Tamara, this is incandescent! Not only for its lyricism, but for the rare courage of its lens, one that doesn’t sanitize attraction into strategy, but studies it like an ancient language, half-lost, half-inherited. You’ve chosen to write from the inside out, treating desire not as a tidy algorithm, but as a feverish intelligence. Love it! Wild, disruptive, and impossibly precise. That choice alone deserves praise, because so few dare to tell this story from within the ache.
Your essay reminds me of Clarice Lispector, who once wrote, “I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”. That’s what this feels like: an earned simplicity—fierce, lush, and rigorously honest. Like her, you aren’t satisfied with the “what” of a thing. You insist on the “why,” and then the “why beneath the why”. To read your words is to sit inside a cathedral of mirrors, each sentence a reflection of what we suspect and fear and long for in quiet.
Your framing of attraction as “a kind of literacy” is revelatory. We’re so used to treating chemistry like coincidence—a spark, a swipe, a punchline. But you elevate it to something sacred and epistemological: a grammar of the unsaid. It reminds me of how Leonard Cohen sang of love not as resolution, but as fracture: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”.
You’ve given us the map of that crack. You’ve made it holy.
And how rare it is to hear someone say, without apology, that desire can be diagnostic. That our types are often echo chambers of unfinished business. You reframe our supposed “mistakes” not as failings, but as revelatory artifacts. It’s deeply compassionate, and frankly, so needed, to suggest that even poor choices can be precise in their excavation.
Reading this was like reading someone who has loved with their whole nervous system. Someone who knows that real intimacy is not efficient, not scalable, and certainly not safe, but honest. Disarmingly so.
Thank you for trusting us with this vantage point, from the edge, where the most meaningful truths tend to live.
You, Céline, you read my essay’s undercurrent, its breath. To be understood in this way, from within the ache, as you so perfectly put it, is rare and profoundly moving. And to be compared to Lispector? That’s a communion I don’t take lightly. She once said, “I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own”. That’s the spirit my thoughts came from. Not from conclusion, but from combustion. Not from analysis, but from the raw, stunned pulse that follows a misstep so intimate it teaches you your own name again.
I like a lot your phrase “cathedral of mirrors”. That’s how it feels, each attraction not just a person but a prism, bending the light of memory, myth, and unmet need until we can almost see ourselves. Almost. And yet never quite. We reach for others and touch our unfinished selves. That’s the ache. That’s the glory….
Yes to Cohen, to fracture, to the map of the crack. But also, yes to this kind of response… generous, literary, layered. You’ve made the dialogue incredible! Merci!
What an honor it is to meet your combustion with recognition, to find our metaphors brushing shoulders in the dark.
Your writing invokes, it does what sacred art does, disorients first, then guides, Thank you for showing that the ache is the answer. And for proving, with every sentence, that the most intimate knowledge of another is often born from the ruins of our most beautiful mistakes. With awe, always.
How? How do you do this? Every f@cking time. Excuse my expression. Born to Irish parents in Northern England. I never stood a chance. Swearing is second nature. How am I supposed to get anything done now for the rest of the evening. So much here is a wrecking ball wrapped in velvet that has me going wtf?? The resonance is off the scale and creating harmonic waves in my system.
I just experienced the most brutal end of a relationship and all of this that you present here I know in my bones. I am wearing it as a coat. In ceremony.
This is scarily perceptive. I am not going to quote your own lines to you. There are too many which are quotable. This doesn't have bits of gold in it..it is paved with the stuff.
I am going to walk in the woods now. To land this. It is shatteringly beautiful.
This moved me, a wrecking ball wrapped in velvet, I might borrow that, or better yet, tattoo it on the soul of this essay. Because that’s precisely what this kind of knowing feels like, a collision draped in tenderness, a demolition that somehow comforts as it levels.
