Love at first sight. <sigh> Dude, call me a cynic, but it's a really hard sell for me. I believe in attraction at first sight. I believe that you can meet someone and feel tingles that turn out to be love once you get to know that person. But immediate love without any interaction at all? Eh, that sounds like hormones to me. (Not that hormones are a bad thing.)
Maybe the thing that people call love at first sight is some sort of intuition. You know, he has a beautiful smile and laugh lines around his eyes, which means he has a sense of humor (which is hot). Plus, he's of a general physical type that I find appealing. So these general things that predispose me toward attraction and liking get my attention and make me all tingly. And then I get to know him and fall in love. But was it love at first sight? I don't think so.
What has prompted this reflection upon love? A book I picked up (and put back down). Of course. It was about a surgeon who fell in love at first sight with a beautiful supermodel who was in an accident. She was freaking unconscious when he fell in love with her at first sight. As I mentioned above, this is a really hard sell for me, but it can be done by a skillful author. I can buy the immediacy if it is about personality rather than looks. Smile, eyes, expression, body language, something that tells The Faller a bit about personality. Here? She was unconscious. There's little personality to judge when someone is unconscious and injured. It's totally about either appearance or about her vulnerability. Which is either shallow or just plain creepy.
Plus, she's his patient. Hello, the AMA has rules of professional ethics and conduct, and dating a patient is a violation of them.
Maybe the thing that people call love at first sight is some sort of intuition. You know, he has a beautiful smile and laugh lines around his eyes, which means he has a sense of humor (which is hot). Plus, he's of a general physical type that I find appealing. So these general things that predispose me toward attraction and liking get my attention and make me all tingly. And then I get to know him and fall in love. But was it love at first sight? I don't think so.
What has prompted this reflection upon love? A book I picked up (and put back down). Of course. It was about a surgeon who fell in love at first sight with a beautiful supermodel who was in an accident. She was freaking unconscious when he fell in love with her at first sight. As I mentioned above, this is a really hard sell for me, but it can be done by a skillful author. I can buy the immediacy if it is about personality rather than looks. Smile, eyes, expression, body language, something that tells The Faller a bit about personality. Here? She was unconscious. There's little personality to judge when someone is unconscious and injured. It's totally about either appearance or about her vulnerability. Which is either shallow or just plain creepy.
Plus, she's his patient. Hello, the AMA has rules of professional ethics and conduct, and dating a patient is a violation of them.
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Comments
This book had swans on the cover. Don't remember the title, though.
However, while I would have, up until the age of twenty, agreed with you about LAFS - at twenty, it happened to me when I met my husband.
Now, I've had this conversation over the internet before, and it always leaves me grouchy, and with great sympathy for those people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
If you don't believe in LAFS, you have to think that I'm lying, misremembering, or labelling something as 'love' that ought to be called 'lust' or 'attraction'. And then I get annoyed, because I'm fairly sure I know the difference between lust, attraction and love.
All I can say is, that in my experience 'love' is almost a chemical thing happening in the brain - where you've an altered mental state, and an irrational attachment to the person. I imagine it's a bit like taking an addictive drug. Your brain just turns to mush, and this person is all that matters. And it happens over a very short period of time. That's what I mean by 'falling in love at first sight.'
For me, it has nothing to do with consequences. That is, if I'd never seen my husband again, or we'd broken up, or he turned out to be a bad person - for me, that wouldn't mean I hadn't fallen in love. I see it as a physical state, a biological process shooting into action - not as intrinsically good or bad.
And the settled love we have, the married kind, is a different sort of thing. (And I don't believe you have to fall in love with that sudden explosion of hormones or pheremones, or whatever that was, to reach the other kind of love. My sisters didn't.)
At this point, people usually redefine 'love'. And I agree, it depends what definition of 'love' you're working with. But the thing that people mean when they talk about LAFS, that does happen, and it's just not a strong, lustful attraction.
