The Growing Belief in ‘Love at First Sight’

The idea seems so old-fashioned, so sentimental: that you could fall for someone “at first sight,” deeply and instantly. It’s straight out of the classic romance dramas—Jack’s gaze freezing when he sees Rose on the Titanic’s deck; The Notebook’s Noah lighting up and asking, “Who’s this girl?” when he spies Allie across the amusement park. As a general rule, the stuff of popular love stories is not the stuff of real life. We know this, right?

…

But once Gesselman stepped back and thought about the finding, she said, it made some sense to her. In 2014, dating apps were relatively new. Couples tended to meet through friends or family; people would get to know each other for a while before pairing off. In more recent years, Gesselman has consistently found that swipe-based dating apps are the main way that partners meet—across age, gender, race, income, and geographic region. That style of dating has people in the habit of making quick calls, judging whether they have chemistry with a stranger after just one date. Paul Eastwick, a UC Davis psychologist who studies romantic attraction and wasn’t involved with the survey, told me the same thing: “Online dating has a lot of ‘We met—no. We met—no. We met—no. We met—no. We met—oh, that was a good one!’”

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): The Atlantic