Is love at first sight real?

Something is real, but probably not what the phrase promises. Attraction can arrive in a fraction of a second: in one study, the average time to judge how attractive a person is was 0.13 seconds. What is much less clear is whether that jolt is already love.

A 2017 study put it to the test. People remembering love at first sight described the features of passionate love, such as constant thoughts about the person and a longing to be together. But people who said they were feeling love at first sight right after meeting someone only gave neutral scores on a romantic love measure that included passion. The feeling also tracked how physically attractive the person was. The researchers concluded that love at first sight is a strong initial attraction rather than the state of being in love.

That would explain why the memory feels so much bigger than the moment. Some authors have speculated that the remembered story of falling in love at first sight, with all its passion, is often a memory confabulation: later love gets written back onto the first glance. Two ordinary effects may help the story along. People tend to assume that someone beautiful has other good qualities, a trap called the halo effect, and the more often people see someone, the more they like them.

The idea itself is ancient. The Greeks called love a kind of madness sent by the gods, medieval troubadours made it a feature of courtly love, and Shakespeare had Romeo fall for Juliet the moment he saw her. The spark may be real. But what best predicts how a relationship will go is its first few minutes, not its first moment.