Who have not experienced love at first sight at least once in a lifetime? Those that deny it, defined as crazy the idea of falling for a person the first time they met. And this notion is not new, the first record of the use of the term “love at first sight” comes from the Greek, that referred to it as: “The madness of the Gods” and used the so famous god of desire Eros—Cupid—to explain how two person can fall in love, darted by his arrow.
So, if love is madness, I ask, how mad is a person that falls in love at first sight?
Researchers at Pennsylvania University determined that the average time in which our brain rates beauty is .13 seconds. How much information can be processed in .13 seconds? It appears that enough to determine who really likes us.
If you think that fact only measures our physical attractiveness and you need more than a pretty face for fall in love, you are right, but you should know that an additional study from The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships demonstrated that the first minutes of relationship determined its future, becoming more predictive about the success of the relationship than what the two people have in common.
Could it be? Maybe that’s why people say “first impressions never lie.” The problem is that people also say “never judge a book by its cover.”
Which one is right? Probably both.
And then is when my dear friends the Greeks come back to the picture. I understood that after endless hours of philosophize about love, Plato came into the conclusion that only a God—as omnipresent being—could see in to the future of a man and see what is best for him and justify the premature amorousness. Or maybe only a God could be so ruthless to punish a man with the disease of falling in love of a woman that will crush his heart.
That’s why philosophy sidestepped leaving love in the realm of the divine along with all those things no one can or want to prove (including me.)
So let’s finish saying that the only thing I’m sure about is that love at first sight exists and I hope that if you stumble with it, will burns as passionate as an erupting volcano and lasts as long as the last star in the firmament.
M. Ch. Landa