The Truth about Marriage/Chapter16
CHAPTER XVI
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
Here is a question that all of us can answer without hesitation: "Do you believe in love at first sight?"
Of course, we do believe in love at first sight. There are enough cases on record to prove it genuine. And yet there have been cases where one has believed that he or she had fallen in love at first sight when experience proved that it was a mistake.
Therefore we conclude that we must not be sure that our infatuation at first sight is necessarily the genuine lasting article.
I knew a man who was tremendously impressed by a beautiful girl whom he met, and the feeling grew to such a degree that he felt he could not live without her. It was happiness beyond compare to be in her presence. Later on her love and kisses and words of affection confirmed him in his belief of love at first sight. And yet they did not marry. Each married, and each married happily.
I don't know the record of the woman, but the man knows certainly now that his was only an infatuation, which would probably not have lasted, since he is married ideally to another now, and he thinks for eternity.
So do not be too sure of your love because it chanced to be love at first sight. Sometimes two people seem to attract each other so powerfully and immediately that life without the other seems impossible.
Sometimes they are married people, and they desert husband and wife respectively for the new affinity. And in a year or so, more or less, they see that it was all a mistake.
Some of the most lasting cases of true love I have known, resulting in ideal marriage, have not been the result of love at first sight. I do not say that there has not been an attraction from the first, but it was not recognized as love or anything like it.