I’m so sorry you’re moving through that kind of ending, the kind you don’t just get over, but carry like sacred wreckage. I recognise that coat. I’ve worn it too. It doesn’t keep you warm, but it makes you honest. Ceremony is the right word. Because when love ends, especially the brutal kind, we do more than grieve, we officiate. We bless what it gave us and curse what it took, often in the same breath.
Swear all you want, your Irish-Northern-English DNA gave you the perfect vocabulary for this kind of visceral poetry. And if my essay became part of your ritual tonight, part of the harmonics in your system, then I’m humbled.
In truth Tamara your essay allowed me to bask for a moment in a knowing that what I have experienced and what I have learned in the rebuild since the start of the year are on point. In truth nothing new here folks. But a perspective now from a place higher on the spiral of here we go again. I found a sanity in my madness. That I know now more deeply than ever before that attraction is recognition dancing with projection. That there was a 'her sized space' in me all along waiting for this collision. This just helped me confirm that. Thank You.
Tamara, I read your insights as if they were written just for me. Tomorrow I will spend an afternoon with a woman I was attracted to in a restaurant. I am an 85 year old man and former priest who actually went to the same Divinity School as the new Pope Leo. I was married 52 years after leaving the priesthood. And now it is as if I am reliving my adolescence that I missed while studying to become a priest. Your words made me aware of my encounter tomorrow with this 49-year-old woman who I feel an attraction to and have no expectations other than getting to know her and perhaps making her a friend. Thank you for your gift of insight into the deepest recesses of our soul.
What a profoundly moving note, thank you, Michael! I’m honoured, truly, that these words met you at such a charged threshold. The way you’re entering this encounter is wonderful: not with expectation, but with attention. That’s the rarest form of reverence. Bravo!
Attraction at 85 is no less true, no less vital, than at 25, it might even be more honest, stripped of performance and pretence. You’ve lived a life shaped by vows, ruptures, reinventions, and deep devotion. And now, here comes another moment, not a second adolescence, not at all, but a kind of spiritual renaissance. You missed it then because you offered your youth to something larger. And now it circles back as invitation, not as repayment.
That you are approaching this woman not to possess but to know, without grasping, without agenda…. that is the most exquisite form of presence. I don’t know what will unfold, but I know this, you are already living the wisdom most people never reach. You are awake to the mystery without needing to solve it.
Thank you for bringing your story here! It elevates everything I hoped my essay might be. May tomorrow offer not clarity, but wonder!
What a beautiful affirmation that the soul is ageless!
Some friendships can feel like an Anam Cara, in the words of John O’Donohue. I’m currently in a transformative friendship with a young man almost half my age.
Isn’t is life affirming to feel so deeply like an adolescent? I’m right there with you!
Miriam, thank you for your heartfelt response. My penpal in Turkey thinks I am acting like a 15-year-old. Maybe so, but love is ageless. I wish you a happy relationship with a young man in your life. Thanks for your kind words.
It has always cracked me up talking to other men about what women find attractive. They get frustrated when women claim to want x set of characteristics, but end up with someone who has y set of characteristics, as if 1) stated preferences are somehow absolute or all-encompassing and 2) attraction works on some sort of utility-maximizing algorithm, as if evolutionary psychology holds the precise explanation for why they just got dumped.
I love your idea that what attraction might be is accrued knowledge, both of your partner and yourself, and how that knowledge is gained through disruption, not prescription.
Attraction is both highly exclusionary and indiscriminate. It's exclusionary in the most obvious ways; someone is "the chosen one", and everyone else in the line must be turned away. But it's also indiscriminate in that you are not actually in control of the "who" or the "why" of that next point of singularity, or as you brilliantly put it, "psychic apocalypse", where the fabric of you is altered.
I have to agree with what Céline just wrote: incandescent. And if I may, "inexplicably right". But at this point, your readers expect nothing less.
This might be one of the sharpest dissections of male bafflement I’ve ever read, thank you! It’s true, isn’t it? The desperate need for attraction to be rational, symmetrical, fair, as if desire were a loyalty programme, or a well-calibrated algorithm waiting to be debugged by the next Jordan Peterson disciple.
