Why do we love/hate a person at first sight?

You may answer: ‘it is because of his/her character and personality.’  

But the truth cannot be far from that.

You might have met someone just once and you felt attracted at first sight. Not a ‘thunderbolt love’, but you certainly felt some unknown strings pulling you mildly to him/her. There was no time to study the person or his/her background, likes, dislikes, views on family, future, religion, politics or anything else. You could not even ask her/his name. All the same you felt attracted.  

“You look at a person and you feel like  you have made a connection. you looked at this one person out of the entire people assembled there and thought, wow! This person is made for me!” In eastern societies living together before marriage is unthinkable and consent for marriage is based entirely on the first impression or liking.   A youngster will like a person whose features match with those held dear in the subconscious. 

When you meet, ten people together, you may feel an instant liking for say, two of them. Another guy would catch your attention more. You feel he is really handsome.  Two of the remaining ones evoke a dislike in your mind while a third is detestable. The remaining four persons look neutral; you neither like nor dislike them.   Well, what a diverse reaction! You have just seen them. Of course dressing and grooming does differentiate them, but that may not be the real reason that has evoked these reactions in your mind. Your judgment has nothing to do with their character, education or status as you do not know them at all

Why did you see them differently? The psychology of falling in love may enlighten us to understand why we fall in love with someone. But the majority of us do not care to analyze the reasons and we just like to treat this as a mysterious process with no rules.  But we have to know why we like certain people and why we dislike others.

Why we like the person we like? If we find someone who has similar features to someone who was dear to us during our infancy and early childhood (these features are all indelibly inscribed in our subconscious mind) we may take an instant liking to him/her. Further, from our life experiences we have drawn a list of the nature of the characteristics (‘criteria’) like  the color of the skin, height, weight, facial appearance, hair, body profile, body language and communication ) that strongly appeal to our mind.  If we find these criteria in a particular person we tend to like him and generally we are attracted to him. If the features held dear by our subconscious mind (gleaned from the features of the persons who loved or took care of us in our early days) and the criteria, we have come to accept as ideal, we are looking for in a person, are found in a man or woman, we tend to instantly fall in love with or like him/her strongly.  

This is an unconscious process and it does not result from any objective study of the person in front.  This is universal and this first felling will create a lasting mental bias towards him or her unless conscious efforts are later undertaken to correct the same.  We are positively inclined to one who matches with our map of an ideal person and negatively inclined to another who is a mismatch.A question like this may have propped up in your mind sometimes: “Why don’t I feel attracted to someone who is ‘absolutely fantastic’ to many others?”

Otherwise, you might have felt, “why am I feeling an attraction to this person even though he/she is not conventionally beautiful or handsome?”

If the features and the criteria held by you match with those of the person in front of you, there will be an instant liking which may lead to love. People instantaneously notice one’s physical appearance and get trapped into love/hate at the first sight/ meet. Strongly- felt positive feelings and the webs of sexual attraction between a male and a female makes an impartial assessment of one’s nature and personality later very difficult. And hence the first attraction is very crucial in the eventual decision to accept or reject. If you strongly dislike a person in the first encounter it is mainly because of the mismatch between his appearance, body language communication and the features and criteria you hold dear to you in the depths of your mind.  This dislike will continue to influence you in assessing the person in your future encounters before the crucially important decision as mentioned before. Many of our enemies’ features will not match with those held good by your subconscious mind. There will be mismatches between the criteria held dear by us and those of the persons in question.     

 Love or liking at first sight starts with an impressible feature and criteria matching. Dislike, hatred, enmity -- all must have a beginning in a total mismatch of features and criteria.