Irvin Yalom, in Love’s Executioner, writes about his patient, Dan. Dan is convinced that upon meeting a woman for the first time, “he had entered into a spiritual linkage with another kindred soul”. He had fallen in love at first sight.
Dan and Yalom hold two different views about what we can know at first sight, one Proustian and the other Nietzschean. Yalom held the sentiment that Dan had created his love interest: “In a Proustian way, you’ve packed this creature full of the attributes you so desire. You’ve fallen in love with your own creation.” Yalom was referring to this passage in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Swanns Way:
We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds, those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's
Dan defended his position. He “cited Nietzsche who said somewhere that when you first meet someone, you know all about him; on subsequent meetings, you blind yourself to your own wisdom.” Yalom considered the idea that: “Perhaps on a first meeting, guards are down; perhaps one has not yet determined what persona to don. Maybe first impressions are more accurate than second or third impressions.” But he reaches a different conclusion:
I am persuaded that, in these infatuating meetings, Dan and the woman mistook what they saw in the other. They each saw the reflection of their own beseeching, wounded gaze and mistook it for desire and fullness. They were each fledglings with broken wings who sought to fly by clasping another broken-winged bird. People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two broken-winged birds coupled into one make for a clumsy flight. No amount of patience will help it fly; and, ultimately, each must be pried from the other.
- Irivin Yalom, Love's Executioner
The difficulty with love at first sight is that we’re not particularly good at seeing. Erich Fromm warns about our inability to see the “narcissism behind the charm." The way “a kind of glow or smile…gives the impression of…beatific, trusting, childlikeness” and how “a peculiar glitter in the eyes” that can be “taken by some as a symptom of half-saintliness.”. It’s so easy to get it wrong. That’s why we talk about being “blinded by beauty,” which may mean only to see with your eyes but not with your heart. To mistake shimmer for soul.
To love someone at first sight is to recognise and fall for that thing within them which is eternal. Love at first sight is likely made possible by a finely tuned intuition, one forged by experience, that acknowledges and knows more than we do. So that, when our eyes fall upon them, the smile that grows on our face is one that recognises its home. It is, Mary Oliver wrote, “only those lovers who didn’t choose at all,” that know what this means:
Not anyone who says, "I'm going to be
careful and smart in matters of love,"
who says, "I', going to choose slowly,"
but only those lovers who didn't choose at
all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible
and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possible even
unsuitable -
only those know what I'm talking about
in this talking about love.
- Mary Oliver, Not Anyone Who Says
Friends who fall in love after years without any romantic sentiment also experience love at first sight. When love finally finds them, they see each other, for the first time, through the lens of love. If we give up on the concept of love at first sight, we will lose an essential way of knowing each other and further subordinate intuition to the tyranny of reason, by denying the stories and the secrets that another’s eyes and smile tells our hearts.