Series Intro

While it might not be witchcraft, the formula for ‘love at first sight’ remains a mystery. However, if you pop the following ingredients into a kettle: large pupils, long glances, and a lovely, attentive smile, you may not have concocted a bona fide love potion but your witch’s brew could contain some insight into the laws of attraction.

Being an optometrist and all around eye aficionado, I have a deep interest in the connection between the eyes and love. After reviewing many decades of literature and research, I have picked out a few studies that I think help us to understand how love affects our eyes and how our eyes can affect the level of attraction and love we feel for someone else. Let’s start off this “Learning The Look of Love” series by first exploring love and eye contact.

Part One: That Sly ‘Come Hither’ Stare

Let’s pretend it’s Friday night, you’re in a bar and you are people watching. It’s dim in here but what do you see? You may see strangers exchanging glances with each other from across the crowded room. Once their eyes meet if eye contact is established and a look is held, the game of love has begun. A man peers around the room and becomes suddenly intrigued by a woman returning his glance. The glance turns into a gaze. He initially found her beautiful but now the magnetism of her prolonged eye contact has amplified her attractiveness.

Like the man in the bar, we do perceive people as more attractive when they are engaged in eye contact with us and when they shift their direction of gaze towards us as confirmed in experiments performed by Mason et al in 2005. This directed gaze apparently signals their interest and the fact that they find us interesting makes them even more appealing to us. In other words, if someone who you find attractive locks eyes with you, they automatically go up a notch on your love barometer.

Now, back to the bar. The male makes his way over to the female once good eye contact has been established and returned but what would have signaled him to come over even quicker? Perhaps along with the look of love, a smile would have reassured her interest in him.

Ben Jones and his team knew there must be more to it than just the eyes. The man in the bar feels a heightened amount of attraction for a woman who is looking at him and smiling at him. They did an experiment in 2006 demonstrating that when someone smiles while directing their interest and eye contact towards us, their attractiveness is boosted, more than someone who looks at us without smiling or when someone is smiling but not looking at us. Of interesting note, we also can find someone attractive if they are looking away from us and not smiling. I guess if your date or potential mate is directing a smile at anyone, it makes sense we’d like it most if that smile was directed towards us because it is that purposeful, attentive smile and stare that can spark the feeling of a connection between two people.

So the man and woman in the bar looked at each other and smiled. Now what? Initial attraction was there, fine, but could long glances really blossom into feelings of love?

Kellerman et al took 72 unacquainted, undergraduate students, split them into male-female pairs and then studied the effects that two minutes of uninterrupted mutual eye contact had on their feelings towards one another. In their study, they found that if the two strangers gazed into each others’ eyes for those two minutes, they later reported they had increased feelings of passionate love and affection towards the other person. Another phase of the experiment had the pairs of students interact in other ways like looking at their partner’s hands or counting blinks of their partner but it was mutual eye contact that best fanned the flames of attraction. This suggests that long periods of eye contact can connect you to someone and even ignite feelings of love inside you for that person you have never previously met.

And for those already in love? Well, they look at each other more than average. Zick Rubin, a social psychologist, did a study on romantic love back in the 1970’s which is still frequently referenced. He came up with a scale that measured the degree to which two people were in love and the strength of their feelings for one another. He had college couples come in and each person filled out a survey asking them questions about their relationship. Then he left them alone saying that the next part of the experiment would start soon. Little did they know, it already had. By observing the amount of eye contact couples gave each other when left alone and comparing it with the level of love their surveys had measured, he found that people whose survey showed a stronger connection of love also held eye contact for longer periods of time than those who had a weaker connection of love.

Another way of looking at it? Let’s journey back to the bar one last time and turn our eyes towards the lovely couple seated at the table in front of us. They are not taking their eyes off each other, they look like they are in deep conversation and in their own little world. The waitress is treated as an unwanted interruption and burden. And this in fact just might be the case. According to Rubin, normally two people in conversation give each other eye contact anywhere from 30-60% of the time but couples who are in love look at each other 75% of the time during conversation and are slower to break their look away from each other when interrupted.

Now I am not saying the next time you are at a bar you should act like a pick up artist and look deeply into your potential mate’s eyes trying to hypnotize them into a love connection. There is a point where unrequited eye contact can go from flirty to just plain creepy. Also, when out for a romantic dinner you should not all of the sudden start staring down your spouse from across the table but a little more eye contact couldn’t hurt.

The complex magic of love can’t be boiled down to a wink, a nod and a grin but it is easy to see that the eyes have a lot to do with physical attraction, seduction and romantic love.

So, are the eyes really the windows to the soul? Perhaps we should say they are the windows to the heart.

Keep an eye out for Part Two in the series “The Look of Love” on large pupils and love.

References:

Jones BC, Debruine LM, Little AC, Conway CA, Feinberg DR. Integrating gaze direction and expression in preferences for attractive faces. Psychol Sci. 2006 Jul;17(7):588-91. PMID: 16866744

Kellerman J, Lewis J, Laird JD. Looking and loving: The effects of mutual gaze on feelings of romantic love. J Research in Personality, 1989 June; 23(2):145-61.doi: 10.1016/0092=6566(89)90020-2

Mason MF, Tatkow EP, Macrae CN. The look of love: gaze shifts and person perception. Psychol Sci. 2005 Mar;16(3):236-9. PMID: 15733205

Rubin Z. Measurement of romantic love. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1970 Oct; 16(2):265-73. PMID: 5479131

Photo credits: Bright Eyes: stock.xchng photo by mokra; Sunset Kiss and author’s photo by Erica Angiolillo, Gotcha! by Erica; Lovers: stock photo at stock.xchng by Dariusz Bargiel