In my opinion, there’re way too many princesses who fall in love at first sight. Cinderella, Snow White, the Little Mermaid, Thumbelina, Sleeping Beauty, even Juliet: the majority of famous princesses fall in love right away.
They suddenly fall in love, become completely infatuated, and get all excited thinking “This must be destiny!” Then, without so much as a single date, they accept the prince’s marriage proposal. Seriously, do they only care about looks? Or is it the position of “prince”? Is the lesson here that an attractive person with money and power is the best?
It’s not just the princesses either. Princes are just as bad. Just from looking at the princess’s face, they fall head over heels like “What a beautiful girl, I shall make her my wife!” and propose without any kind of courtship. Among the offenders is some guy who fell in love after looking at a girl’s face while she was asleep. Good grief, is it all just about the girl’s face too? Is the lesson here that all a girl amounts to are her face and her youth?
In any case, these are basically just speed marriages. They walk down the aisle at super speed and everything is wrapped up with an “and they lived happily ever after.” Even a tragic fate like Romeo and Juliet’s only took about two weeks.
Nowadays you’ll see stories in the harem romantic comedy genre catch flak because it’s inconceivable that any of the heroines could fall for the main character, but personally I think that criticism should be levied more at classical literature. I just don’t get it. I don’t get why the princess and prince fall for each other. “Love at first sight” is a crappy excuse to just conveniently wrap everything up.
...Or, well, all that’s how I felt before, anyway. Now, ever since I met her, my whole way of thinking has taken a 180. My world was turned upside down. Love at first sight does exist. I now empathize with the princesses and princes of the world. Come to think of it, an English mystery writer once said that “The only true love is love at first sight,” and now I think that guy might just have a point. Because on that day, at that moment, I fell in love at first sight.
Actually... maybe I just want to make the whole thing into love at first sight. Now that I’ve actually fallen in love, maybe I want my love to be love at first sight. I want to think that because I’ve fallen in love, maybe the first time we met truly was something special. I want to feel like maybe it was destiny. Maybe I want everything about our story to be sacred. I can’t deny the possibility that my brain is tweaking the narrative to make it so.
Come to think of it, maybe these mental gymnastics themselves are what “love at first sight” really means.
You might say it’s a form of self-hypnosis that comes from having love on the brain. It’s not that you fall in love when you first look at someone: after you’ve come to like and eventually fall in love with someone, your brain conveniently restructures your memories so that, when you look back, you’ll be able to say, “I knew from the moment we met that we were destined to be together.” It’s entirely possible that “love at first sight” is nothing more than these distortions and rewrites to your memories. Or something like that.
Anyway, I think I’ve monologued long enough to hide my embarrassment now. It’s about time we get to the point. It all starts with how we met. When I look back, now that everything has been laid bare, I can’t help wanting to laugh at how funny, novel, strange, and just like a fairy tale the whole thing was.