But attraction was never a transaction, it’s an interruption. You’ve captured the paradox better than most textbooks ever could, this maddening duality of attraction as both hyper-specific and entirely out of our hands. Yes, it chooses one, but it does so with the randomness of a lightning strike, not the logic of a checklist. And your critique of utility-maximising men is perfect. There’s something almost tragic (and a little comic) about watching someone try to reverse-engineer desire like it’s a failed investment portfolio.
What’s so often missed in those conversations is that stated preferences are not blueprints, they’re decoys. What we say we want is often the armour; what we choose reveals the fracture beneath. And as you put it beautifully, the “accrued knowledge” attraction offer doesn’t arrive gently. It arrives as a rupture, a reordering of internal logic that says: “Forget what you thought you knew. Start here”.
Thank you for this kind of resonance, Andrew, for always meeting my words with meme than agreement, with articulation. To be understood at the level of “psychic apocalypse” is a rare thing, and yes, I’ll take “inexplicably right” any day over algorithmically approved!
This is stunning work, and deeply incisive. But we expect nothing less at this point. What you’ve articulated, especially the idea that “attraction is literacy,” reframes desire not as randomness but as recognition, patterned, precise, even diagnostic. And that’s the nuance I want to underscore: attraction is revelatory and it’s predictive. It reveals not only the unconscious content we carry, but the shape of the work still left undone. It’s not foolishness; it’s data—messy, emotional, often encrypted, but data nonetheless.
To your point about misrecognition, many of us aren’t drawn to people by chance, but by internal algorithms we haven't debugged. Attraction becomes a kind of psychological Rorschach where we project not just longing, but unfinished internal negotiations. It’s rarely about who they are, and more often about what part of ourselves they animate: protection, risk, worthiness, loss, hope. Which means that to “study” the object of our desire is, in fact, to study the self in real time.
I think we need a more mature psychology of attraction, one that doesn’t dismiss it as base impulse or dress it up as fate, but treats it as a signal system: imprecise, yes, but rich with insight. As you said, it's not about optimizing it, it’s listening to it, tracing its logic, understanding what part of us is doing the choosing, and what part is being revealed in the choice.
An excellent essay, one that I’ll remember for a long time.
Grateful for this thoughtful expansion, thank you, Alexander!
Yes to all of it: attraction as encrypted data, as a psychic signal system, as diagnostic rather than decorative. The metaphor of the Rorschach is especially striking, what we project onto the object of desire is longing, to which we add the negotiations we’ve postponed, the questions we’ve refused to answer. Every crush is a thesis on unprocessed history.
Then, I couldn’t agree more that what we need isn’t a rebranding of attraction, but a reframe, not as cosmic lottery or carnal chaos, but as emotionally-coded intelligence. Messy, yes. Misleading at times. But never meaningless! We don’t just fall for people… we fall toward parts of ourselves that are still learning how to speak, as I mentioned in my essay.
Thank you for giving my thoughts such a rigorous, generous second life. I’ll be quoting you!
My first thought was oh! how I’d love to print this out and send it in a letter to someone I shouldn’t and most likely won’t.
And then. The comments here! I’ve never seen anything like it. Tamara your writing is breathtakingly gorgeous. Your audience is brilliant. And the care given back and forth! What an absolute treat to witness. Thank you all.
What a beautiful impulse — to send it in a letter to someone you shouldn’t and most likely won’t. That line alone holds an entire novel of restraint, desire, and secret knowing. Ohhh now I like it!!!
And yet, isn’t that what true attraction often does? It writes the letter for us, even if we never post it. It fills the margins with unsentences and almost-confessions.
I’m so moved that you noticed not just the essay, but the ecosystem around it. The comments here feel like a salon of the soul, my incredible readers offering more than just reactions but revelations. I’m endlessly grateful to be part of this dialogue, and even more so when someone like you steps into the room and sees the whole thing shimmering.
