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Every relationship begins with the meeting of two people who feel the pull of attraction. As that relationship matures, your memory of the actual details of your first meeting inevitably starts to fade, but those details can also start to shift. Do you even remember exactly how you and your partner met? Has it all become fuzzy, or perhaps distorted by how the relationship has played out over the months or years? New research by University of University of Groningen’s Florian Zsok and colleagues (2017) on love at first sight, or "LAFS," suggests that sharing your memory of first meeting with your partner can help you regain some of that passion that drew you toward each other.
The Dutch authors begin with the observation that “In Western countries, approximately every third person reports having experienced [love at first sight]”. The chances are good, then, that you’ve had at least one LAFS episode in your life and the chances are even higher that this is the person with whom you're currently in a relationship. That LAFS episode becomes, according to the Groningen researchers, a central theme of the story you and your partner tell and retell about each other over the course of the relationship. If you've lost a grip on that theme, their research suggests, you can benefit from reconstructing it your partner. The four little words, then, are "love at first sight," and by asking your partner how he or she felt at your initial encounter, you can get back to those passionate sensations you once had toward each other.
The key idea for the importance of remembering your first joint encounter comes from the proposal by Zsok and his fellow researchers that LAFS is a “positive illusion” that couples create. This illusion can continue to inspire them over the course of their relationship as they focus on the grand romantic themes that unite them. Over time, your illusion can grow and feed on itself. As you rework the details of the events that brought you together, the LAFS illusion can become a “confabulated memory that adds meaning and uniqueness to the relationship” (p. 2).
Most people in a long-term relationship do believe that it all started with LAFS. There is, though, a small but important minority for whom an LAFS experience didn’t lead to a subsequent relationship. Zsok and his associates were curious to find out if LAFS is actually a distinct entity from true love and intimacy, rather than only a memory bias that couples create out of their initial encounter. If they could identify episodes of LAFS that didn't lead to a long-term commitment, it would suggest that LAFS is a form of love that differs in important ways from the kind that grows and matures over the course of a relationship.
They believed that LAFS, whether separate from true love or its own entity, involves a strong dose of physical attractiveness. Knowing nothing about the person you feel an instant connection with, you can only go by this person’s outward appearance. If you feel sexually drawn to a person you first meet, this in and of itself can trigger what they call eros, or passion. Is this passion, though, like the kind that couples in long-term relationships feel toward each other?
To investigate the differences between LAFS and true love, the Dutch researchers created simulated first-meeting events in an online study, a lab study, and three in-person dating events involving strangers meeting in a bar. There were 396 participants averaging 24 years of age; most were heterosexual, but the design was tailored to their actual sexual orientation. The online study involved a simulated speed-dating situation in which participants viewed six faces (either same or opposite sex) while imagining they were meeting those individuals for the first time. The lab study involved a similar procedure except that participants saw 9 instead of 6 faces.
The researchers asked participants to complete questionnaires that tapped into their feelings of LAFS, physical attractiveness, and the three components of the triangular theory of love—intimacy, passion, and commitment. An additional measure tapped into eros, or passion, independent of the love scale items. LAFS items included, for example, “I am experiencing love at first sight with this person.” Getting a score of above 5 on a 7-point disagree-to-agree scale indicated strong LAFS feelings toward the individual whose face they saw, or whom they were meeting in the bar. Participants also rated their attraction to, and love toward, their current partner if they were in a long-term relationship.
The findings indicated that in both the experimental and dating settings only a small minority of participants reported feeling drawn to a stranger. Only 32 participants reported a total of 49 distinct LAFS experiences in response to the online or face-to-face people they were seeing or meeting for the first time. Importantly, among people already in a relationship, reports of LAFS were far higher, with about one in three stating that they had fallen in love with their current partners immediately upon meeting them.
There were a few interesting tidbits from this study regarding the role of physical appearance: Those who reported a LAFS experience in the online and dating scenarios did so with partners whom they found attractive, but there were large gender differences — women found men they met in the dating scenario to be more attractive than the men whose pictures they viewed online. The photos all included people who smiled. Oddly enough, smiling in a man's photo might have been a turnoff for women. The moral of the story: If you're a man and you want to be viewed as attractive on a dating website, you may want to take on a more somber appearance in your headshots.
Another intriguing finding related to unrequited instances of LAFS. Of all who reported LAFS in the dating scenarios, none were in turn the targets of LAFS directed toward them. The authors interpreted this result to suggest that mutual LAFS is actually quite rare, which “contrasts with the positive romantic ideal that is typically portrayed, for example, by Disney movies” (p. 11). Love at first sight, in other words, can be far crueler than we are led to think by Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.
This tendency for one partner to feel LAFS toward another who doesn't also suggests what happens in real relationships. One possibility is that the partner who truly experiences LAFS uses this feeling to jump-start a longer-term relationship with the non-LAFS partner. Once the relationship blossoms, both start to reconstruct the narrative so that the LAFS was actually reciprocal.
Now let's look at what LAFS actually might be. As it turns out, it's not love at all. People rarely reported LAFS, as you might recall, and when they did, it was not associated with a single element of love or even eros. When you met your partner, it's likely you felt excited, exhilarated, and even psychically connected, which provided you with a readiness to experience the feelings that will carry you through to a longer-term relationship. As you and your partner construct and revise your personal fable of togetherness, that strong initial attraction becomes only stronger and more idealized over time.
With these study's results in mind, let's return to those magical four words to bring back that initial exhilaration and excitement. Just ask your partner to describe his or her "love at first sight" feelings toward you, and share yours toward your partner. Reconstructing that personal fable, as the authors conclude, “is associated with experiencing more love and passion in the relationship." Returning to that memory is a process that can only enhance your fulfillment over time.
References
Zsok, F., Haucke, M., Wit, C. Y., & Barelds, D. H. (2017). What kind of love is love at first sight? An empirical investigation. Personal Relationships, doi:10.1111/pere.12218
