When did Sherlock and John fall in love? 

(Sherlock Meta by Loudest Subtext In Television)

Question: 

Ok this may be a stretch and I know it's pure speculation but I would really love to know you're take on this. You said that John realized he was in love with Sherlock during the pool scene in The Great Game and that Sherlock deduced himself to be in love with John during The Sign of Three which I agree with. But when do you think Sherlock fell in love with John ? If he deduced he's in love with John it must have happened before The Sign of Three? Is there a moment that's particularly striking ?

Loudest Subtext in Television:

It depends on what you mean by love exactly. We get a lot of suggestions of an instant connection the first time they met. For example, the callback for John in "The Network game" implies that John thinks of it like that in retrospect anyway, that it all started for him when he first met Sherlock. But it’s unlikely John knew he was in love and not merely attracted until later. Then Sherlock’s perspective on his first glance at John is really loaded.

There’s some physical attraction on John’s part perhaps immediately too — when he hands Sherlock his phone the first time he smiles slightly and looks away, which is odd for John — but he’s certainly aware of the physical angle by the time they talk at Angelo’s. As for Sherlock’s part, when John showed up at Bart’s John was wearing the outfit Sherlock’s dad wears in series 3, so we might take from that that Sherlock was latently physically attracted from the start and didn’t realize it — which goes a long way toward explaining why his gaze keeps going back to John’s face and eyes during his first deduction of him, when normally Sherlock’s deductions have him take in details and immediately move on.

I think they both unknowingly fell in love to some extent the first night — John in particular after he realized Sherlock had cured his limp, and Sherlock in particular when he realized John had shot the cabbie.

But for when they were undeniably in love, I think John couldn’t deny it to himself anymore after the pool scene, and that’s when it hit Sherlock too. Though Sherlock was still too emotionally repressed to fully acknowledge it as love — in large part because he didn’t think John could be in love with him, so what would be the point? — he seems to wrestle with it in those terms anyway: Sherlock spends all of A Scandal in Belgravia worrying what John thinks of his capacity for sentiment, and he’s resentful of John’s girlfriends and how John looks at straight porn and how John basically has a life outside of him, and he obsesses over all the reasons John has to dislike him (he fixates on John’s blog entry about how he couldn’t solve a case), and he starts composing sad music while reading one of John’s blog entries about a gay couple wherein one of the guys kills the other. A Scandal in Belgravia also marks the first time we see Sherlock genuinely obsessed with dumb details about John. When he says in Mycroft’s office that “I imagine John Watson thinks love is a mystery to me” he goes on to describe the chemical effects of romantic love — pulse rising, pupils dilating — not platonic love. So his struggle with his feelings for John is consciously romantic to some extent, but it seems so impossible, and it terrifies him so much, that he can’t even go far enough with the idea to sort out his sexual orientation, even. His brain just breaks when it comes to the idea of John caring about him in even a significant platonic way. He can’t safely acknowledge his feelings until The Sign of Three when he first realizes John had feelings for him and lied about it, and then he sorts out his orientation and admits to himself he’d been in love with John too.

So the significant points for both of them line up in my mind. First meeting there was an instant connection, first night they unconsciously fell in love, and at the pool neither of them could deny the intense feelings that were there and they both struggled with it from that point onward. Sherlock had to admit his feelings to himself at John’s wedding, and John’s wedding was also when John was forced to acknowledge getting married wasn’t getting rid of his feelings for Sherlock, but there was nothing else John thought he could do.