Love at first sight.

I used to believe that love at first sight was a fantasy. I still believe that the way it's portrayed in movies--looking across a room and BAM, you're in love--is fake.

However, I have found that the deepest and most lasting friendships I've ever made started with a kind of instant recognition. At a party, or out with friends, I saw someone I didn’t know. Yet the way they moved and talked was instantly familiar, and spoke to something inside of me that was comforting and uplifting at once. And, after a single conversation, I felt as though I’d known this other person for years, and that I wanted to know them forever.

I thought it was just me, the way I formed attachments, but recently I spoke to a man who lamented that a friendship he’d formed while here in Japan was being interrupted by the friend leaving for his home country. He struggled to explain how from their first night out drinking they’d “told the same jokes” and “understood each other’s half-finished sentences.” This man had plenty of friends, and other people he loved, but the instant ease and familiarity he’d found in his leaving friend had never happened to him before. And perhaps it never will again.

None of my “love at first sight” experiences have been romantic, nor was the young man’s example from above. Maybe that’s why love at first sight as it actually is doesn’t interest a lot of writers, who would rather show sexually-driven chemistry. Yet having experienced how truly special it is to look at a stranger and know that they will become dear to me, it’s something I’d like to try and write. It’s a small bit of magic in day-to-day life, not an incomprehensible miracle, but a wonderful slice of reality. Life has too little magic. It’s good, to celebrate when you find some.


-Elizabeth Reuter
Author, The Demon of Renaissance Drive