But why?

I posed a question to myself recently.  Why do we as people, put more faith in the validity of our negative feelings than we do our positive ones?  It is perfectly accepted in society to make a snap judgment about someone, provided it is in a negative light.  No one questions me I when I describe my first impression and the general feeling I get from the Student Support Specialist at my son’s school.  That dude gives me the creeps.  He’s kind of an impish looking man with poor posture and a bad haircut.  He seems to have a very submissive or timid personality as well.  From the moment I met him, I did not like him.  All of my family and friends have been supportive and in agreement about my judgment of this man, yet none have met him.  This isn’t the first time I’ve felt a negative vibe from someone based my opinion of them on the feeling; in fact it’s happened more than I can count.  I tend to be a person guided by emotion more than reason.  However, there have been far fewer instances in my life where I have met someone and felt an overwhelming positive emotion towards them.  But if I were to approach my family or my friends to say I met a person who makes my heart soar and they give me all of those mushy gushy feelings of love and lust and like, I would be met with eye rolls and skepticism.  The validity of my feelings would be doubted, questioned and disregarded.  I would get the “again?”  I would be laughed at, ridiculed and dismissed.  Why?  Why do we trust and accept our negative emotions more than our positive ones?  Why is it perfectly suitable to write someone off as a perverted creep without knowing a damn thing about them but it is not okay to place a person in high regard with no further knowledge of them?  Do we really need extensive time to decide if we have positive feelings, but negative feelings can be instantaneous?  Are positive and negative emotions really all that different?  I don’t think so; there is a very thin line between love and hate.

Then I started to ponder another related question.  If I am arguing that positive emotions can be as instant and valid as negative emotions, then is love at first sight possible?  It’s definitely happened to me where I’ve met someone and within a very short amount of time they have had a greater impact on my life than people I have known and interacted with on a daily basis for years.  But is that love?  Love is a tricky word.  I believe it is one of the most overused words in the English language, but still carries quite a punch.  We love a lot of things.  Obviously we love people, in a variety of ways.  We love our things, our personal possessions.  We love how things are, our environment.  And every time we use the word, it can carry a different connotation.

When I held my son in my arms for the first time, yes, I would absolutely consider that to be love at first sight.  I loved that child with everything I had and everything I was, but was it like the love I fee for him now?  Absolutely not.  I loved him without knowing him then, I loved him because of the impact he just had on my life and the connection I felt with him.  I love him now, for all those reasons and because I know him inside and out.  I know that child and I love the person he is now and he is becoming.  Romantic love is a bit trickier than motherly love, but I think it conceptually works the same way.  Upon meeting someone, there can be a connection that goes beyond lust.  Lust is just a physical attraction, but there can be something else there that draws you to that person.  A lot of times this feeling gets called “love” because we lack another word for it.  Is it in fact love?  I don’t know.  It could be the start of love.  It could be love in its infancy.  Or it could just an unexplained strong emotional attachment.

So, do I believe in love at first sight?  Yes, I think I do.  I believe that there are special people out there with whom we can click so quickly and so powerfully, there just isn’t another word to describe that feeling.  Here’s where I think we as people get confused, though.  We consider “love at first sight” to be synonymous with “happily ever after”, but really they are unrelated.  (Although, how romantic would that be, to get both?  That is the fantasy shoved down our throats by Hollywood; it’s easy to see where we would get confused.)  So, I figured, we don’t need time to determine how we feel towards someone, necessarily, we need time to determine compatibility.  The sad truth is we can love someone with whom we are not compatible, that is a lesson I’ve learned many times over.