How We Become Sexually Attracted To Someone

5 min read

When it comes to sexual attraction, there are lots of things that affect how much we’re drawn to someone. As a sex therapist and coach, this is something I discuss a lot with my clients — and it can differ from the experience of sexual desire. In this post, I’m deep-diving into two key factors that affect how we become sexually attracted to someone (plus a few extra bonus factors).

My hope is that this post gives you a better understanding of the psychology behind sexual attraction and how complex it truly can be.

Factors that affect how we become sexually attracted to someone

Factor 1. Mood

In sex researcher Justin Lehmiller’s book The Psychology of Human Sexuality, he emphasizes the importance of our mood when it comes to sexual attraction. He talks about a study made by Krosnick, Betz, Jussim & Lynn (1992), where they examined what happened when one positive and one negative stimulus was introduced to people before they met strangers.

The study showed that those who’d been shown a picture of kittens tended to react more positively to the stranger, while those who’d been exposed to an image of snakes in a bucket, just before meeting the stranger, reacted more negatively to the unknown person.

Lehmiller argued that you can view this as a case of classical conditioning, and I agree with him on this.

The fact that we’re more often sexually attracted to someone when we ourselves are feeling good – or to people who make us feel good, may not seem surprising in and of itself.

This is, however, interesting in relation to what “pick-up artists” usually preach.

A common pick-up method that was discussed a lot about 10 years ago is “negging”. In essence it means you say something negative to someone to catch their attention. Like “how nice your sweater is, shame the trousers don’t match”. Or – “your friend’s really hot”. Pick-up artists claim this is a very successful way of picking someone up.

There are, however, several reasons why this isn’t a good strategy.

For one, it’s not a very nice way of behaving, generally speaking.

And also, according to Justin Lehmiller and the science, it doesn’t really work.There’s a greater chance the person you’re interacting with will become attracted to you if they’re feeling good. Which, if we’re being honest, isn’t that likely if you insult them.

Factor 2. Similarity

Another interesting factor that determines how sexually attracted to someone we become, is similarity. Lehmiller means that this factor plays a role in the choice of partner.Wwe more often choose a partner that’s about as physically attractive as we are.

This is also a prominent factor when you consider our partners often have a similar intellectual capacity to our own.

This obviously doesn’t mean everybody makes this kind of choice. Just like with all research, this is more or less true for each individual – but the pattern is, none the less, there.

An interesting aspect of similarity being important to attraction, is that this, in itself, doesn’t guarantee happiness in our relationship or longevity, compared to couples where partners aren’t that similar.

Lehmiller brings up dating sites as an example of this. He says that although the matching algorithms on popular matchmaking websites would have you believe that similarity equals happiness, this isn’t backed up by science.

What seems important at the beginning of a relationship doesn’t remain over time. How to keep a relationship alive is all about other things like, creating an intimacy inventory and sharing quick moments of closeness throughout the day. Layering in emotional intimacy that doesn’t just hinge on our similarities but also our differences – can be key.

Because no matter what made us sexually attracted to someone in the beginning – whether it was our similarities or not – there will be a whole lot of life that will come between our passion for one another, as time moves on.

And this, in turn, will mean we cannot just rely on sexual attraction alone to feed our bond. It also needs to be dependent on things like commitment, love and attachment.

Want your sex drive back?

My free resource The Desire Test helps you take that first step towards an increased sex drive, by understanding your decreased desire. 

Download the quiz and yo also get instant get access to my, deeply appreciated, weekly newsletter. You can unsubscribe at any time.