Love at First Sight
Across the room, a tall, muscled figure catches your attention out of the corner of your eye. You can’t help but adjust your gaze to meet his eyes passionately digging into yours. Game over. You know in your soul that he is the man you will marry. Is this true love?
In many fairy tales, the concept of physical attraction is one of the main catalysts and, oftentimes, sole criteria of marriage. A seemingly gallant, courageous king meets a woman of insurmountable beauty and determines on their first encounter that she will become his wife. This repeated scenario in stories across literature and film perpetuates the idea that raw beauty alone can not only ensure a happy and successful future, but is also a secure foundation on which to build a lasting relationship.
The Six Swans
The story of The Six Swans, written by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, tells the story of a king’s seven children, six boys and one girl. Out of jealousy of the King’s attention to his children, the stepmother turns the six boys into swans. In order to save her brothers, the princess must not speak or laugh for six years while she sews shirts from aster flowers. Determined to begin her work immediately, she climbs up in a tree. The king’s huntsmen find her and after investigating her with no response, they take her to the king. The king, when he saw her, fell in love with her “because she was so beautiful” (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm049.html). They were wed a few days after their initial meeting.
Although speaking out against the huntsmen and the king would result in her attempt to break the spell becoming for naught, the new queen did not express any signs of distress about marrying a man who does not know a thing about her.
Disney’s Cinderella
In the Disney adaptation of the story of Cinderella, released in 1950, Cinderella’s widowed father marries a woman with two daughters of her own and dies shortly after. Cinderella is forced by her stepmother and stepsisters to attend to countless and harsh chores and duties. The king hosts a royal ball in order to find his son a suitable wife. Cinderella, with much determination and magical help from her animal friends and fairy godmother, is able to attend the ball. Once the prince sets his eyes on her, he walks past the hundreds of other women there to meet him and dances with Cinderella all night. When the clock strikes midnight, she hurries back home and loses a glass slipper on the steps of the palace. The prince finds it and sets on a mission to marry the woman whose foot fits the shoe. After much searching, the prince offers the slipper to Cinderella, a perfect match, and they get married shortly thereafter.
The prince, after only knowing Cinderella for one night, embarks on a mission to find her, a woman of complete mystery and beauty, and marry her.
Big Fish
The 2003 movie Big Fish tells the story of Will Bloom’s imaginative and exaggerated father Edward Bloom, who will soon lose a battle with cancer. Although distant for many years, Will travels to his father with his wife in hopes that he will learn more about him and his life experiences, rather than the tall tales he formulated as an absent traveling salesman.
One of the many stories depicted in this movie is how Edward meets and falls in love with his wife Sandra Templeton, now Sandra Bloom. Edward travels to the circus and sees Sandra across the room after a show. Time stops briefly and in an attempt to catch up, increases in speed, making it impossible to speak to her. Knowing that this was the woman he wanted to marry, Edward spends three years in the circus trying to learn more about her. When he finally learns her whereabouts, Edward is shot out of a cannon, lands in Auburn University, finds her, and asks her to marry him.
In many of these tales, we see the man instigating the proposal after laying eyes on the beauty of a woman. Though usually no words at all are exchanged, as is the case with the stories above, it is determined by sight alone that marriage is the next step in the relationship. Rather than an offering of love, the hasty marriage between two strangers is indirectly illustrated as a means of marking territory or property. Although the concept of love at first sight is exemplified in countless stories of countless genres, we do not hear of many relationships in real life lasting based on pure physical attraction.
