Love at First Sight Is Real, If You Believe

Love at First Sight Is Real, If You Believe

Some 41% of men, versus 29% of women, say they have experienced it, a 2014 survey found

By Elizabeth Bernstein in the Wall Street Journal

The first time he saw the beautiful young woman across the crowded room, their eyes met. One week later he told her loved her. Three months later, they were married.

Does this really ever happen outside of the movies?

Scientists say we are genetically wired for the possibility of love at first sight, but why it happens to some people and not others is largely a matter of timing and self-assurance.

If you are lucky enough to fall in love immediately and the feeling is mutual, it still isn’t possible to know if it will last. A dinner date that starts on a love-struck note could turn sour before the check arrives, yet another “lightning just struck us” couple will go on to have a life-long relationship. Because love is hard to replicate in a lab, there is little research on when and why—and for whom—love at first sight works out.

According to an annual “Singles in America” survey of more than 5,000 singles ages 21 to 70-plus, sponsored by the dating site Match.com, 59% of men and 49% of women in 2014 said they believe in love at first sight, and 41% of men and 29% of women say they have experienced it.

The survey and numerous psychological studies have found men fall in love faster than women, says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and New York City-based senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. “Men are so visual,” she says. “They see a woman who appeals to them physically, and it will trigger the romantic love system faster.” She adds, “Women are custodians of the egg, so they are more careful romantically.”

Romantic love is one of three systems—along with the sex drive and feelings of deep attachment—that humans developed for mating. Romantic love’s intense desire for connection with the other person typically lasts 18 months to three years, experts say. Its evolutionary purpose is to help people pick one partner and bond in order to raise a child.

When we fall in love, a reward system fueled by dopamine is activated in the brain. “It’s the system that governs wanting, craving, obsessions, focus, energy and motivation,” Dr. Fisher says. A brain scan of a person in love shows activation in some of the same areas as in a heroin addict, she adds.

The sex drive, or sexual craving, in both men and women is fueled by testosterone, Dr. Fisher says. In contrast, romantic love is emotional obsession. The two are meant to go together, but it is possible to have one without the other.

Like the sex drive, romantic love can be triggered immediately—which may explain the metaphor of “falling” in love, which implies something quick and unintentional. All mammals experience a form of romantic love, Dr. Fisher says. “It’s an adaptive mechanism for attraction and to start the mating process quickly,” she says.

Typically, three factors are present when you fall in love, studies have found: You have to like the other person’s physical appearance; you have to find his or her personality desirable, and you have to feel the other person likes you, says Arthur Aron, research professor at Stony Brook University in New York and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies love.

People may feel they have fallen in love quickly, even when they have known their beloved for some time, he says. “One day the person smiled at them, and at that moment they fell in love because it was perceived as safe,” Dr. Aron says. Timing plays a roll. “You may be more likely to fall in love quickly if you are ready,” he says.

David Dubel asked his now-wife, Yvette Dubel, out on April 17, 1989, when he was a student at East Carolina University. She was a high-school senior and invited him to join her at a student fair, collecting signatures against apartheid in South Africa.

Ms. Dubel didn’t know how to introduce her date. “I couldn’t call him my boyfriend,” she says. Mr. Dubel took matters into his own hands. “I’m her future husband,” he told her friends.

He was right. They married in 1990 and have three children.

What was there that first day? “Soul recognition,” says Ms. Dubel, now 44 and an arts education consultant in Greenville, N.C. Mr. Dubel, a 45-year-old training supervisor for United Parcel Service, says, “I saw it in her eyes—what a sweet person she was and that she was the one.”

Gennady Gerovich felt an immediate spark the first time he saw his now-wife, Marina Gerovich, after a dinner cruise they had both attended. He talked his way onto a 10-day student trip to Ukraine and Israel that she was taking, just so he could be near her. Sadly, Ms. Gerovich wasn’t feeling anything close to love. “It was more of an irritation,” she says.

The two became friends on the trip. Mr. Gerovich says he was “persistent and patient” and made it clear he was open to a relationship. “She was motivated, confident, independent, determined and had the most beautiful curly hair,” says Mr. Gerovich, now 29 and a real-estate broker. “I was hooked.”

They dated for eight months and got married in 2011. Now they have a year-old son. “Even though it was not love from the first sight for me, or so I thought, I’m extremely grateful to my husband for not giving up on me, because now he is the love of my life,” says Ms. Gerovich, 27, a certified public accountant in Brooklyn.

Ben Bryant had his love-at-first-sight experience in August 1967, at a rehearsal for a summer theater production of “Carousel” in Mount Gretna, Pa. Playing the character Billy, he walked onto the stage and there she was in the front row, with a Shetland Sheepdog at her feet. “It was as though there was a spotlight on her,” says Mr. Bryant, 32 at the time.

He learned her name was Elizabeth Hepburn and she was playing the role of Carrie. He was mesmerized by her singing, and when the cast took a break, he asked her to lunch. She accepted.

The two spent a lot of time together, going to dinner or the laundromat. One evening, a week after they met, he used the “L” word.

Ms. Hepburn was silent. The two continued to hang out, and it wasn’t until they returned to New York City at the end of the summer, they both say, that things “heated up.”

That November, they wed. “It was the most natural thing in the world,” says Ms. Hepburn, who works as a wellness coach. “We wanted to share our life together.”

The couple was married for 31 years and then divorced in 1998. “I left to find myself,” Ms. Hepburn says. She was in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, and the experience gave her an urgent desire to embrace her loved ones. Mr. Bryant, she says, was foremost in her mind.

She called him—he still lived in the apartment they’d shared—and they met for dinner and a movie.

The former spouses began dating a year later, Ms. Hepburn moved back into the apartment in 2005, and they remarried in 2010. Their total time together: 47.5 years.

“If you’re blessed enough to experience love at first sight, don’t fight it,” says Mr. Bryant, now 79 and a video director and editor. “Experience it. Examine it. Follow your heart.”