4 Replies to “Do You Believe…?”

  1. If only we had a buffet of words for the nuances of love, as do the Greeks! I think debating the concept of ‘love at first sight’ is an exercise of futility as long as ‘love’ is so undefined.

    Do I believe in infatuation at first sight? Absolutely. Infatuation requires irrationality; it’s an intrinsic necessity. This is the stuff of celebrity crushes.

    Do I believe in [a feeling of] love at the first sight of one’s child? I concede it could be possible, but I can’t identify with it. The newcomers were a novelty; too much a stranger for much beyond ‘fascination at first sight’. (And nobody in the world is cute at one day old, anyway.)

    Do I believe in romantic forever-love at first sight, à la Hollywood? No. Forever-anything requires reasoned consensus in one’s mind, and reasoning takes more than a moment. My first sight of would-be-Husband was such a non-event for me that I have no recollection of it. I later concluded I’d have first seen him at the train station, and had been walking from the station to work with him for days before I realised he was the same guy who sat in the cubicle across from me. (Another colleague would walk with us, and I’d be so engrossed in talking with her that I didn’t pay much mind to the quiet guy on the other side of her.)

    1. A thoughtful answer! I agree: infatuation only takes a moment; but you can’t truly love someone you don’t know.
      Although I have heard one believable lyric on the subject: “I already love you and I don’t even know who you are” – addressed by a father (Bruce Cockburn) to his unborn child. Mind you, the title of the song, Little Seahorse, supports your not-so-cute theory…

  2. I fell in love with MrC sort of at first sight. More, at first listen. We met while in separate cities and our phone conversations melted my heart. By the time we met in person six weeks later, we both knew we were forever, but had not admitted it to one another in case the other didn’t feel it and it would be awkward.

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