Marianne McA
http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/vie
That strikes me as right, the kind of thing I experienced. Especially the part about obsessively thinking about the beloved. Night after we met, I lay awake all night, going over and over the experience. I never do that.
(Actually, thinking about it, I've only read a very few romance novels where the author gets LAFS right. Perhaps because it is - when you think about it - a bit creepy.)
MMcA
My problem with the "love" that is part of love at first sight in romance novels is the definition of it. Because the definition used there seems (to me) to be the one that includes consequences and the future, all wrapped up in the initial attraction/love/chemical reaction, usually laden with a value judgment that if a love is worthy, it is immediate. And that because it is immediate, it is Right.
I like your view of it, as a physical state, a biological process without inherent value judgment (good or bad). Perhaps it would be better for me to say that I have a problem with the romance version of LAFS, with all of the baggage and shorthand that romancelandia loads?
jmc
And I think where I get grouchy is where people reverse that argument and say 'Because you can't be sure instantly whether it's Right, then it can't have been Love, therefore you're mistaken about what you felt.'
I think what I found interesting last time I discussed this that some posters who didn't believe in LAFS between adults had no problem accepting that you could love your baby on first sight. (Took me ages to love mine. Oldest is nearly seventeen. Some day soon...)
I thought Suz Brockmann did LAFS well in 'Out of Control'. Kenny falls for Savannah within a conversation, but then has to get to know her afterwards. He has a thought somewhere in the book to the effect that when he fell in love, he knew next to nothing about her, so he filled in from his imagination - and in many ways he was wrong. I liked that, because it was close to what my own experience of the process was.
It makes sense to me that parental love might not be immediate, for a whole host of reasons that range from difficult birth to unreasonable societal expectations of women as natural caregivers and nurturers to mixed feelings about parenthood generally.
OOC is one of the Brockmann books that I've only re-read for the Alyssa/Max parts. My problem isn't the LAFS particularly, but the whole Kenny-Savannah dynamic. It read as if they were both in love with figments of their own imaginations, and I was very impatient with both of them.
I think the older I get, the less tolerant I am of LAFS. Love shouldn't be so chemical! You need more!
This, despite my favorite real love story:
My mother's friend met a man in a hotel lobby and they spent a couple of hours together, talking. She was supposed to return home with her mother that evening and he said, no, marry me instead. So she did. They stayed married 25 years until he died (he was about 20 years older but we can just skip lightly over that bit.)
OH, and my father claimed he fell in love with my mother at first sight. He was walking toward her and she sneezed. Apparently it was some sneeze because my father said he told the guy he was with "I'm going to marry that woman."
I knew about a week after I met my husband that he was the one. But that was a full week or so. Okay, maybe a couple of days.
Kate R.
Actually, if love is a chemical reaction rather than just a feeling or emotion, I have a much higher tolerance for LAFS. Cynical much, me?
As a general concept, I don't have a problem with love at first sight. Even if the initial connection is just attraction, the fact that it develops into love pretty quickly is just a continuum in my mind. It's the beginning of love. Makes for a good story to tell the grandkids.
I was reading up on Mark Twain yesterday, and his Wiki says that he fell in LAFS with the photograph of his friend's sister. After two years of courting they married.
I completely agree with you, however, that a Dr. who gets all gooey over a unconscious and injured woman, supermodel or not, is really icky.
Lyvvie
I think my discomfort is two fold. First, the definition of love that is part of LAFS. Is it the initial thunderbolt love that wears away, becoming something more once the characters have gotten to know each other? Or do they have the deeper/forever thing immediately? I find the second version very hard to believe in at first sight.
And second, I think Romancelandia uses LAFS as a shortcut -- if the characters are already in Twu Wuv, then the plot can move on to more concrete things...instead of actually developing their feelings and relationship.
LAFS followed by two years of courting -- that is the sort of romance that I'd like to read, rather than LAFS followed by an elopement to Vegas. I always expect to read about a divorce not long after that...but I'm a cynic, despite my romance reading, so maybe it wouldn't end that way.
~jmc