You’re part of it now! Letter unwritten, but heard! Thank you!
This is just exquisite. Hard to express how much I feeeeeel all of this so deeply. 🪄✨Ahh that sweet ache. That thinking it’s the other, but really it just a meeting of myself in the mirror of a glance.🥹🪄
Ohhhh that exquisitely inconvenient ache, the kind that dresses up as desire but is really the self, slipping out of its disguise. That mirror-glance moment, where you think you’re gazing at them, but it’s really some long-lost version of you looking back, still bruised, still beautiful, still asking to be met. The magic, I think, is not in avoiding the ache, but learning to read its grammar. And you clearly speak the dialect fluently, Suzy, thank you!
Gaaah…yes! exactly that! “learning to read its grammar rather than avoid the ache”…to see myself as the storm and the other as merely the lightening strike. Ooooof soooo farking beautiful isn’t it? To realise the desire, the hunger, the ache between the hips is me LOVING me and love and life surging through me, FOR ME! Something very powerful about that.
Of course, to unleash it with someone who can meet me there…not gonna lie, love me some of that too!🥵😁
Yes, that right there! When you realise the ache isn’t a lack, but a life force, your own aliveness pulsing through, calling itself back home. The storm was always you. The lightning just made it visible. And yes, finding someone who can meet you in that current? Divine chaos. Sign me up, too!
I’m not going to attempt to be as eloquent as so many of these comments because they all resonate.
In one word- FIRE …
Your metaphors for attraction seep into me with a liquid of desire while my head shakes in nods of yes. I’ve lived these attractions with wonder and inexplicable frustration causing heartache and deep learning.
That one word — FIRE — might be the most honest summary of what this whole essay tried to light and barely contain. Because that’s exactly how real attraction feels, not a spark, but a full-body combustion. The kind you don’t control, you just try to survive with a little grace and maybe one unburned corner of your pride.
Your phrase “a liquid of desire” is its own gorgeous metaphor because that’s what it does, doesn’t it? It seeps. It floods the places we thought we had walled off. It’s both ache and alchemy. And yes, it teaches, but only after it unravels. I’ve lived those attractions too, the kind that arrive with wonder and leave you muttering existential questions into your coffee.
I’m so glad you found these words too. Fire loves company, Shelley! Thank you!
"But desire has never been a good capitalist. It is inefficient, unscalable, rude. It lingers where it shouldn’t and leaves where it should have stayed. True attraction resists productisation. It’s not a preference you can tick in a profile. It’s a psychic event. A little apocalypse that rearranges your inner furniture, sometimes permanently."
Sharp truth, eloquently delivered and dissected as always Tamara! At first I was struck by your bold (yet accurate) claim that desire has never been a good capitalist, but the real pop of gold here is your acknowledgement that attraction is a "psychic event". Attraction is both to our light and our shadows, our unhealed wounds and our tended ones. Attraction is a self-discovery of self, our good bits and our blind spots. Whilst attraction is centred around the relationship of two people, its core is about ourselves, what we know and what we don't until it's revealed by being with another. It's the complicated and illogical dance our soul gets us into, and when the light switches, we get ourselves out of or remain in. It's a divinatory dance with no real destination, until of course we figure this out by the end of our lives. The process of revelation, as you suggest, is a painful one for modern audiences to understand or comprehend. But like seeing and feeling the texture of the petals of a flower, the unveiling of our humanness is an extraordinary thing to behold and experience over the course of our lives.
You're right that attraction is a literacy - "a way of reading what the self hasn't yet spoken" - a profound way of understanding what the essence of attraction is beyond chemistry, green-flag behaviour and a list of characteristics. Literacy encompasses so many things - nuance, flavour, language, scent, history. What a brilliant way of observing and perceiving attraction! "A soul map sketched in glances, gestures, and misread text messages." Yes!
