People sometimes wonder what others find most attractive in a person’s face, what they focus on, or always look at… sometimes it’s lips, or determined chin, or button nose, or rosy cheeks or a pale and interesting complexion, or dimples, or tiny ears, or straight/arched/slanted/heavy/fine brows, high/low forehead, expression/lack of expression, smile/stare/gaze/simper… for me it’s eyes. When I’m editing my novels I have to cut out quite a lot of repetitive reference to eyes, because that’s just my thing.
When I was eighteen I went back to Cambridge to spend a few weeks with my aunty and uncle, and one night went down to a pub by the River Cam, The Fort St George, with some friends. I noticed a tall handsome blond guy straight away, standing leaning against a wall talking to someone. He looked up, our eyes met… moments later he was talking to me and that was the start of my first romance. It wasn’t the colour of his eyes, or their shape, or even their expression… it was something I struggle to explain, except to say maybe it was love at first sight. He was so good-looking, like a young Jon Voigt, and such a nice man too, but sadly he lived in Germany, I lived in England and although we tried to continue our relationship it foundered somewhere between the two countries.
It’s not always at first sight that the eye thing happens for me, I’d been together with the man who became my husband for a couple of weeks and had gone on a gig with him, he was behind his drum kit giving it a good thrashing, he looked across the cymbals and caught my eye and bam! That was it! I knew he was the one!
My next novel Flipside starts with an eye thing. Jaz has gone out for a drink after work with her brother and his partner whose life has been wrecked by the trauma he suffered serving in Bosnia and now can barely speak because of a dreadful stutter. They are at the bar, he turns to giver her a drink, their eyes meet and wow! That’s it! It’s love! She falls off the bar stool, he drops the drink… it doesn’t matter, they’re in love! Of course, being a novel, things don’t progress happily and there are a lot of complications, many because of the post traumatic shock he suffers from… but it was the eye thing which started it.
Definitely the eye thing!
Lois Elsden 
Can totally relate to the eye-thing 🙂
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Me too 🙂
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Wink! 😉
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Interesting (tho’ not surprising!) to find what isn’t visible just from an e-mail notification – that you have Raul’s photo to illustrate this point! The biggest surprise to me when I met him was exactly that, his EYES. Firstly, they often look brown in photos and clips so I was surprised to see they are the most beautiful blue. But also so intelligent, EXPRESSIVE, long-lashed and, of course, full of mischief. More generally speaking, I’m not sure eye colour is too important, as long as they are a decent size, well-lashed and have that “heaps of information and expression” going on behind them. Years ago I was smitten with a man 14 years older than I, built like Raul, and completely bald on top – but with huge beautiful blue eyes. People were still somewhat perplexed, but a friend of mine nailed it perfectly: “Ah yes,” she said, “But you see, he has a twinkle in his eye.” And she was right – maybe that’s what it is you may “struggle to explain…”?!
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Yes, the eye-thing is irrespective of age – many years ago I met a former student of mine when he was about twenty-four and I must have been about ten years older – and there certainly was the eye-thing although nothing actually happened at all; he was Kashmiri and had green eyes…
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