“I just saw him and thought, that’s it, that’s the man I’m going to marry.”
For my mum, it was love at first sight. Thirty-four years later, she’s still dedicated to that same man that grabbed her attention at a seminar back when she was a twenty-three year old hippy in the seventies.
However, despite this fairytale romance enduring both the ups and the downs of the last quarter century, not everyone is such a romantic as my mum. This includes, as it happens, my dad. For him it took a few dates, rather than a few seconds, to realise that he’d met The One. But that still fits in with the fantasy rather more than most modern relationships. Today, 42% of marriages in England and Wales end in divorce and there has been an increase in the number of marriage breakdowns of couples in their fifties or sixties. But this evidence does not counter the notion of love at first sight, merely the idea that this love will be eternal. Is there no space for love at first sight in our modern world? Has the freedom that we now have, the choice to marry whoever we want, rather than who we should marry, driven away that lightning bolt feeling to make room for something more realistic, more secure?
And if that is true, if we now search for something safe, something that we can rely on, knowing that it is us who has to make this relationship work, as opposed to clinging together desperately for the sake of society or family reputation, then is there anything wrong with that? I don’t want to deny the existence of love at first sight; like many other young women, I adore the idea that one day I will meet somebody’s gaze across a crowded room and that would be it. That would be the moment that I realise I’d met the person I’d spend the rest of my life with. But that notion has risks; love is not all you need to hold a relationship together or to successfully work through everything that life throws at you. You need a connection, a personality click.
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Perhaps it would therefore make more sense to call it lust at first sight: to be aware of an instant attraction between two people. But somehow, the way my mum tells the story of how she met my dad, it doesn’t seem to be lust that she means. Lust might make it clear to you that at some point very soon this man will end up in your bed, but does it make it clear that he will also end up in your heart?
If one is not so naïve as to allow the notion of love at first sight to take over one’s search for true love, then perhaps it is ok to accept the idea as possible. If you don’t let it damage your love life by discarding any man with whom you have not had that electric feeling of knowledge that he is The One, then hoping for this fairytale should not be something to be ashamed of. We can hope for those fireworks and that instantaneous love, as long as we enter into that relationship aware that you need more than just that to make it work. Perhaps, therefore, it is not completely stupid to live by the words of one of the greatest victims of love at first sight:
“So it’s not gonna be easy. It’s gonna be really hard. We’re gonna have to work at this every day, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, for ever, you and me, every day”- Noah, The Notebook.
Photo Credits: http://www.panhala.net/archive/Rails%20-4.jpg, www.geekyrant.com