This Kant be Love

Every year around this time, I recall how a frightening medical condition changed my life.

I had all the symptoms the scientific journals warned about: elevated heart rate, shortness of breath, surging levels of the hormones oxytocin (promotes social bonding) and dopamine (pleasure). But I was young then and didn’t know which malady I had contracted or what terrors were in store for me.

It turns out I was afflicted with what psychologists and songwriters call love at first sight (LAFS). I think about the condition every year around this time. (Happy belated Valentine’s Day, lovers everywhere.) And I was pleased to see that the phenomenon is being taken with new seriousness by the academic world.

As many as two-thirds of U.S. adults say they have experienced love at first site. Researchers at Yale and Penn have found that people need an average of only 0.13 seconds to judge a stranger’s physical attractiveness. A similar study determined that the first three minutes together can predict a relationship’s long-term success.

Our culture is bristling with examples of love at first sight: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Tamino and Pamina in Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute” and, perhaps inevitably, a 2023 Hollywood film titled “Love at First Sight,” about a guy and a gal who... well, you can guess what happens.

A recent article by philosopher Errol Lord in the scholarly journal Ergo prompted me to write this column. Lord asserts that the German thinker Immanuel Kant had it all figured out back in the 18^th century. Love at first sight, he asserted, is a rational response by a first-time observer to what Kant called the “dignity” of the person observed. To him, dignity included not just appearance, but also subtle clues to social status, personality and character.

That certainly explains my life-changing experience. It was the summer I turned 21, and I was attending a three-day journalism conference at a vast state university not far from my hometown. At the opening session, I spotted a gorgeous blonde across the room. I could tell from the way she smiled, carried herself and greeted strangers that this was a woman of vast Kantian dignity. And those eyes – warm, brown, sparkling with intelligence – were heart-melters. “Then I knew that I was a goner,” as the Bell Notes put it in their 1959 Top 40 hit, “I’ve Had It,” which played in my head at that moment.

Unfortunately, she was way out of my league – high school cheerleader, editor of her campus newspaper, dean’s list student at a selective women’s college near New York City, daughter of a prosperous New England family. I, by contrast, was an impoverished poseur from a clapped-out Midwestern nowheresville struggling to avoid academic failure at my respectable but less demanding eastern university. I didn’t stand a chance.

Then something happened, a phenomenon possibly linked to those hormones but still unexplained by scientists. On the conference’s final night, I worked up the courage to approach her and, to my surprise, started conversing with unaccustomed wit and erudition.

In fact, we ended up talking all night – dining at a burger joint, sitting in my parked car, giggling atop an earth mover at a campus construction site. Miraculously, I avoided acting like a total putz. At dawn, she insisted we attend Sunday Mass before I drove her to the train station. She left me with a chaste but promising kiss.

We visited each other’s towns often in the coming months, and I experienced the LAFS syndrome each time. Then, to my pleasant surprise, she was accepted into a master’s degree program at my university and would start shortly. (Though we were roughly the same age, she was, of course, a year ahead of me.) It was then I knew we were both goners.

Until, that is, an old, annoyingly tenacious girlfriend showed up unexpectedly. My flat mates let her stay in our spare room. I made myself scarce, sleeping at the campus newspaper office. But when the blonde learned that my ex- was back in town, she hunted me down and declared our own relationship over.

I was stunned, of course, but barely had she uttered that death sentence when those friendly hormones saddled up and rode to my rescue. Almost without thinking, I blurted out the perfect solution to our problem: “Will you marry me?” She accepted on the spot. We wed a few months later.

In the decades since, we’ve had our ups and downs, laughs and tears, kids and grandkids. I sometimes wonder what a sassy, classy lady like her ever saw in me. And I still get the old shortness of breath and elevated pulse when, after the briefest of absences, I see her face again – that smile, that grace, those warm, brown eyes.

I reflect on our good fortune every Valentine’s Day. I cannot credit my own skills and charms, or even the intervention of that 3^rd century patron saint of romantic love. But I do thank the gods of oxytocin and dopamine, and the scientifically, philosophically established phenomenon of love at first sight. It is indeed real.