It is often asked if love at first sight is possible. Love is certainly possible. Adopting an attitude by looking at a person or having a short interaction with them is possible. So love—presumably an attitude in our heads (bodies?)—should be something that could come to exist in this way, right? So why is love at first sight thought to be puzzling in a way anger at first sight, admiration at first sight, or belief at first sight aren’t?
We can see why love at first sight is particularly puzzling, and its very possibility something we can reasonably doubt, by investigating the attitude many of us have towards common declarations of love at first sight. We—at least at some level—don’t want to take them at face value. We are skeptical. We think that, probably, the “lovers” are confusing love with some other attitude. Maybe it is mere strong liking, or infatuation, or attraction, or some kind of affection that falls short of genuine love. Love, it seems, is something over and above these things. These things might lead to love, but love seems to be both deeper and more significant than them.
Love is a big deal. It is something you can carry your whole life, something you have between long-term partners, towards your children, family, and friends. Something often seen as one of the most important things in life. So, if love is to be a genuine response to something in the world, it should be a response to a big deal, too, something deeply significant about the person. And looks, and whatever one says during small talk, do not seem to be significant enough.
One might doubt that love requires anything big in its object. Maybe you could just come to love someone for no prior reason, as Harry Frankfurt has famously argued. You are simply hit, as if by Cupid’s arrow. Or perhaps you could have it for reasons having to do with attractive qualities of the object. Either way, love at first sight should not look puzzling on views like these. But it does, at least for many of us. It is also difficult, on views like these, to see how we can distinguish love from other positive attitudes such as strong liking and attraction.
Alternatively, some, such as Niko Kolodny, have argued that love is a matter of history, a history that you lack in the case at issue. Love at first sight, on this view, is problematic because a condition on love is the presence of some kind of relationship between the parties, and this relationship is missing in the case of love at first sight. The problem is that it becomes unclear how people can be in themselves worthy of love on a view like this one. Just consider someone who is not in a relationship with anybody—a loner. It seems that they are still worthy of love; they do not have to wait to be in a relationship with someone to be (finally!) deserving of love.
My preferred solution, which is very simple, is to say that there is something deeply important already there in the very first encounter with another person: the person themselves. Being a person, a distinct individual, is a big deal. Individuals are unique, irreplaceable beings. This looks big enough to justify something like love. This suggests a view of love for persons that I will put in a slogan form: Love is the affirmation of the reality of another person.
Suppose a view like this is on the right track (even if some technical work might be needed to spell it out). If love is that sort of thing, this is something we can in principle get in a short period of time. A genuine love at first sight would have to involve a certain orientation whereby one (following Iris Murdoch) really looks at the other person and appreciates their existence. This typically happens over a certain period of time, but it doesn’t have to. It also typically happens in romantic contexts, but it doesn’t have to. You might come to love someone at first sight in a way that involves no romantic feelings. Maybe you could come to “love at first sight” someone you already know but whose existence you have not yet properly appreciated.
Genuine love at first sight—the thing that is distinct from strong liking, attraction, and so on—appears possible, but not easy to get, at least for many us, distracted as we are by the vicissitudes of life and challenged in our ability to also really look at, and appreciate, ourselves and our inherent, unconditional worth. Because genuine love, on a picture like this, is independent of self-interest, and it requires a clear eye for its acquisition and maintenance. (How can you really look at another person if you are focusing on, and worrying about, yourself?)
We’ve got a view that preserves some healthy skepticism about many declarations of love while satisfying any hope we might have that genuine love can be acquired in a small amount of time. After all, people should not have to prove themselves to be worthy of love—they already are. And they do not need to show their worth—if that worth is not something, like looks, that can be acquired or lost. Knowing this, we can be confident that love at first sight, in all of its forms, is open to us. How ready and willing we are for it at any given point in time is a further, practical issue.
Hichem Naar
Hichem Naar is a research associate in philosophy at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He is the author of The Rationality of Love (2022).
