love at third sight

On New Year's one and a half years ago, friends introduced me to a mutual friend of theirs. We exchanged a smile and a few words and didn't see each other again for the rest of my stay there. I met up with the same friends at a book festival two or three months later, met a whole bunch of other people they thought I should definitely knew. We got along pretty well; how could we not with a mutual love for books and stories? They left my conciousness as soon as I stepped on the train back home. Another two months later said friends wanted me to join them at a fabric printing workshop and of course I let them convince me. Their mutual friend that they'd already introduced me to on New Year's Eve was there too.

We hit it off immediately. Once we really started talking to each other we discovered similarity after similarity. Within the first 20 minutes of getting our room ready, we had exchanged opinions about Heros of Olympus' Jason (we both detest him) and expressed our mutual love for Jacob Reckless and even more for Fox (both characters from Cornelia Funke's Reckless Series), we laughed our butts of the first day and all three or four of us fell asleep semi-snuggling that night. She told me I looked like Helena Bonham Carter (way to win my heart) and Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice, which lead to a hour long discussion about whether Dumbledore is a good man and whether Snape should be forgiven and about how freaking much we love Sirius like oh my god.

I call her my love at third sight now, because that's exactly what it is. Once we got to know each other, once we noticed that somehow our brains seem to work very similarly. Love at first sight is a pretty imagine, a nice dream for hopeless romantics. Even though an instant attraction is a fantastic thing I value my love at third sight more than I probably would value a love at first sight. Why? Because it means I almost missed an opportunity to make a great friend, but I didn't. I made that friend even though we didn't feel the spark the first time we saw each other. It took a bit of warming up but now we're good friends and I really like spending time with her. We could have easily not made this bond if we stopped trying, if we hadn't talked again and again after that first meeting even though we didn't feel like we're about to become partners in crime right away. We tried again, and tried again, and it took almost five months (though to be fair: we live quite a bit away from each other), but eventually we bonded. We didn't stop trying.
What I'm trying to say is, similar to this lesson i've learnt: just because you don't immediately become best buds with somebody, don't stop trying. You might miss a great friendship and don't get to know a pretty cool person.