first draft

Melinda Borgnis

Marlen Harrison

English 202

April 14, 2010

Love at First Sight…From All Points of View

“Do you believe in love at first sight or should I walk by again?” According to Askmen.com this is the number four worst pick up line ever created. But why? Why is it so bad? Isn’t the thought of falling in love with someone in an instant so amazing. What if our culture was not such that both heterosexual and homosexual individuals did not have to go through the painful process of heartbreaks and bad dates? What if all you had to do was glance at someone for a few instants and one could instantly know that the person staring back at them was the one?

The theory of love at first sight has been a seemingly timeless question to which no conclusive answer has ever been discovered but instead it is a question on morals and beliefs of an individual. Love at first sight is something that has puzzled scientists and lovers a like for many years. “In mainstream twentieth-century culture the phenomenon of love at first sight…has resided in the realm of what we might call feminine epistemology”(Matthews). It is a phenomenon that can be described as essentially one making visual contact with another and having an instant feel of not only attraction but also love. But what is the likelihood that love at first sight will happen to a homosexual individual versus a heterosexual individual? This is the question that the following piece explores.

This has never been officially been described but there are many scientific studies done on the mental and physical states that one must be in to achieve feelings of this nature. My research is not only those mental and physical states but also the effects of homosexuality and heterosexuality on those intense feelings that one gets when he or she feels like they have experienced a love at first sight type of reaction. Homosexuality in this way has never been explored before but it has been studied that adolescents that are homosexual love in different ways. “Adolescents who experience feelings of same-sex attraction (SSA) differ from those without such feelings in the quality of relationships with parents, peers, and class mentors and in psychosocial functioning (health status and school performance)”(Bos).

I plan to conduct interviews as well as use the already conducted research to come up with weather or not there is a difference or greater rate of homosexual or heterosexual individuals experiencing love at first sight. I plan to conduct these interviews on campus at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and also within the communities in Indiana, Pennsylvania and Collegeville, Pennsylvania to get a vast majority of age ranges as well as some societal differences between the two locations. I hope to provide a useful conclusion to help others find out weather or not their love is true and weather or not love at first sight exists or exists for those individuals. This research will benefit all people that are struggling to find their sexual identity and all those who have felt some kins of “love-at-first-sight” emotion.

I feel as though heterosexual couples will be more apt to fall in love at first sight because they tend to be the more judgmental of the two groups. “partners who fell in love at first sight, relative to partners who got involved more gradually, entered into intimate relationships more shortly after they met, would have mates with less similar personalities, especially with regard to levels of extraversion, emotional stability and autonomy, and would report relatively low levels of relationship quality”(Barelds). Homosexual couples tend to rely more on an emotional connection than a strong physical one. My research will prove my prediction either right or wrong but through the interviews that I conduct and the primary research I should be able to come to and adequate conclusion.

There are few studies that encompass love at first sight but none that i could find explored love at first sight relating to homosexual relationships at all. This sparked an interest in me and I assumed others would have the same interests. In order to fully understand the way that love at first sight works for both couples we must understand three things. the first being how and why heterosexual relationships work.

Obviously the type of relationship that is discussed most is the heterosexual relationship. “Women are predicted to desire characteristics that reliably lead to an increase in women’s reproductive success. These include selecting a mate who (1) is able to invest resources in her and her children, (2) is able to physically protect her and her children, (3) shows promise as a good parent, and (4) will be sufficiently compatible in goals and values to enable strategic alignment without inflicting too many costs on her and her children” (Buss). This proves that first attraction women are attracted to someone that appears muscular so that he will protect her and that he appears to be together in a way that could support a family or children. “Human matings can last a few months, a few weeks, a few days, or even a few minutes. This end of the temporal continuum may be called short-term mating. The temporal dimension turns out to be critical to many components of mating, perhaps none more central than the qualities desired. Furthermore, humans display remarkable creativity in their ability to mix and match mating strategies. It is not uncommon, for example, for a person to engage in one long-term committed mate-ship with heavy investment in children, while simultaneously pursuing an extramarital affair, or series of affairs, on the side”(Buss) This also proves that deep down heterosexual relationships are based on sexual desire and they will, for the most part, always be resorted back to that. Attraction triggers dopamine to be released to the rewards portion of the brain (Fisher). This means that love at first sight or at least attraction at first sight does trigger a reaction in the body, giving the person the feeling of love and purpose. This shows the function and purpose of heterosexual relationships.

