Have you ever felt this pull?
Suddenly someone seems unusually magnetic. You can’t stop repeating their every gesture, wanting to know everything about them, waiting for the next time you see them, even analyzing a single sentence or a glance for hidden meaning.
Surprisingly, this feeling is rarely found with someone who loves you or whom you can meet at any time.
Instead, it always happens to people who fall a little short.
This person may be a teaching assistant at a university. You see each other every week; he answers your questions, listens carefully to your ideas – you have a lot of opportunities to talk. But somehow, when you’re actually standing in front of him, you can’t find much to say. You think about him during the day, you think about him at night, you look forward to the next lesson, but the border between teacher and student never disappears.
This person may be a colleague with whom you only occasionally cross paths. You know he’s in a stable relationship, but every time you talk, you feel like your eyes linger on each other a little longer than they should. You can’t help but wonder: Does he find me attractive too? If so, why did he never ask me out? You’re probably saying to yourself, there’s never been a chance like this.
These people have one thing in common: they don’t exist at all. They are only almost non-existent.
There is always a sliver of chance between you and them. You both feel like you’re a perfect match; you can’t imagine that in another time, under different circumstances, the story could have been completely different.
I feel more and more that what really attracts us is not the “being” itself, but the state of being. almost, but not quite, within reach. Isn’t it a lovely place? attraction?
I even doubt that attraction and human existence are not related in a simple, linear way.
If someone is fully present, then as familiarity grows, he gradually ceases to be a person full of possibilities and becomes just a real person – the mystery and expectation gradually disappear. If someone doesn’t exist at all, we can’t get emotionally invested in the first place and end up changing ourselves. attention elsewhere.
The position that most easily sustains attraction may be the middle ground—a relationship that still has a little chance, but never quite materializes. Perhaps what attracted us was something that never existed but was almost possible.
Psychology offers a number of explanations for this. Zeigarnik effect suggests that things that are not covered are more likely to stick in our minds, so we return to that idea: “If I had said that then, would things have been different?” Research on reward prediction has shown that the brain is most excited when a reward is received, not when a reward is reliably forthcoming. possible but uncertain. Occasional support explains why an occasional reply, a look, a single caring word often stays in the mind longer than constant, daily companionship.
All these theories describe the same phenomenon: What really amazes us is that rarely is accuracy a possibility.
And yet, I increasingly feel that while psychology explains why such relationships so easily capture our attention, it leaves another question unanswered: why do such relationships take on so much? fantasyanticipation and desire?
Psychoanalysis may suggest another way of understanding it.
Jacques Lacan What we want is often not a specific person meaning he comes to represent us in our inner world.
A young and beautiful teaching assistant can attract you more than just her looks or looks personality (or even its English pronunciation). It can represent maturity, trustcalm intelligence – a version of the person you hope to be one day. What attracts you to an office colleague may not be who they really are, but the version you imagine when you picture yourself. to be with him – more reliable, more attractive, maybe even leads a different kind of life.
In other words, a person can be unique symbolic expression. What they carry is not only themselves, but also our ideals, desires and unrealized possibilities in our lives.
So what really makes us fall in love is sometimes not the person themselves, but the world that person allows us to imagine.
It also explains why “almost non-existent” people are so easily idealized. Because the relationship is never real, we rarely get the chance to discover that the other person doesn’t understand us as well as we imagined, has habits that hurt us, or simply can’t give us the life we imagined. The truth has not yet forced this man from a symbol to become a simple, limited human being.
The farther away the object is, the longer it can sustain our projections. We can keep adding new meaning to them, whether or not that meaning really applies to them.
So the key point here is not just Lacan’s familiar idea of ”lack.” Above all, the “almost non-existent” person maintains a symbolic space open to desire. They are real enough to exist, but not close enough to spoil the fantasy; they give us enough material for imagination, but not enough reality to fully solidify the story.
So what makes us fall in love is not only a possibility not yet achieved, but not closed by reality.
This is when reality really gets involved openness gradually begins to narrow.
Maybe it’s not the possession that kills the passion, but the fact that the space is narrowing. imagination could exist.
So what seems like simple lust can actually take on multiple unsatisfied needs at the same time – not just the desire for a person, but the desire to imagine, to try out the future, to try out who we might be. Viewed in this way, the attraction is not shallow; it depends on personality development to do the same job.
