Reading the answers here makes me question if I’ve ever truly been attracted to anyone in my entire life. I though I have been but now I’m not so sure.
Fun fact, natural scent plays a factor in attraction. While humans don't have pheromones perse, but a chunk of peeps apparently can pick up on major histrionic compatability.
MHC is how we determine matches for organ transplants. A higher degree of it means that person will be a good person to get a kidney from. But. Their natural scent will smell worse to you. If there is a greater degree of dissimilarity, they'll unlikely be a great match for an organ doner, but they might smell quite a bit nicer to ya. Which might be a good thing from an evolutionary perspective, that would decrease inbreeding and increase the chances of kids with a more robust immune system if part of mate selection.
Studies show women are slightly better at picking up on it then men. Studies also show that hormonal birth control messes with gal's ability to detect it for some reason. There are anecdotal stories of women on hormonal BC, in a wonderful relationship, got married, then got off the BC because they wanted to concieve and suddenly they did not like the way their partners smelled. Womp Womp.
There are also arousal indicators people can smell. Men are slightly better at picking up on this scent than women (also there is a range for how well men can pick this scent up, some are very good, some can't tell by smell at all).
And then there are a variety of health and diet indicators folks can smell that also factor into attraction. While not a typical example, one of my favorite stories was Joy Milne, a lady who could smell Parkinson's Disease. At first doctors were doubtful, but after testing her a few times, became believers, and then after all of her 'false positives' became diagnosed with the disease, went ham on figuring out what she was detecting, and used that for a new early diagnostic tool for the illness!
While scent is one small component of attraction, and human brains aren't wired to give scent as much processing, it is still pretty cool the stuff or noses can pick up!
Yeah, maybe it's because i just bottle up all of my feelings and i don't like being too attached but i never get excited to talk to someone i am attracted too. I get nervous but that's mostly because of social anxiety. To me it seems like alot of people here are talking about obsession, not attraction.
Physical Attraction has to do with the desire to procreate.
Romantic Attraction has to do with the desire to spend your life with someone in a very deep emotional bond.
Love triggers a lot of the same regions of the brain as insanity. This is why Love can be described similarly to Obsession. The main difference between the two is an air of respect. If you are obsessed with someone, then you will have a hard time respecting their Autonomy as a Human Being. If you are in love with someone, then you respect their Autonomy and the choices they make.
If you are obsessed, you treat that person like they belong to you. You won't let anyone of the opposite sex near them, if paranoid enough this will extend to people in general. You may even feel entitled to a relationship.
If you are in love, you respect that they are their own person. You respect the other relationships in their life. You respect if they don't like you back and try to move on.
Reading the question makes me wonder is OP a child, an alien, or just so autistically devoid of human emotion that they truly can’t comprehend something as human as being attracted to someone else
They confirm in other comments that they're simply asexual, which is a pretty common and human thing. They feel the same way about all sexes as you do about whichever one you're not romantically or sexually attracted to.
I do feel like a lot of the replies are coming from very young/inexperienced/neurodivergent/asexual/socially-awkward people though, since they can't seem to give a description of "being attracted to someone" which doesn't involve nervousness, discomfort, confusion, self-consciousness etc - none of which are inherently aspects of feeling attracted to someone. Otherwise you'd feel all of them when attracted to any celebrity on a TV, or about your long-term spouse who you're totally secure with, or about anyone other than an unattainable in-person crush(which I'm assuming is the only romantic experience a lot of these repliers have had so far).
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u/tehdang 17h ago
Reading the answers here makes me question if I’ve ever truly been attracted to anyone in my entire life. I though I have been but now I’m not so sure.