less wounded psychologically. Waiting for   [First Love]   to “come around” thus, did not pay off for me.  She resisted my love-at-first-sight for way too long.

So it’s reasonable that I came to believe that the lack of immediate reciprocation probably means that the woman will never love me. I don’t like waiting too long because in my experience, the longer a guy has to wait for a lady, the more likely his desires for her will go forever unfulfilled.  As such, having to wait for more than a few months for her to open her arms, is a sure sine to get away, and invest in someone else.  While some resistance of love-at-first-sight is wise, too much of it becomes off-putting.

So, while having to wait very long indicates that she’ll probably never love a particular man, some amount of waiting is still necessary.  While quite young and ignorant of the theories in evolutionary psychology, I may have given up on perhaps hundreds of eligible women, because they showed little or no immediate interest in me. But I hope that with these insights today, I can better weather a new lover’s initial coyness, and avoid viewing it as a sign of prejudice or as a prediction of certain doom.  We’ll see.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Power Imbalance: Blind Man Dating Sighted Woman
• Why Women Resist Love At First Sight

References

• Love-At-First-Sight   definition on Wikipedia