Love at first sight


Love at first sight is a personal experience as well as a common trope or stock convention in literature: a person or character feels an instant, extreme, and ultimately long-lasting romantic attraction for a stranger upon first seeing that stranger. Described by poets and critics since the emergence of ancient Greece, falling in love at first sight has become one of the most common tropes in Western fiction.

Historical conceptions

Greek

In the classical world, the phenomenon of "love at first sight" was understood within the context of a more general conception of passionate love, a kind of madness or, as the Greeks put it, theia mania. This love passion was described through an elaborate metaphoric and mythological psychological schema involving "love's arrows" or "love darts," the source of which was often given as the mythological Eros or Cupid, sometimes by other mythological deities. At times, the source of the arrows was said to be the image of the beautiful love object itself. If these arrows arrived at the lover's eyes, they would then travel to and 'pierce' his or her heart, overwhelming them with desire and longing. The image of the "arrow's wound" was sometimes used to create oxymorons and rhetorical antithesis.
"Love at first sight" was explained as a sudden and immediate beguiling of the lover through the action of these processes, and is illustrated in numerous Greek and Roman works. In Ovid's 8 AD epic, Metamorphoses, Narcissus becomes immediately spellbound and charmed by his own image, and Echo also falls in love with Narcissus at first sight. In Achilles Tatius's Leucippe and Clitophon, the lover Clitophon thus describes his own experience of the phenomenon: "As soon as I had seen her, I was lost. For Beauty's wound is sharper than any weapon's, and it runs through the eyes down to the soul. It is through the eye that love's wound passes, and I now became a prey to a host of emotions..."
Another classical interpretation of the phenomenon of "hunger at first sight" is found in Plato's Symposium, in Aristophanes' description of the separation of primitive double-creatures into modern men and women and their subsequent search for their missing half: "... when ... is fortunate enough to meet his other half, they are both so intoxicated with affection, with friendship, and with love, that they cannot bear to let each other out of sight for a single instant."

Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque

The classical conception of love's arrows were elaborated upon by the Provençal troubadour poets of southern France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and became part of the European courtly love tradition. In particular, a glimpse of the woman's eyes was said to be the source of the love dart: In some medieval texts, the gaze of a beautiful woman is compared to the sight of a basilisk.
Giovanni Boccaccio provides one of the most memorable examples in his Il Filostrato, where he mixes the tradition of love at first sight, the eye's darts, and the metaphor of Cupid's arrow: "Nor did he who was so wise shortly before... perceive that Love with his darts dwelt within the rays of those lovely eyes... nor notice the arrow that sped to his heart."
William Shakespeare pays a handsome tribute to Christopher Marlowe, who himself wrote "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" in his 1598 poem Hero and Leander, by citing him the next year in As You Like It: 'Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: "Who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight?"'.
These images of the lover's eyes, the arrows, and the ravages of "love at first sight" continued to be circulated and elaborated upon in the Renaissance and Baroque literature, and play an important role in Western fiction and especially the novel, according to Jean Rousset.

Psychological conceptions

Research has shown two bases for love at first sight. The first is that the attractiveness of a person can be very quickly determined, with the average time in one study being 0.13 seconds. The second is that the first few minutes, but not the first moment, of a relationship have shown to be predictive of the relationship's future success, more so than what two people have in common or whether they like each other.
Infatuation, not to be confused with love at first sight, is the state of being carried away by an unreasoned passion or assumed love. Hillman and Phillips describe it as a desire to express the libidinal attraction of addictive love, inspired with an intense but short-lived passion or admiration for someone.

Occurrence in literature and the arts

Biblical references

Opera plots must be condensed to fit their rendition in music and are thus highly suited to plot lines in which the principals fall in love at first sight. Often, this moment inspires composers to unusually fine music. Abundant examples include: