Sorry romantics, new findings suggest love at first sight is really lust at first sight

By Christian Jarrett Reporter: “When did you know she [Meghan Markle] was the one?” Prince Harry: “The very first time we met” 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 v...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Dating Sex Source Type: blogs