I had an interesting exchange with a nice lady on Wave's blog yesterday under my review of When the Jazzman Sings. We were talking about insta-love and the lady asked in general how I (and other reviewers) would define insta-love. Well I have to say that it knocked me for six for a while. How would I define insta-love? And I've been thinking about this on and off for most of the afternoon (yes, I am that sad).
Firstly, at least in my mind, insta-love is not love at first sight. Love at first sight is (as the name suggests), that instant connection, bolt of lightning feeling that happens the minute that two people's eyes meet. Insta-love is when two people fall in love in, what the reader considers, a very short space of time. It's a little more difficult to define because the timing can vary depending on the situation and the personal feelings of the reader.
But what are my personal feelings? And what are yours? They could be two entirely different things. To test this theory I've devised a little quiz - just for fun. Below are a few different scenarios, some of which I would define as insta-love and some I won't. I'll let you choose yours and then I'll reveal my preferences tomorrow.
1. Couple meet, spend an evening and most of the rest of the day together, including sex. By the third day they are in love.
2. Couple meet, spend an evening and the next morning together, including sex. Then they don't see, speak or contact each other until the next weekend when they do the same as the previous weekend. Then they are in love.
3. Couple meet and go on a date ending in sex. They text each other all week, meet the following week for dinner then sex again. At this point they are in love.
4. Couple meet and go on a date, no sex. They text each other during the day and have long phone calls at night. They meet the following weekend and have sex. They are now in love.
5. Couple are forced into close proximity, day and night, for up to four days during which time they spend much of the time talking about themselves and have sex. When the time comes to part they realise they are in love.
6. Couple are forced into close proximity, day and night, for up to four days during which time they hate each other's guts and constantly argue before succumbing to attraction and having sex just before they leave. At which point they declare their love.
7. Couple spend a week in each other's company, but not necessarily the whole time. After that time they are in love.
8. Couple spend 2 weeks seeing each other now and again and talking on the phone. Then they declare their love.
9. Couple go on dinner dates each Saturday night for a month and don't see each other outside of those dates. No sex. At the end of the month they are in love.
10. Couple see each other pretty intensively for a week, then don't see each other for a few weeks. They meet again and after a couple of days, declare their love.
So which of these 10 scenarios would YOU define as insta-love? Leave your answers in the comments, and remember folks, there's no rights and wrongs here, so no bickering!
Perhaps you have your own scenarios you want to add. Feel free to stick them in the comments too.
1. Insta-love
ReplyDelete2. Insta-love
3. Cusp of Insta-love
4. Cusp of Insta-love
5. I can live with this
6. Idiots (not insta-love though, just stupid)
7. I can live with this one.
8. The time-line is too long for insta-love but has me a bit skeptical
9. The time-line is too long for insta-love, but doesn't has me a bit skeptical
10. I can live with that.
For me it really is a time thing and the amount of time spent together. Because really, on a date or even a weekend date, the person is on their best behaviour. You're not going to know anything about their personality by going to dinner and falling into bed so I don't believe you can "love" a virtual stranger. Now being in close proximity for several days and seeing the worst side of someone can certainly speed up the process, but even then I prefer that the couple not profess their love even if they "think" they are in love. Give it some time to prove itself. But 3 days is too fast.
All the above mention would classify Insta-luv for me...
ReplyDeleteI am quite skeptical and suspect of any plot with protags meeting and saying the L word even up to 6 months, depending on the time they spend together..
I probably am a bit jaded, but I know there is insta-lust, insta-attraction and insta in-your-pants-now, but The L word is a path that deserves time to develope and with a rush job it just becomes too candy cane, as nothing is that perfect and there will be some compromise or even hard choices that cannot be rectified in a four day period..
HFN - yes, but not love...
I have to admit I go with the flow of most of it - after all it's fiction... When the gems come along we know those books instantly and I am sure they don't have insta-luv..
E.H>
1-7 are insta-love for me. I just can't imagine meeting someone and knowing within just a few days that you are in love with that person. I can understand really liking someone, being very attracted to that person and wanting to spend time with them BUT knowing they are who you want to be with forever, wedding bells true love, nope, doesn't feel right.
ReplyDelete8-10 are borderline. A couple to a few weeks is still pretty fast but more believable.
It all sounds more or less insta luv to me. You don't really know someone after a few weeks.
ReplyDeleteThey all sound like varying degrees of insta-love to me...
ReplyDeleteWeighing in, here, just because. :P
ReplyDeleteI'm with Lily in thinking 1-7 are insta-love. The remaining three, not exactly.
Now, to be fair, I draw a very large distinction between loving someone (which can absolutely happen in a couple/three weeks) and being IN LOVE with someone. For me, they're two very different things, but that's not the topic of this post, so... *hums softly*
I qualify a few days to a week as enough time to know whether you like someone. Even when confined together for some reason (desert island, locked together by a psychopath who intends to kill and eat you, in jail for too many unpaid parking tickets, whatever), it doesn't seem very realistic to 'love' someone at the end of that confinement. You might like tham a lot -- maybe more than you remember ever liking someone in your life -- but love? Meh. Not so much.
