conclusions

I began with the most obvious of questions. Do you believe in love at first sight? Six out of my seven participants agreed that they did not. When asked why they said that it is possible to be strongly physically attracted to some one, so to have more of a lustful sexual attraction to someone but love is a much deeper. We then got onto the topic of having “types” meaning a specific trend of person to which one seems to be attracted (i.e. Football players, blondes, and big boobs). The group then noted that it might be easier to have an immediate connection with a person if that individual were someone that the viewer is normally attracted to or is the viewer’s “type”. The outstanding member of the group, who also happened to be the homosexual male, said that he believed in love at first sight from the beginning but the fact of typing someone just validated the point that it is definitely attraction at first sight.

We next got onto the topic of ex significant others. The group stated that if a person resembled an ex that they used to be in love with it would be much easier to fall in love with them in a short period of time. The group decided that that would not be love at first sight because it would be basing the perceptions on the knowledge of the ex that resembled the object of their vision.

This raised the question of how long does it take an individual to get to know another before they know that they are in love with them. And in a more specific sense what is the shortest amount of time that a person could talk to another before knowing that they were in love with them. The group had a hard time discussing this because there were many varied opinions the group finally came to a decision that it is possible to fall in love with someone after only speaking to them for two minutes. But being that two minutes is a short amount of time we debated that that could be considered love at first sight.

I then asked the group what they felt the differences between love at first sight in a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple would be. This was when the evening turned interesting. We then began discussing something that I had come across in my research and was rather disturbed by. The subject of labeling is one that today’s society struggles with because we are constantly trying to put people into categories as a natural human habit. Piget’s theory of schema states that human behavior is to organize objects into categories so as to store them into memory (Bhattacharya,Han). This creates a problem because like the one female in my group its not that easy when it comes to sexuality there are so many different categories in sexuality and society and science define only two in the research that I have found, homosexual and heterosexual. The group had a hard time placing the different sexualities into categories but in the end we concluded that a person of one sex finding a person of the same sex attractive is classified as homosexual. Whereas a person of one sex finding a person on the opposite sex attractive is classified as heterosexual. The group decided that the differences in homosexual love at first sight and homosexual love at first sight were that they felt heterosexual people were more apt to experience love at first sight because they are more centered on appearance instead of the emotional intellectual side of their partner. This is directly related to the hypothesis that I had in the beginning of my research.

The group then carried out a conversation in which the believer in love at first sight, the homosexual male, persuaded some of the group that if the two people having the interaction cared out a few simple words in a few second time period that they could fall in love. We finally concluded that the theory of love at first sight is purely based on the individual and how open they are to a relationship and finding love at that point in time. It is stated that love at first sight is known to release endorphins into the rewards system in the brain the same as winning a prize (Barelds 3). This proves that a person must be in the right state of mind and in a happy point in their life to achive love at first sight.