(Fatal) Attraction

 

The last post by my friend and colleague, #englishrosiee, about the importance of looks in dating has inspired me to write a post about what I find much more important than beauty itself, namely attraction.

I think it’s crucial that we’re attracted to our partner. However, from my experience beauty doesn’t have that much to do with whether we’ll be attracted to someone or not. I remember getting a kiss from a guy with appearance of a supermodel which made me cringe so it’s not the looks but attraction that will (or won’t) make your foot pop. Of course, being conventionally good looking never hurts in the dating business but often  we objectively don’t know where the panties dropping chemistry is coming from.

The secret must be hidden somewhere between looks and behaviour but the small mannerisms of a person matter too. We don’t know why but we start to feel in a certain way and once the attraction is there, it can’t simply be announced null and void, like Henry the VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. We have to live with it till it either ends up in a successful relation or a broken heart. The only choice we’re truly left with is the one between acting on the way we feel or not.

Attraction is important as mentioned before and ideally, the person we’re attracted to is also a person we have a lot in common with and that in general is someone who positively influences us and our lives. If it is so then we basically have no problem. We should totally go for it and who knows, the person may just as well turn out to be the right person, the One, Prince Charming, soulmate, or whatever term you’d like to use for that.

However, the problem appears when it’s not so. When we keep being attracted to individuals with no substance, far from what we really want or even displaying the full range of our pre-established deal breakers. The broke asses, the ones whose interests are limited to booze, the flirts. In other words, the absolute no nos. Sounds familiar? Then you know that attraction can be very treacherous which is the reason why it’s often not good to listen to it.

We all know how difficult it is to tell ourselves not to follow up with the feeling if the mere presence of the person in our surrounding makes our knees go weak. We keep justifying our choice by pointing out the positive things about the person which truly don’t matter to us in long run.
“Freakonomics” (a book I recommend for those who like to learn about fascinating yet random connections between stuff) mentions a study in which people would enumerate a number of factors important to them in dating before a speed dating session and after it. The results have shown that the before and after qualities would differ. The participants had a tendency to change their initial choice of qualities to the ones that they found in people they found attractive during the meeting.

To sum up, attraction is definitely an important dating factor but we can’t base our romantic decisions purely on it. It can make us decide poorly and feel like we just wasted a chunk of our life when the attraction is gone and we realize that there’s nothing between us and the other person. Alternatively, in the worst case scenario, the attraction is going to make us insane, and we’re going to end up with the nickname Bunny Boiler, a term coined after Gwen Close and her role in the movie “Fatal Attraction”. Either way, we don’t want that.