A couple/few weeks of fairly constant and regular contact, by it in person, via telephone, text message, email, etc. might be enough to have you thinking "I love this person. We have this-and-that in common and they get what I mean when I say things." Add in "Oh, and they're really hot and good in bed and they want me, too, so it's all good," and sure. I can see calling that love.
Being IN LOVE is a whole other kettle of fish, IMHO. It's deeper, more soul-deep, I think. And THAT takes time. Months, and sometimes years... and sometimes it never happens at all, no matter how much you might want it to.
But that's reality and while I wouldn't mind reading a book that traced the course of three years (as an example) from first meeting to being IN LOVE, I'm most likely in the minority.
I think things are acceptable in fiction that would have people entirely boggled in real life. Like... I can accept characters exchanging "I love you" after weeks in a romance story.
In RL, if one of my friends said "OMG, I just met this guy and we had the best sex last night and I LOOOOOOOVE him!" I'd recommend laying off the crack.
As usual, I've gone off on my own tangent, here. Sorry. :(
~Tis
I'd recommend laying off the crack.
ReplyDeleteHa. Best line ever.
Tam: I have to agree that to really understand someone and to fall in love properly you have to get over the honeymoon period and start seeing their faults. If you can still claim to love them after that, it's definitely the real thing.
ReplyDeleteEH:
ReplyDeleteThe L word is a path that deserves time to develop and with a rush job it just becomes too candy cane.
That's just so true. I know that what we read with romance is essentially fantasy, and I would like to think that it is possible to find your true love in four days, but I remain sceptical of any relationship where they jump in with the L word so quickly.
Lily:
ReplyDeleteI can understand really liking someone, being very attracted to that person and wanting to spend time with them BUT knowing they are who you want to be with forever, wedding bells true love, nope, doesn't feel right.
That's a good point. The thing is romance novels are trying to give us that in a relatively short space of (page) time, so unless an author is writing a series and can chart a relationship over several months and years, then we have to sometimes accept and hope that when the couple of weeks are over and the book ends then their relationship will survive into the next 40 years.
Wow, that was a long sentence!
Hi Ingrid and Chris
ReplyDeleteI'm genuinely surprised that this has been the popular response. I was sure that many of you would think that the last few weren't insta-love.
Hi TC
ReplyDeleteThanks for chipping in.
But that's reality and while I wouldn't mind reading a book that traced the course of three years (as an example) from first meeting to being IN LOVE, I'm most likely in the minority.
In some ways this is why I like reading series books which follows a set of characters. The first book deals with the meet, and then the rest show the development of the relationship into love. It's all so much more realistic than trying to fit a declaration of love and a HEA into one book.
I think things are acceptable in fiction that would have people entirely boggled in real life. Like... I can accept characters exchanging "I love you" after weeks in a romance story.
That's true. We suspend disbelief for the sake of the necessity of a happy and satisfying ending.
It is only after weeks that some of the rosy glow starts to fade away and that you can see some things in a person that you don't like as much.
ReplyDeleteSo if you think you can cope with those traits than you are in love.
I can't decide! It seems like many of them could be "insta-love" of the type that would make me roll my eyes in a book. But any of them could be realistic too. Some people take months to fall for the person they end up with, others fall in love at the drop of a hat, fall out again after two weeks and never settle with anyone. Others fall in love at first sight, marry within a week and are still cooing like lovebirds when they are 90. I guess it's one of those annoying ways that fiction has to make more sense than real life!
ReplyDeleteI think any of those scenarions could be convincing if written well. Even number 6! That's terribly Hollywood cliche, but would work better in a book than a movie, since you can explore the inner lives of the characters in a book. If both of them are resistent to the intense attraction between them and argue because of that, then it's more convincing when they do eventually admit that they actually want each other.
Personally, I love a scenario of instant connection, maybe some sex, maybe not, but certainly wanting to. Some time passes before the characters will admit to anyone, including themselves, that this just might be more than sexual attraction. But even once they do and declare that, they should still have plenty to figure out before "I love you right now" can turn into "We'll be together forever!"
Okay, late to the party again, but I see all these as variants of insta-love, but for "falling in love" they could all work,excepting #6, which makes me pull out my hair. It's the falling part that makes the short timeline work. One can fall out of love equally fast, usually after a short, sharp dose of reality. To progress to a steady loving once the initial flame burns out is harder, and probably why we don't see it so often.
ReplyDeleteMaybe there should be a deeper divide between "falling" and "love."
I could actually like a #6 if, instead of love, the declaration was, "You're an irritating bastard and I'm going to f*** you all night and see if you irritate me just as much in the morning."
Agh. Now I have to go write that.