Why David B. Clear’s Take On “Love At First Sight” Is So Flawed
I know because I lived it.
While I was away on vacation, I happened to read an article by David B. Clear on Medium called Why “Love At First Sight” Is a Relationship-Killing Belief. Clear took a very colorful approach to the presentation of his opinion on the matter, an opinion that applied an exclamation point to his cleverness and his authority on love, specifically how it must unfold in order to truly exist.
Needless to say, I shook my head as I digested Clear’s narrow-minded view on “love at first sight.” Simply because one doesn’t experience it doesn’t mean “love at first sight” doesn’t exist. So why endeavor to rob other’s of the possibility by way of justifying your own road to finding love?
You see, what Clear calls “relationship-killing,” I call the beginning of a monumental love story — one which caught me off-guard, swept me up completely, gifted me with a meaningful, wonderful life then gave me the reason and the courage to “carry on” when all was suddenly brought to an end. The day my now-late husband and I met, we both fell in love at first-sight. At the end of our sudden meeting, he called his sister and told her that he had just met the woman that he was going to marry and I made my own phone call to the gentleman I was dating at the time and stopped seeing him.
The manner in which we fell in love didn’t excuse us from the work that goes into building any relationship. Nor did it stunt the depth of love that we shared, in fact quite the opposite. How many men would arrange for a birthday party for his wife, then stand (when he barely could) to toast her fourteen days prior to dying from Cancer? How many men would refuse to die until his wife (achingly but selflessly) whispered into his ear that he could go?…that she would take care of the kids; that they would be fine? And only then would he finally pass? How many women would dedicate her life to honoring his legacy through their children and through her own future work, including a book that would share their tale and ultimately become award-winning because others saw themselves in it?
Clear’s views on “love at first-sight” are very clinical, if you ask me. And yet, there are plenty of people who have fallen in “love at first sight” who speak to its magnificence. There is no doubt that this type of love is precious and rare. But to squash its very existence or deem it “relationship-killing” is to discredit all of us who have experienced it, and that, Sir, is sorry.
I believe we each seek a spiritual connection in the form of love, which goes well-beyond current-day romanticizing of it. Just look at the story of Adam and Eve, specifically Eve being fashioned from Adam’s rib. Could you not relate Adam finding his rib (and vice versa) to the intensity of “love at first sight?” Is that not an example of how deeply profound, powerful, and spiritual love can be — something so immensely rooted in us that we recognize the other in an instant given we are so fortunate as to cross his or her path?
As much as “love at first sight” may feel to some completely remote, I will tell you that it is not simply because it doesn’t “go to script.” As much as David B. Clear is allowed to have his love story as he chooses, so are you. But if you fail to “believe,” you will already have given up on the possibility. And in my experience, that would be vastly regrettable.
