Amy Says: Absolutely
I am a cynic when it comes to love. In fact, I’m downright suspicious about it. I find it hard to believe how couples can be so infatuated with each other. I just don’t get it.
So when friends used to talk about meeting ‘the one’ and ‘knowing’ from the second that they laid eyes on the poor chap, I was usually the girl who was making comedic puking noises in the background.
Love at first sight was a ridiculous idea. “Nope, not buying it!” I would think when a love-struck friend would describe (in explicit detail) the second her eyes locked with her beau’s for the first time.
“It just can’t happen!” I’d scoff.
But then it did happen. To me.
I had spoken to him before, but this was technically our first meeting. It was lashing rain, I was rocking the drowned-rat look and felt completely miserable as I walked down Anglesea Road. Then I rounded the corner and saw him coming towards me. And our eyes locked.
And I will be cheesy and admit that it felt as if a bolt of lightning had hit me full-force (the weather was so dismal, I had to check and make sure that a bolt of lightning hadn’t actually hit me).
I felt a rush of emotion towards this person who I didn’t really know and it’s hard to explain it, but I knew that we’d end up together. And we did. In fact, the two of us have been inseparable ever since that day.
People may say that they don’t believe in love at first sight but then it happens to them and they quickly renounce their old cynical ways. Trust me.
Michelle Says: No Chance!
The notion of love at first sight is as old as the hills. It’s been around ever since the Greeks wrote of ‘Theia Mania’ – madness from the Gods that would overcome fictional heroes and heroines upon sighting the object of their affections. Through the centuries and across the globe, this idea, of an instantaneous and unbreakable affection with a stranger as soon as eyes meet, persists.
It remains however, as it did in Greek Literature, a concept that belongs in fiction. ‘It was love at first sight’ is the opening line to one of the most celebrated books of all time, Catch 22, and the same line also forms the refrain for one of Kylie’s catchiest hits, (try and tell us we’re not cultured…).
But in reality, love is much more complicated that someday looking upon one, and knowing he’s the one.
Love is… not a super cute cartoon. Love is complicated, messy, wonderful, hideous, heart-breaking and life-changing, but most of all – it’s a journey. And the road is, for most, a long one with many twists and turns in the plot.
Women who expect to be thunderstruck by simply gazing in to the peepers of he-who-shall-become-Himself are expecting way too much. There’s beauty in a slow-burner. Those initial butterflies in the tummy that say that over time give way to the feeling that wherever that person is, it’s home – that’s just magic.
Anyway, most people nowadays meet in pubs or clubs, and if you really think that the old cliché of ‘eyes met across a crowded room’ applies in Coppers while the DJ spins the third Nicki Minaj tune of the night – then all I’m saying is you need higher standards.
To get that frisson, that spark, that feeling that anything could happen – the very second you meet a person? That’s just amazing and oh-so-lovely, but it’s not love. So to hold out for love at first sight? Well that just makes you blind, to the beauty of falling slowly.
