by Pheori

Created on: August 28, 2009

You lock eyes from across a crowded room and exchange smiles. You stare as you feel your heart racing; your mind is reeling as you glimpse your future together in one brief moment. You can see your future home, your future children... your future beagle. You are compelled and drawn to this person you've never met. You make your way through the sea of people so that you can begin your life together.

Love can take many forms. Love between friends, love between family members, love for your fellow human being, love for your partner and love for your favorite things in life among others; in some languages there are actually different terms for each type of love. The phrase love at first sight implies a mutual and immediate attraction and affection and is usually used in conjunction with the term soul mate. There is no guarantee that the connection you feel upon seeing a stranger will be reciprocated.

When you've developed a relationship through its various stages and are committed to the person you've chosen to spend your life with, it's easy to look back at the memory of your first meeting as love at first sight and as the day that you found your soul mate; it's such a romantic notion. While it's true that you can have a very strong attraction for someone when you first meet them, there is no guarantee that they feel the same way. If you are lucky enough to meet someone who does feel the same way, you will begin a courtship that may either end in disaster or your ultimate bliss.

We humans are very emotional beings, we can choose to remember things consciously such as subjects we're studying in school, or we can remember things unconsciously because they've been linked to a strong emotional response. The powerful attraction your felt for your partner the day you met each other has left its emotional mark in your mind. When you look back on that memory, your view can be a bit skewed by the initial emotional response, and the emotion you experience while recalling the memory.

On one hand, you can spend 50 years with a person and have an overall happy experience in your life together; when you look back you can safely say that it was love at first sight because you've had a good run and you made your relationship work through the good times and the bad. On the other hand you can have a rough go, perhaps ending in divorce, and this might cause you to recall the initial meeting in a very different light; you were blinded by your attraction, it wasn't meant to be, and you should have seen the flaws right from the beginning.

A strong emotional and physical attraction can, and quite often does lead to a healthy and mutually satisfying relationship filled with love and happiness along with some possible struggles along the way. But, love at first sight is a purely romantic notion that has no factual basis.

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