“The first time I saw my boyfriend was at a party and as soon as I saw him I felt attracted to him… I’ve never felt anything like that and I think it’s really love at first sight.” This is one of the many love stories that can be found on the Internet told by those who lived them. They are proof of love at first sight… or not?
For some psychologists this is nothing more than an urban legend: you can feel attracted, but for love to be born as such you need a time of “exposure”. And if things go well, the brain has mechanisms that idealize the memory of that first meeting. However, and even if that happens, this does not mean that we need all that time to fall in love with someone. In fact, it took us between 90 seconds and 4 minutes to do it. And let’s not think that he ‘conquers’ us with his mellifluous speech and because he has a glibness that makes the coldest heart melt. Nothing of that. According to Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, the weapons of conquest are 55% body language, 38% the tone and speed of our voice, and only 7% what we say . Casanova had little of a conscious heartthrob and more of an innate fluke.
Not only that. It is likely that the topic that whoever follows her gets her has no place in the love game either. According to a study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships by Artemio Ramírez and Michael Sunnafrank of Ohio University, we decide the type of relationship we want to have with a person within minutes of meeting them. For Ramírez, “things happen very quickly. People make snap judgments about the kind of relationship they want right after they meet a person.” Of course, that does not mean that we are right in the election; we simply tend to enforce our expectations ; It is what is called the self-fulfilling prophecy: if the first impression is good, a subsequent relationship is more likely to emerge. In fact, after 9 weeks, those who rated the potential relationship more positively tended to sit closer to their partner during class and talk to him more. And this reaction was the same regardless of the time they spent talking at the beginning (which was spread over 3, 6 or 9 minutes).
“Love -said an 18th century courtesan- is something that begins you don’t know how and ends you don’t know when”. And that is the question: How long does that infatuation last? According to Cindy Hazan of Cornell University “human beings are biologically programmed to feel passionate between 18 and 30 months”. It is enough time for a couple to meet, copulate and have offspring, something fundamental from an evolutionary point of view.
For some scientists, love at first sight may be a critical adaptive function among animals . For example, during the mating season a female squirrel needs to reproduce. And there really is no advantage to doing it with a boar. Now, if you see a healthy male squirrel, you shouldn’t waste your time. If it seems acceptable to him, he will stick to his luck to copulate. Is it not love at first sight more than an innate tendency that stimulates the mating process? Perhaps what we know today as a crush is nothing more than that function evolved towards that very human sensation of captivating passion at first sight.
But, what is it that makes us pay attention to that particular person? The first thing to do is draw attention . Anthropologist David Givens and biologist Timothy Perper have spent hundreds of hours in singles bars across the United States studying flirtation. Men and women attract attention differently, but the first thing they do is define “their” territory: it can be a seat, a place on the dance floor, near the DJ… Once established, they begin to attract attention . It doesn’t matter where we are from and what culture we belong to. The ritual is always the same, whether you are in the Amazon, in New Guinea or in a nightclub in Madrid. Here some clues.
The woman smiles at her admirer and raises her eyebrows in a quick movement as she opens her eyes to look at him. Then he drops his eyelids, shakes his head down and to the side, and finally looks away. He frequently covers his face with his hands, giggles and hides behind the palms of his hands. This is something so distinctive that the ethologist Eil-Eibesfeldt says that it is something innate.
Men roll their shoulders, stretch and exaggerate their body movements . For example: instead of using the wrist to stir the drink, they use their entire arm. Man is very similar to other animal species. Do you remember when walking through the office that colleague leaning back on the chair, with his hands clasped behind his head with his elbows up and his chest out? It is a position that expresses dominance or flirtation.
Finally, recent studies affirm that we tend to look for someone who looks like our parents . At St Andrews University in Scotland, psychologist David Perrett metamorphosed the faces of the students participating in the experiment into the opposite sex: of all the faces on offer, this was the most chosen (they couldn’t recognize it, but it was the one they liked the most). ). Do we find them attractive because they remind us of the ones we constantly saw during childhood, that of our parents?
Appearance is an indicator of the quality of genes and therefore plays an important role in our selection criteria: there are things we look at even if we don’t know it. For example, the symmetry in the face. Asymmetric features are a sign of underlying genetic problems. We also tend to adopt as search criteria those who most resemble us in the volume of the lungs, the length of the middle finger and the earlobe, the complete size of the same, the circumferences of the waist and neck or the rhythms metabolic.
What there is no way to determine biologically is whether that relationship we started will continue . Some behavioral genetic studies show that identical twins, whatever marital success they had, shared it. Does he mean that the tendency to divorce is in the genes?
References:
Helen Fisher, Why We Love (2004, Santillana Ediciones SL)
Sunnafrank, Michael y Ramirez, Artemio Jr., “At First Sight: Persistent Relational Effects of Get-Acquainted Conversations” (2004). Communication Faculty Publications. 345.
Ramirez, Artemio & Sumner, Erin. (2019). Initial Impressions. En el libro Macmillan Encyclopedia of Families, Marriages, and Intimate Relationships (pp.466)
