DATING TO RELATING FOR MEN – WEEKLY COLUMN– 9/6/10
Dating To Relating For Men- Advice By Mr. L. Rx
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Mr. L. Rx is the author of the popular DatingToRelating.com website and the author of the popular book “Dating To Relating – From A To Z”. Have a question? Send it to Column@DatingToRelating.com and it may be selected for answer in this column. (Sorry all questions cannot be answered.)
Question: Mr. L. Rx, I am very attracted to this girl in one of my college classes. I’ve known her for several months now, though we don’t have a relationship. I feel that I am deeply in love with her and told her that the other day. She told me that attraction is not love. Is she right? I feel that this strong of an attraction must be love. Could I be wrong?
Answer: This is one of the best questions I have had in a long time. And the answer is simple. Love is not attraction.
Well, perhaps I should temper that. For some people love is experienced as attraction, or at least love is misidentified as attraction. Attraction between men and women is entirely a physical force not a mental force. Attraction between men and women can be created by mental considerations, but in the end it is not a mental force.
Mr. Webster defines attraction as:
The electric or magnetic force exerted by oppositely charged particles, tending to draw or hold the particles together.
Men and women are oppositely charged particles. When we are talking about attraction here, we are talking about a physical attraction.
Now most women, not all, have a better handle on this than men. Most women, can feel a physical attraction for a man, recognize it as such, determine that the man for other reasons is unsuitable as a “love interest” and move on. Most men, on the other hand, can’t do this. Most men feel a physical attraction for a woman, and the stronger that physical attraction is, the more they misidentify it as “love.”
Both David DeAngelo and myself have written extensively that attraction can be created and that it is not innate. You can create attraction, where there is none, just by teaching men (or women) to say and do or be certain things.
Men physically saying or doing or being certain things, creates attraction in women. This is a physical law, not a mental condition, just as it is a physical law that you can magnetize any piece of metal, and create attraction to that metal whether or not it was magnetized before. (Incidentally you can do this no matter how ugly or poor that piece of metal is!)
Now love on the other hand is also an attraction of sorts. But it is a mental attraction not a physical one. Physical attraction is different for everyone. For some it is how cute you are, for others, how rich you are, or yet others, how famous you are. But in all cases a physical attraction is an instantaneous attraction with no thought attached – just like a magnet.
Physical attractions are meant to get us to pay attention to someone. That’s all. That is the extent of it. Once you pay attention, cognitive processes should take over.
Now love, when it is not misidentified, is a totally cognitive process. It is a mental process. After someone gets our attention, love is the attraction that develops because we get to know someone and find that many of their non-physical qualities are a good “fit”, agreeable, or a match for us.
Love can take a long time or a short time to develop, but “love” is where we arrive when we overwhelmingly start finding ourselves attracted to a person in ways that the physical sexual attraction did not foretell.
When we find that the person’s humor, personality, way of being, way of communicating, and goals in life are all “attractive” or compatible with ourselves (and are real – not fake attributes that were meant to create physical attraction); and when we find that we naturally want to be with a person because of a whole set of variables – not just looks or money or fame – we are starting to develop a cognitive attraction or “love.”
There can be so many cognitive attractions to a person that, at some point, it can overcome a lack of “physical attraction” (looks, money, fame). But, most importantly, a cognitive “love” would look for a “return” variable in another. In other words, a cognitive attraction would not consider it “love” – as between a man and a woman – unless the cognitive attraction saw the attraction going in both directions.
And that my friend is the difference between love and attraction.
Mr. L. Rx
