The Rules of Attraction

The statement, “I’m just not attracted to them like that” (referring to romantic attraction) is an all too common one that I have gotten tired of hearing. I guess because of the way people use it, implying that their state of unattraction is, for one, static, and two, without any cause. I don’t know about you, but for me, whenever there is something that is apparently not moving and in a static position, my first reaction is to investigate. Why? Why is it as it is? It just seems like it would be easier to understand such a supposedly definite, unchangeable, unexplained state such as unattraction. Similar to the way a ball is easier to nab when it’s not moving. If someone is supposedly consistently unattractive to a given person, it seems probable that there is a consistent reason or reasons causing this consistent state. At least from my reasoning, this makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately for me, not many people are as devoted to discovering the underlying reasons for things as I am. And, well, who knows, perhaps despite my efforts, I’m really nowhere closer to understanding than they are.

I went through a whole ordeal for the past long while (still coming to terms with it) where I’ve been trying to understand why (as far as I am aware) no man I’ve ever been attracted to has ever been attracted to me, and why every man that has been attracted to me, I have not been attracted to. I guess there are tons of things that would play into that sort of thing, so there’s not really a generalized rule I can use to explain such phenomena. There was one guy in particular who was exceptionally attractive to me but whose head I just couldn’t seem to turn to save my life most of the time. This guy told me we had no similar interests. This I didn’t understand because, though how much I opened up was limited because of my anxiety, if he had just paid attention to any of the conversations we had, I don’t think he would have said that.

Unfortunately, based on later conversations, I don’t think he ever remembered a word I said. He remembered what he wanted to remember. I couldn’t understand why God would create me to be so attracted to that man and have him so…I guess…so not captivated by me. To be honest, the moments where I got his attention the most were the moments I was fearlessly myself with him (rare), and his interest was clearly more sparked. You’d think he’d notice those moments and attempt to seek them out more. My interactions with this fellow, however, have taught me that much like many people I’ve known throughout my life, his views toward the world around him (including human beings) is incredibly consumptive. For example, “How does the outside make me feel?” not “How are who I am right now and my past experiences affecting how I’m feeling and responding to the outside and leading me to the conclusions that I come to about who and what’s around me? And how are the other person's experiences, thoughts, and feelings having an effect on the situation?” I am guilty of pure consumption as well and outward blame as well. It’s kind of selfish to live life consumptively without any introspection. I think introspection in a lot of ways, though it seems kinda funny that it is so, can be more selfless rather than self-absorbed even though you're turning inward. It’s hard to face the truth within yourself seeing as it’s often not what you want to see. It's easier to ignore it all. Also, back to those moments where I was actually myself around the guy, you’d think I’d put more weight on those moments too and realize I really should just be myself. But fear isn’t rational like that, and at least at that point, I was incapable of bringing it into submission. 

Through all of this, I came to the conclusion that our search for consistency in our lives causes us to view ourselves much more as static matter rather than beings capable of being affected and changed. Our characters change and certain aspects of our personalities change throughout life. This leads to the whole idea of maturity. Am I just too immature for the guys I liked? Were they just too immature for me? To be honest, the word maturity is another thing I don’t like, because people use it to generalize too much. They dismiss someone as immature far too quickly when they notice something about them that seems juvenile. To me, this seems to be very hypocritical as I don’t think I’ve met a single person in the world without at least one thing about them that is very juvenile and not all that worthy of respect. The funny thing is, we often don’t notice the immature parts of ourselves so when we look at someone else’s immaturity and compare it to the way we are, we are incapable of truly comparing objectively. In all honesty, rather than just dismissing the whole world as immature, perhaps it would be better to just recognize without highly critical judgement that all of us could use some improvement in some area of ourselves.  

That being said, perhaps attraction and unattraction have something to do with maturity in different areas of your life based on your own experiences, your decisions, and how intentionally engaged you were in learning and growing from all of the significant and seemingly insignificant moments that took place during your life thus far. What I have come to believe and understand is that God is much less currently involved on earth than many Christians want to claim He is. I believe that in order for us to have the ability to make our own decisions, God has, to some degree, taken a step back and withheld the use of His power by not making decisions for us. I do not believe that He has predestined our every step. I think at the end of the world as we know it, God will resume His all-powerful control. But for the sake of giving us all a fair chance to choose our own destiny to the best of our ability, He has currently withdrawn. And being the fair, loving God that I believe He is, I think He will take the fact that we had no control over the genetics we were dealt and what outside forces did to us into consideration when forming His judgments about us. This isn’t to say that He is never involved. I think sometimes He steps in and makes choices for people, and maybe sometimes He chooses a specific spouse for someone, but I don’t think He necessarily does that for everyone. It’s not that He’s choosing favorites, but maybe He works in everyone’s lives differently.

Maybe I do not have a specific man intended to be my husband by God. Maybe He did not dismiss my deep desires and needs when certain people rejected me. Perhaps rather than viewing life as an already written, published book, it’s better to view life as more of a maze that actually has multiple routes that lead to the correct end. Perhaps the man that rejected me would have been “destined” to be my husband had we met at a different moment in time or a different phase. Perhaps if so and so had not done something that affected me which affected this person and in response, I made a decision that affected myself and another etc…perhaps if every little decision that I made and others made happened to line up just right, maybe then that man would have been attracted to me. Perhaps if He had had unbelievably intense social anxiety around women that He found attractive, He would have been able to empathize with me, and thus not be so turned off. Perhaps if certain experiences had not happened in my life, perhaps if I hadn’t experienced so much rejection in the past, I would have been able to be myself, and things would have been different. Perhaps if the guy were a little more mature in the area of trying to listen to and understand others, a lot of false assumptions and unspoken misunderstandings that may have led to the unattraction could have been avoided. And perhaps not, because no one can see everything.

It could be that the inherent parts of our personalities are actually quite compatible, but that our difference in experiences and choices have led to different individual places that just don’t currently click together. Maybe the reason that the men I have found attractive are not attracted to me is that I have experienced life differently than many other people, so the good things I have to offer are still a foreign concept to those men who have not experienced it and so they don’t recognize it as good themselves if they recognize it at all.

It has been hard for me to accept things as they are and not blame myself thinking "what if I had just done this, or this or that? What if I had just matured in this area sooner? What if I had just thought this way?" But when I'm not an all-knowing, all-powerful decision-maker and my experiences are based solely on myself, how can I, as an individual, be that unforgiving toward myself? What should have happened always looks so clearer in hindsight than when I'm making decisions based on my current limited knowledge. I forget that maybe it was those particular experiences that I want to change that allowed me to gain the clarity I now have.

So when someone says that two people just weren’t “meant to be”, maybe they were at first, but the constant shiftings in life as a result of cause and effect have changed the course of history and they really aren’t meant to be anymore. And maybe, with luck, if things change, they might end up being meant for each other again. This is probably one reason why committed relationships end up breaking apart. Because each of the people went into the relationship with the incorrect assumption that through the events that took place, each individual would remain the same, and contrary to their assumption, they didn’t. What at once seemed "meant to be" didn't seem like it anymore. I think true love is what seeks to fill the gaps when different lives attempt to merge. It keeps people together despite life.

Maybe someone who is not attracted to me now or wasn’t in the past will be attracted to me in future. And then again…maybe not. It hasn’t happened to me personally. Either way, it seems silly to make the claim that a particular person will never end up in a relationship with me with such certainty. It also seems unwise to hold on so tightly with such hope that things will change to what I want them to be. If there’s one truly predictable claim I can make about life, it’s that life is not fully predictable at all.