When it comes to attraction, there are lots of things that affect how much we’re drawn to someone, sexually. As a sex therapist, this is something I discuss in my practice a lot — 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 going through a few 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.

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.

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 science, it doesn’t work.

  There’s a greater chance the person you’re interacting with will become attracted to you if they’re feeling good – which 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 – we 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 there.

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 in 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.

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Other factors that may affect how we become sexually attracted to someone

Another study the author points to – which I thought was very interesting – is a classic study from 1965. This study examined how attractive we perceive people to be, depending on how others have described them.

Descriptions were divided into four categories: solely positive, solely negative, negative initially then positive, positive initially then negative.

This may prompt you to ask a few follow-up questions. That’s what happens to me, anyway.

• Could it be that the results indicate a human inclination for competitiveness?

• Or is it a question of a sense of achievement, when a person goes from disliking to liking you. That we feel we’ve somehow deserved it, and we feel sexual attraction?

Another study in Lehmiller’s book looked at clumsiness and awkward mistakes and how they affect how sexually attracted to someone we feel.

It’s thought that successful people (at least people who we perceive as successful) become more human to us, when they make minor mistakes. And it’s this “human-ness” that increases the power of sexual attraction.

However, if someone we think of as mediocre, slips up in a similar way – we feel less attracted. Seems a bit unfair, doesn’t it?

Sexual attraction is complicated

How we become sexually attracted to someone isn’t always clear cut. Sometimes it has to do with how successful we perceive a person to be, other times it has to do with winning people over, or the fact that we as individuals have similar personalities. By learning more about what sparks attraction you can more easily learn how to rebuild sexual attraction in a relationship, by focusing on the things that drew you in before.

First published on my Swedish website, Sexologkliniken.