Attraction, PUA Theory - Friday, February 5, 2010 7:12 - 15 Comments

Attraction is Instant?

A thread popped up on a forum recently with a couple less experienced guys talking about having an epiphany that “attraction is instant.”

Of course, as usual, I felt obliged to step in and crush everyone’s dreams.

But seriously, I felt a lot of these guys were getting mixed up so I posted the following:

–

I don’t want to take anything away from your realization, it’s an important one. A lot of guys get the impression from this stuff that you basically always start at zero and have to build attraction from scratch, when that’s not true at all.

But going the other way and claiming attraction is “instant” isn’t correct either.

Attraction is always changing. Coming and going. It’s not static and it’s not an all or nothing deal.

All sorts of things can cause a woman to be attracted to you. Your clothes. Your posture. Your clever jokes. Your interesting stories. The way you touch her. Your haircut. The time of the month. Your job. Your passions and hobbies. Your confidence and self-awareness. The way you laugh. Your beliefs. The way you look into her eyes…

You get the point… I could go on forever…

Some of these things are “instant.” For instance, if you’re 6′3″ and built like Drago from Rocky IV, that’s pretty instant attraction. But if you have brilliant, yet ironic humor, a Ph.D in Physics and used to save starving kids in Sudan in your spare time — well, that’s also attractive, but there’s nothing instant about it. She finds out about it as your identity unfolds throughout the interaction.

In seminars, I refer to these things as “passive” attraction and “active” attraction. A concept that’s actually spread quite a bit in the past two years.

Attraction comes and goes. Sometimes it’s there immediately and you lose it over time (minutes, months, years). Other times it’s not there to begin with, but you slowly build it over time (again, minutes, months, years). But as people in this thread have pointed out… the sooner you build it, the more permanent it seems to be.