Thank you a breathtaking response, Joanna! You wove an entire tapestry with my thread, pulling in the unseen, the sacred, the messy choreography of shadow and self-discovery. I like your line a lot: “a divinatory dance with no real destination”, yes, attraction is less a journey toward another and more a spiral inward, lit only by the flare of our own contradictions.
You’ve beautifully underlined the central paradox that attraction feels like it’s about them, but it’s always a revelation about us. Our blind spots, our hungers, our unfinished stories with different faces. It’s soul-led, often against our better judgment, and its timing is absurd. But its intelligence? Relentless!
Your point about the pain of revelation is so necessary, especially now when we’ve become obsessed with self-optimisation and aesthetic closure, we’ve already discussed about it several times, you and I. We’ve become allergic to the awkward, the unscalable, the sacred mess. But that’s exactly where the texture lives. The flower, as you say, not just admired but felt, petal by petal, bruise by bruise.
And thank you for picking up on the layers within literacy. It’s not decoding, it’s embodiment. It’s sensing meaning in the unsaid, the flicker, the scent of someone’s grief beneath their grin. That, to me, is the kind of reading worth learning.
You’ve mirrored this piece with such insight and grace, and I’m grateful!
I had an inkling you would like that line ("a divinatory dance with no real destination")! Your idea of "sensing meaning" is a powerful one because there's a big difference between being "delivered" meaning over sensing it out for ourselves. It's primal and can't be packaged.
Thank you for being so generous and present with your responses Tamara, I've noticed you've been getting some well-deserved pick up in your writing of late :)
Tamara this is my second time reading something for you in the course of few days. In a nutshell I cried for good 30 minutes halfway through this before finishing it up. It was as real and disturbing as real attraction is supposed to be, and i felt so free and human in that cry. I was halfway through it when i said “fuck now i’m gonna have to reread this again and think very carefully about what i think of it because it’s scary” i love ur writing, you’re a vision and a dear human.
What a devastatingly beautiful thing to share, thank you, Umaima! That cry, that freedom in the middle of it, is the highest compliment I could ever receive. If the words reached into you far enough to undo something, to shake it loose, then they did their job. Not to comfort, but to recognise. To remind us we’re not crazy for feeling this much in a world that keeps telling us to filter, flatten, or reframe it into something more manageable.
I know exactly what you mean by “scary”. Real attraction isn’t cute, I t’s unseating. It threatens our storylines. And yet, that disturbance? That’s the pulse of being alive. You met it head-on, with tears and truth, and I’m honoured to have written something worthy of that moment.
Phew. Tamara, this is the kind of piece that demands you stop what you're doing, reread it, and then spend the next three days subtly re-evaluating every romantic decision you've ever made. You've bottled the sheer, glorious, terrifying illogic of attraction, and it's absolutely brilliant.
"Attraction isn’t a preference. It’s a literacy." That line. That's it. It's not about a checklist; it's about reading the subtext, the scent, the sorrow. The "knowledge" aspect, the way it just insists: this one. That visceral, unexplainable pull that defies every sensible filter you've ever tried to apply. You're right, Darwin never stood a chance against a man rolling up his sleeves.
"Attraction doesn’t read Darwin. It writes in dialect." This is gold. It's the language of the unconscious, bubbling up, making you ache for someone you have "no good reason to want." The actor who barely spoke but listened like he'd survived a fire. The one who sent lunar metaphors. The manipulative ones. You've captured that magnetic, often self-sabotaging, pull perfectly. It's not stupid; it's revealing. It's the ultimate diagnostic tool, showing you your own unfinished business.
And the way you dissect the modern attempt to "bureaucratise desire"? The swipe economy, the optimization? You're right, desire is inefficient, unscalable, rude. It's a glitch in the algorithm, a psychic event that rearranges your inner furniture, sometimes permanently. We try so hard to be "securely attached" that we forget the point is not to be invulnerable, but to be pierced in new places. That's the truth.
