What Kills Attraction?

Love is not the same as attraction. What gets someone to have feelings of love for us is not the same as what makes someone want to take us home, what makes someone turned on by us, and if we want to keep someone’s attention in dating, attraction is absolutely essential!

The mistakes mentioned below do not hurt love but the attraction, and when we feel like we fizzled out with someone, it is not because of a lack of love but rather because of a lack of attraction. And what gets someone to the point of love? Enough desire in the early stages to carry them through to a place of real deep connection and investment.

This article offers mistakes that I have seen people make a lot, I have made them myself, and it does kill attraction, but let me take a moment to give the due credit to the person who observed and verbalized these points in the most wonderful manner possible: Matthew Hussey. Here is the link to the youtube video where he shares these insights: Why did he stop chasing you?

MISTAKE 1: Showing that we are surprised that someone is into us

If we say or do things that communicate to the other person that it is hard for you to believe that someone like them will like someone like you, that you are surprised that they are into you, what you essentially communicate to the other person is this: someone with their value should not be with someone of your value, and the danger of that is that the other person might feel that they got the raw end of the deal. We all want to feel like we are getting the best deal possible. Therefore, no one wants to go into a dating scenario feeling like they are shortchanged, but when we say to someone that you are surprised by their attraction to you, it is another way of saying to someone that they are the one getting shortchanged.

MISTAKE 2: Telling someone you are afraid that they are going to hurt you

If we continuously show that you are afraid of being left, cheated, and abandoned, you begin to play a victim in the scenario. You are not saying that you have an equal opportunity to hurt the other person because you can also leave. So if you act like you are the only one in danger, it is a way of telling the other person that they have all the power and you have none and that they are more valuable in the situation. You are somehow making them feel a level of safety that might bring boredom and leads to lower attraction.

MISTAKE 3: Talking about parts of yourself you do not like

This could be as simple as talking about disliking your body. When you do this,

• you are drawing somebody’s attention to the very thing that we do not like; you might argue that you are just being honest and vulnerable, but the truth is that revealing insecurities have to happen at an appropriate time and place, you do not talk about how much you dislike yourself on the initial dates.

This does not mean you can never reveal your insecurities and vulnerabilities; instead, you must be mindful of the relationship stage at which you bring these things up. If you begin your interactions with someone with a negative dialogue about yourself, you risk brainwashing them to view you through a lens of shortcomings that you have, and that brainwashing does get through!

There is a right time to bring these up, and you must bring these up because long-term relationships are set on the foundation of accepting the other person with all their imperfections. Still, acceptance is not the same as attraction in the initial stages.

BOTTOMLINE:

If we behave as someone who has no value, who is not desired by anybody else, hasn’t been wanted by anyone in years, and who can blame them, you have got all these unattractive features, if we continue to paint that picture to someone, then they can be forgiven for losing attraction because we are all going on these unconscious ways of measuring people’s values and then getting attracted or not attracted to where they end up on that scale.

The question you need to ask yourself is if the pattern of your behavior is one that paints a picture of someone who has value or someone who has not. And if the answer is the latter, we must start redressing these things we do to sabotage ourselves with the people we like.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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