We’re sorry to spoil the mood music, but a new paper in Personal Relationships – one of the first attempts to study this phenomenon scientifically – concludes that while believing one has fallen instantly in love does seem to be a genuine experience, it’s not really about love at all, but more to do with physical attraction (and it’s rarely mutual). And while people who remember having fallen in love with their partner at first sight do describe their relationship as more passionate in the present, their recall is probably little more than a “confabulated memory” – a “projection of their current feelings into the past”.
The new evidence, collected by Florian Zsok and his colleagues at the University of Groningen, comes from a mix of studies involving a total of 396 participants, about 60 per cent of them women, mostly heterosexual, young Dutch and German students.
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