It's anything but love at first sight. Try hate-at-first sight: two enemies squaring off in an alley, then in a darkened high school hallway. She's the Slayer, a warrior of light Chosen to destroy evil. He's a vampire, conscience-less and reveling in bloodshed. For millennia, Slayers and vampires have hated each other, hunted each other, killed each other. When they meet Buffy has already killed countless vampires, and Spike's got two Slayers under his belt.
But it's not quite that simple.
...
Somehow they can't seem to stay away from each other: they keep being drawn back together by their own choices: every time you think they have parted ways for the last time, they meet again--Spike barrels back into town to get a spell to heal his broken heart, Buffy decides she won't kill him after he's been chipped, Buffy seeks him out after her return from the dead, Spike returns to Sunnydale after his trip to Africa.
Their relationship is, as Spike says, a dance, right from the very beginning. The steps of that dance lead them into many different roles and many different ways of relating to each other, none of which are simple or easy to categorize. They're many things to each other, but what they could never be to each other is insignificant, no matter how hard they try to forget each other.
...
She sees what he can be. No one else has ever transformed himself for the better the way he has, and she sincerely believes that he can be more. It's a huge moment, in which she sees him as a person--as a good man.
And finally, between her faith and his transformation, there's room for love to grow. Not the kind they had before, which, while powerful, was also always twisted by ugliness and pain, but real, selfless, adult love.
James Thurber once said, "Love is what you've been through with someone." And whoa, have these two been through a lot.
Now that he has a soul, Spike begins to understand the meaning of all they've been through together. He understands true selflessness and goodness and he falls even more in love with Buffy than he did before--he can finally appreciate the fullness of her goodness and light. When he has hurt and betrayed her so horribly, she finds the grace and compassion to forgive him, to believe in him, to take him in, and to fight for him and bring him close to her heart. She's overflowing with love, even if she can't verbalize it. But they never really needed words anyways, so he sees it in all that she does for him.
She's strong and compassionate and selfless. She's a hell of a woman. Of course he falls in love with her all over again.
...
What they are is real. Messy and complicated but true.
