Does love at first sight exist?

I must admit that I have been reading a lot of cheesy stuff on the web, thanks to boredom. While I was website-hopping, I came across a thread on how the concept of ‘love at first sight’ is true for many youngsters…and here I was, thinking it to be the prerogative of a Bollywood hero. This really got me thinking, can love happen at first sight? If you find someone attractive when you first lay eyes on them, would you put it down as ‘attraction’ or ‘love’?  Isn’t love all about knowing someone, finding out their likes and dislikes and falling for them despite their peculiar ways?

Thanks to my father’s transferable job, I have friends all over the country and none…none has fallen in love at first sight. It has always been a tedious process of ‘meeting them, crushing on them, dating for a while and falling in love with them’. Despite my many crushes on film stars, authors and classmates, love has always been meant for someone I know well enough to spend the rest of my life with. And I have heard from a lot of people on how love is a feeling that has to take its gradual phase. It can’t be rushed or pushed. But then again, there have been incidents of people meeting someone and declaring to the whole world, ‘yeah, she’s the one!’ How does that happen?

Moreover, do these love stories last? It’s said that when you date somebody for how beautiful they look, you’re committing a mistake as looks fade with time. But if you have feelings for someone for what they are and how they make you feel about yourself, it lasts the test of time. If this is true, how are we to judge how the person is through one look alone? Growing up in a cosmopolitan family, I have seen many love stories culminate into successful marriages…and they are all stories of ‘how I realized I couldn’t live without her/him’ and not ‘I decided it was him/her the day he/she walked up to me’. Am I old school? May be. Do I want to know a person before falling head-over-heels? Absolutely. Does love happen at first sight? Hmm…not sure.

Just to get my head around this idea, I asked a few people about it. Revathi Sekhar, a homemaker, says, ‘love is pretty much a gradual process. You reach a point when you realize how empty life would be without this one person…’
Sukanya Ray, a diehard romantic at heart disagrees though, ‘sometimes, it takes just one look to decide if this person is meant to be with you or not. There is some sort of a connection…that can’t be explained, but it’s there’, she says.

What is your take on this, dear readers? Do you or anyone you know fallen hook, line and sinker at first sight? Time to let us know!