Love at First Sight

I came out of a movie with a friend of mine, and we talked about the acting for a while over a beer; and then he said of the female lead, "She's delightful. I so fell in love with her in this."

These were words from an intelligent and worldly man, notice.

How could he have fallen in love with a screen image, and done it so readily? Every tabloid proclaimed the actress to be, in real life, decidedly hard to like, let alone love.

The power of Hollywood, I thought.

But several days later I had a different take. It's the absence of real knowledge about a person that allows us to "fall in love" with a fleeting image of someone. And that's always been seen as infatuation or delusion.  But what if this situation contains some useful knowledge.  Perhaps it tells us that we're very capable of loving people, perhaps most people, right away.  It's only when we know them better and realize they have quirks that make them hard to live with that we decide we don't match up well, or that our feelings were mistaken. Then we stop loving them.

Perhaps that idealized first emotion is, in some instances, the moment when we look past the surface differences.  We see past the mud and are aware of the diamond caught in it. Experience tells us to focus on the mud, though.

Let's try to re-value that initial moment when we see, perhaps, what is eternal in even the most flawed of human beings. Let the divine in you salute the divine in others, and try to move past anything else.

Then we can re-think 'love at first sight'.