"Masculinity is not the enemy. But our reduction of it… is." That's a crucial, necessary, and incredibly brave point to make. And your description of true masculinity–weird, stumbling, crying during shampoo commercials, building stories retroactively in sheds in bad weather... that's the tender, real heart of it.
This piece, Tamara, is a reckoning. It's uncomfortable because it's so honest. It asks for a level of curiosity and grace that's rare. It reminds us that Eros, in its deepest sense, isn't always kind. It can devastate, it can demand. But it always leads somewhere real. And that's what makes it worth pursuing.
Thank you, Zadie, for this comment that leaves me sitting still for a moment! You understood the heart of it: desire as literacy, not logic. A psychic event. And yes, Darwin never stood a chance against a well-timed sleeve roll.
I’m honoured, truly, by the care and clarity in your words.
This struck me like a front range bolt of lightning. Call me crazy, but there is a part of our psyche, a quality, or part of its structure, something that can only exist when we share it with someone; when we share one and the same part. There is only one between us, and its presence creates a deeply profound connection. When a change occurs in this part, it affects both people. This part of us does not, cannot exist individually. So, its absence sparks a profound longing in each of us and we are drawn because it holds the promise of intimacy. Suddenly we’re looking in a mirror and many of our thoughts, feelings, our subtext are looking back at us.
(I love this part) “A way of reading what the self hasn’t yet spoken, a fluency in subtext, in scent, in sorrow barely concealed by a smirk...
... I mean the quiet, involuntary, irrational insistence of the body that says: this one.”  something we just “know.” “That flinch of fascination. The peculiar quickening when someone’s presence rearranges the air around them like a weather system.” The uncanny similarities in our ways of thinking.
Yes, the quantum entanglement of it all. And fulfilled or not, somehow simultaneously comforting, and terrifying— the ache. 
Yes, the ache. That exquisite haunting that comes not from lack, but from recognition. You’ve put words to something I’ve only circled: that there are parts of our psyche, our soul, even, that don’t fully exist until they’re mirrored. As if they require co-presence to be animated. A shared psychic organ. A mutual haunting. A singular thread running between two nervous systems that never asked to be braided.
What you’re describing is deeper than chemistry, it’s ontological resonance. That eerie familiarity, that mirror that doesn’t just reflect but responds. It’s the part of us that doesn’t exist in us alone, but between us. And when it disappears, it leaves a hole, and it collapses a dimension.
You’re not crazy. You’re brave for naming it.
And yes, quantum entanglement is exactly right. Two particles linked in such a way that a change in one is instantly felt in the other, regardless of distance. That’s attraction in its most metaphysical register… terrifying, tender, non-consensual, holy.
When you come across such an article, penned by an Eastern intellectual bound by social and religious constraints, your mind instinctively draws a comparison—between you, the reader, and the author, the bearer of the message. You begin to trace the narrow space allowed for expressing emotions like love at first sight, which some mockingly refer to here as “a scoundrel’s kind of love.”
A love that is born, grows old, and dies in mere seconds—yet in that fleeting moment, it binds you with a thousand chains. Attraction cannot be rationalized, and love’s chemistry seeks no permission.
Only failed love stories survive to become poetic sagas—tales told with veiled metaphors and subtle hints. Our Arab heritage brims with such stories: pure, idealistic love that finds beauty in missed chances and sanctifies what was never fully lived.
Thank you for this elegant reflection! You’ve brought something essential to this conversation: the geography of restraint, the poetry of what cannot be named aloud. In cultures where direct expression is narrowed, desire doesn’t disappear, it refines itself. It becomes subtext, metaphor, the glance held half a second too long. And in that constraint, something exquisite is born: a love that isn’t performed, but encrypted. A love that lives not in declarations, but in ache.
“A scoundrel’s kind of love” — how perfectly ironic. As if spontaneity were sin, as if the body’s instinct were betrayal. But as you say, attraction seeks no permission. It operates outside the gatekeepers of logic and lineage. It is both exile and homecoming, often at once.
