It's not generally my practice to propagate LJ memes in this diary just for the sake of saying something, but on the rare occasion when someone posts one which includes a question I actually find interesting, I don't let the fact that it came from an LJ meme stop me from answering it.

So naath posted a relationships questionnaire [friends-locked, but a public copy of the questions is here] recently, which contained a lot of questions which I don't feel like answering because they're (variously) inherently uninteresting, badly specified, oxymoronic or simply wouldn't elicit any particularly interesting answers from me; but in among them was the old chestnut ‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’, which reminded me that I relatively recently acquired a definite opinion on that question and it isn't as simple as a yes or a no.

My view of the human mind – or at least my view of my mind, which could for all I know be significantly different from the average one – has always tended to be that it has an emotional side and a reasoning side. In correct operation, the emotional side sets long-term goals and policy, which the reasoning side then tries to find the best ways to achieve. My usual analogy [link friends-locked, sorry] for this is that the emotional side is the Minister, while the reasoning side is the Civil Service doing the detailed work to implement the Minister's policy decisions. However, the usual failure mode of this architecture is that the emotional side often ends up trying to micro-manage, generally in pursuit of some short-term goal which is long-term disadvantageous, and often with disastrous results. Almost exactly analogous, in fact, to a typical Yes Minister episode.

(I've been told several times that this is very similar to Hume's view. I've never read Hume, though; I came up with that model independently as far as I know, simply by watching the inside of my own brain. Perhaps at some point perhaps I should read Hume and see how much of him I agree with.)

So, the relevance of this to love at first sight is that there are two parts to the mental state which I would usually mean when I talk about ‘being in love’. One is on the emotional side, and is composed of all the obvious sorts of feelings: pleasure at being in her presence, desire for good things to happen to her, pain when bad things happen to her, desire for her to like me, etc. A sort of ‘wow’ factor, if you like. The other is on the reasonable side, and drives things like long-term commitment: essentially, it's a judgment that the emotional wow factor I get from her is likely to persist in the long term and to outweigh any reasonably foreseeable downsides, and hence – if you'll forgive the mathematical terminology – that my optimal strategy for maximising the integral of my happiness over time is to stick with her through thick and thin. (Of course, even that decision can be subject to later review if something seriously unforeseen happens. I've heard the opinion expressed that love is by definition forever, and hence that anything that turns out not to be forever can't ‘really’ have been love; but I don't subscribe to that myself.)

Neither component on its own suffices, IMO, to be described as love. The reasoning aspect without the emotional one is just going through the motions with your heart not really in it (perhaps, for example, because you consider yourself bound by a previous promise which you'd feel guilty if you broke), whereas the emotional side without the reasoning part could for all you know just be transitory infatuation. (Though it's noticeable that the emotional part on its own is still clearly distinct from lust, which is also a basically emotional condition but composed of different desires and feelings. The two are correlated, of course, but not 100%.)

So, do I believe in love at first sight? My considered answer is ‘half of it’. I think that the reasoning side does take time to make its mind up, or at least should do; if it decides too quickly then it isn't doing its job with due care and attention and is liable to regret it later. But the emotional side, I know from specific experience, is perfectly capable of falling in its idea of love pretty much instantly, given good enough cause. So if that happens, and then the reasoning side subsequently decides that it agrees, then that's probably easy to mistake for love at first sight if you aren't paying close attention; but if you look a little more closely, you find that only half of it was actually at first sight, and the other half followed along in its own time.

Of course, as I mention above, other people's minds might turn out to work entirely differently from mine. But for the moment, that's my opinion.