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Love & Lust

Do you believe in love at first sight?

Results so far:

Yes
62% 1310 votes Total: 2129 votes
No
38% 819 votes

This is a very interesting question to be asked. My instinct response, if I was asked this few years back, would be YES in capital letters. Now that I am few years older and no wiser, my answer would be another question: do we believe in love and does it really exist? One may jump in protest for this may be a distraction from the original question. This is granted but worth mentioning to establish the perspective from which my answer to the question was initiated. This is also to explain why I have voted NO while the answer that may be derived from my article could be contradictory with my vote or appears to be so.

Now, if we may revisit the question with the assumption that love does indeed exist and we are limiting ourselves to non-platonic love between partners, we need to establish what does the non-platonic love consists of in order to answer the question about the possibility of love from first sight. We may all agree that non-platonic love has sexual desire and attraction as part of it. It can go as strong as lust or as simple as it will do satisfying sex', but in the end sex is an element. As sex is concerned we can make the observation that while we get excited by models and common understanding of beauty we often desire sexually people within our reach or within our circle as defined socially, by age, by profession, etc. This brings me to the second element of non-platonic love: social definition and settling down.
We cannot help dreaming once in love about settling down, forming a partnership, being secure for life in the relationship we identify as love. This is part of our social animal instinct and social pressures. In contrast, sometimes we fall in love with whom is perceived to be wrong choice. Not wrong socially, intellectually or in any practical sense but wrong because it is not accepted within the circle for one reason or another, e.g. from a competing family with reference to Romeo and Juliet. This can be established as the third element of love, identifying ourselves often in protest to other images of self society, family or associates try to stamp on us.
With these three elements of love, is love from first sight possible? The answer is yes. If the question is how, the answer would be our animal instincts to establish ourselves (element 3), spread ourselves and pleasure (element 1) and social definition and security (element 2). Is that love or does love exist? It is indeed a question to be asked and it is for another occasion to be answered.

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Yes

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