Love at first sight in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”

I am currently teaching Romeo and Juliet to 9^th graders, and recently we read and discussed act 1, scene 5, in which the eponymous characters meet for the first time.

During this meeting, Romeo delivers the following speech, one so beautiful and pure as to bring a tear to my eye:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear—
Beauty too rich for use, for Earth too dear.
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o'er her fellow shows.
The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand
And, touching hers, make blesséd my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight,
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night (1.1., 51-60).

The major premise of this speech is love at first sight, so after reading and analyzing I asked my students whether they believed in the concept—I got a resounding “no.” As they attested, love at first sight doesn’t truly describe “love;” it describes lust, since after all, what could we possible grasp upon first meeting but the other’s appearance?

There is evidence for this reading in the play itself. Prior to his glimpsing of Juliet, Romeo harps upon a different woman, deeming her the most beautiful he has ever seen and disavowing the possibility of encountering her superior. This being the case, Romeo’s visitation with Juliet can be written off as his replacement of one lust object with another, his speech teenage rationalization. As if to extend this reading, the 1996 Baz Luhrmann adaptation drugs Romeo in advance of the party, so that he is high when meeting Juliet—in this way, it attempts to excuse Romeo’s apparently “insane” behavior of love at first sight; he is not thinking clearly.

Such a cynical reading of the play troubles me because I myself have experienced love at first sight, and have found it to possess durability. For this reason, I reflect on the conditions necessary to distinguish the concept from lust and mania, and to give the former term meaning.

As my students established, love at first sight cannot exist in a secular world. Devoid of any reality beyond the physical, there is nothing beneath the “surface” for love to seek, and love at first sight merely describes an infatuation with that surface. That is, one experiences attraction to another’s body and equates that feeling with the lofty notion of love.

But in a world in which reincarnation exists, love at first sight can actually pose a form of recognition, a moment’s remembering a person one has known before. In this world, there is depth beneath the surface for love to seize and hold onto, and superficial attraction is in fact irrelevant to the spontaneous arrival of love—rather, one “loves” another because of their familiarity, steadiness, and connection, qualities founded over a previous or multiple lifetimes even though ostensibly, one has never met the person.

Like so many other commonplace notions, love at first sight constitutes a duck-rabbit, something simultaneously visible as silly and as profound depending upon one’s underlying ontology. In the secular world, the concept simply papers over what at base remains base; in the spiritual world, it is a misnomer describing a second, third, or greater re-sighting of one’s beloved.