The second part one must understand prior to studying the effect of love at first sight on homosexual and heterosexual couples is the basis of homosexual attraction. “Experiencing SSA (same sex attraction) without self-identifying or publicly identifying as LGB (lesbian, gay, bisexual) is usually seen as an initial stage in the sexual identity development of sexual minority youth. Several models have been built to describe this development (e.g., Cass, 1979; Troiden, 1984). These models assume that sexual minority adolescents first recognize that they are different from their peers and then realize that these feelings might be linked to their sexuality. In subsequent stages, adolescents give a name to their feelings, make their sexual status public, and finally are supposed to integrate their same-sex sexuality into their sense of self. It is frequently shown that homosexual adults recall that during their adolescence they indeed felt different from their same-sex peers, partly for the same reasons as other adolescents (e.g., physical appearance, abilities, personality characteristics), but also because of their sex-atypical behavior and interests, including SSA” (Bos). This displays the fact that although physical characteristics are a key portion of homosexual attraction, there is also a mental personality component to the attraction that homosexual couples feel. These couples, however, also have the same mental rush at initial attraction that heterosexual couples feel.

Finally the third aspect that is necessary to have some knowledge of in order to perform the most accurate study methods is how love at first sight occurs and how it effects a persons relationship with another person. Women generally are more infatuated with finding love at first sight because they are the ones who indulge in the fantasies of finding their perfect man and knowing it instantly that he exists (Matthews). Although women may be more concerned with love at first sight or trying to make it happen it is not impossible for men to have this reaction to another person. “In a sample of 137 married or cohabiting couples, it was found that, as predicted, partners who fell in love at first sight became romantically involved more quickly, and showed more dissimilar personalities with regard to levels of extraversion, emotional stability and autonomy. Partners who fell in love at first sight did not report lower relationship quality” (Barelds). This study showed that if a couple felt as though love at first sight was a key portion of their relationship often times there were severe personality, attitude, and opinion differences. This may or may not be a bad thing being that in some cases opposites attract. As for love at first sight according to these articles it does exist and can produce successful relationships.

In a group of 5-10 Mixed individuals who identify themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, questioning and straight I conducted a round table discussion on the broad topic of love at first sight. This method is known as a focus group. With this form of methodology I will be able to not express my opinions and remove all personal biases from the study. I plan to ask very few if any questions so that the conversation will flow as naturally as possible. I feel as though this is important because that way my opinions and the hypotheses that I have will not influence the opinions of the participants in my study. In the studies that I have found many used focus groups as an accurate source to gather their findings. These studies include Dick Barelds’s study on couples that were married after reportedly falling in love at first sight. Barhelds studied one hundred and thirty seven couples each of whom was married or living together and some of whom reported being in love at the first sight of their partner. A few studies that I have researched including Henry Bos’s study on male homosexuality used questionnaires as an accurate method for their study. As this method was most accurate for them because they had a larger subject pool this method would not have been accurate for my findings because of the location of my research and the participants that I had.

Being that my research took place with Indiana University of Pennsylvania students and sexuality is an issue for some students it was best to keep my encounters with them personal in order to insure complete confidence in the confidentiality of my research. College students tend to be questioning, as one participant in my study was, and they do not wish to share their sexuality shared with others and tend to lie about their sexual preferences as to allude their peers into a false belief of their sexuality.

I held my study in my living room and provided food and beverages in order to make my guests feel at comfortable. I removed all pictures in my living room of friends and significant others so that my opinions would not bias the opinions of my participants. In my study I had three heterosexual females, one heterosexual male, one questioning female, one bisexual female, and one homosexual male. I acted solely as the mediator in this study so as not to inflict my opinions or let my opinions influence those of the participants.

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 achieve love at first sight.