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It’s a trope of Hollywood: when two people realise in an instant that they have met the one they want to spend the rest of their lives with. In reality too, happy long-term couples will tell you, perhaps a little too smugly, and doing that gazing into each other’s eyes thing, how it was simply “love at first sight”. Mutual, of course.
We’re sorry to spoil the mood music, but a new paper in Personal Relationships – one of the first attempts to study this phenomenon scientifically – concludes that while believing one has fallen instantly in love does seem to be a genuine experience, it’s not really about love at all, but more to do with physical attraction (and it’s rarely mutual). And while people who remember having fallen in love with their partner at first sight do describe their relationship as more passionate in the present, their recall is probably little more than a “confabulated memory” – a “projection of their current feelings into the past”.
The new evidence, collected by Florian Zsok and her colleagues at the University of Groningen, comes from a mix of studies involving a total of 396 participants, about 60 per cent of them women, mostly heterosexual, young Dutch and German students.
Zsok’s team recruited the majority of the participants via an online survey: they answered questions about their current romantic relationship, if they were in one, and they looked at pictures of several potential partners (people they’d never met before) and rated their attraction to them, any feelings of love, including intimacy, passion and commitment, which are the different components of the “triangular theory of love“, and also “eros”, which is measured by items like “I feel that the person and I were meant for each other”. Crucially, participants also stated whether they agreed that “I am experiencing love at first sight”. A similar process was performed by more participants who attended a psych lab where they looked at pictures of potential partners.
Two other studies involved speed dating exercises in which potential partners met each other for 90 minutes in one case, or 20 minutes in another. As with the online survey and lab study, these participants answered questions about feelings of attraction towards their dates, any experience of love at first sight, and other feelings of love.
Read more here. (The British Psychological Society, Research Digest)
We’re sorry to spoil the mood music, but a new paper in Personal Relationships – one of the first attempts to study this phenomenon scientifically – concludes that while believing one has fallen instantly in love does seem to be a genuine experience, it’s not really about love at all, but more to do with physical attraction (and it’s rarely mutual). And while people who remember having fallen in love with their partner at first sight do describe their relationship as more passionate in the present, their recall is probably little more than a “confabulated memory” – a “projection of their current feelings into the past”.
The new evidence, collected by Florian Zsok and her colleagues at the University of Groningen, comes from a mix of studies involving a total of 396 participants, about 60 per cent of them women, mostly heterosexual, young Dutch and German students.
Zsok’s team recruited the majority of the participants via an online survey: they answered questions about their current romantic relationship, if they were in one, and they looked at pictures of several potential partners (people they’d never met before) and rated their attraction to them, any feelings of love, including intimacy, passion and commitment, which are the different components of the “triangular theory of love“, and also “eros”, which is measured by items like “I feel that the person and I were meant for each other”. Crucially, participants also stated whether they agreed that “I am experiencing love at first sight”. A similar process was performed by more participants who attended a psych lab where they looked at pictures of potential partners.
Two other studies involved speed dating exercises in which potential partners met each other for 90 minutes in one case, or 20 minutes in another. As with the online survey and lab study, these participants answered questions about feelings of attraction towards their dates, any experience of love at first sight, and other feelings of love.
Read more here. (The British Psychological Society, Research Digest)