And yes, perhaps it’s only the failed loves that achieve the dignity of myth. Our cultures store them like heirlooms, these stories that didn’t get their ending, and so never got diluted. The unrealised has a strange sanctity. A kind of fidelity to what could have been, unmarred by what was.
Thank you for reminding us that attraction is not just personal, it’s historical, political, cultural… and always, deeply human.
OMG. You do not flinch in your subject matter, even the mystified gossamer of Attraction. You elegantly enunciate the ineffable, but, alas, barely pierce the mystery. Yet this is the greatest "objective" attempt I have ever read to manicle the intellectual essence of the impossible. Attraction, like Eros, will not be fucked with. Attraction is Elvis, James Dean, Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Bridget Bardot. One might say that the 50's was a mini Age of Attraction. But Attraction would say, "Piss off, little pretender. You are out of your league. Go home to mommy. Attraction is for Big Boys(and Girls)." You are absolutely correct when you say Attraction is a kind of Intelligence. Not the kind of IQ or Kuder Preference Test intelligance. No, it is seductively veiled, like Michael Jordon 25 feet away, back to the basket, draped by two defenders. Some kind of Intelligence akin to the Intelligence of Attraction, makes a decision to leap into the air, do a 180 pirouette, and in an instant, quietly flick the ball off of his fingertips to the awaiting twine of the hoop, which it sublimely swishes, without ever touching iron. Now, THAT is Intelligence from Heaven. I am Attracted to THAT.
This response is its own ecstatic riff, thank you for the jazz of it, the full-throated riffing on mystery with the swagger of someone who knows better than to claim certainty. You’re right, Jeff! Attraction is a diva deity with no PR team and zero interest in clarity. It won’t be domesticated, defined, or diagrammed, and it definitely won’t return your calls.
I flinch constantly, by the way. I just try to flinch with style. Because when writing about something as volatile as Attraction, all you can do is approach sideways, with metaphors, misdirection, and a willingness to be seduced by your own sentence halfway through. We don’t explain it, we orbit it. That’s the job. And as you said, the best we can do is manacle the mystery for a moment, knowing it will slip the cuffs and strut out the door in Brando’s white tee.
Your invocation of MJ, that pirouette, that swish that never touched iron, that’s exactly the kind of intelligence I meant. Not measurable, but felt. Not taught, but known. The kind that doesn’t ask permission because it’s too busy flying.
You’re right to say the ’50s were a mini Age of Attraction, before commodification caught up, before branding tried to replace charisma. Back then, we were still stunned by it. Still afraid. And that fear, that awe, is part of the intelligence too….
Thank you for reminding me that some readers don’t just absorb, but they riff back. This was a duet. And I’m grateful!
But of course, Derrida always slicing language until it bleeds ambiguity. The “who” and the “what” of love: his impossible grammar of intimacy. And isn’t that the heart of it? The question that never settles?
Your comment touches the bone of my essay’s obsession. That flicker between loving someone and loving something about them… a smile, a cadence, a story they told once while distracted. It’s so often the what that lures us in, the shimmer of a trait, the echo of familiarity, but if the love endures, it has to become about the who, that unrepeatable singularity that cannot be pinned to a list of attributes.
Attraction, in that sense, is the seduction of the “what,” but the ache? The ache belongs to the “who”. That’s where it gets destabilising, when the object of desire stops being an object and starts being a presence, irreducible and unruly.
The real trick, I think, is realising that the “what” may be the bait, but it’s the “who” that haunts us. Derrida would probably say we never quite love the person, we love the idea of their singularity, which of course is always deferred. But sometimes, if we’re lucky (or doomed), the illusion is so precise it teaches us something real.
Thank you for this, Juan Carlos! A perfect disruption.
Ahhhhh the moth and the flame, forever pretending it’s about warmth when it’s really about incineration. That lyric cuts with the same clean ache my essay tried to map: that sense of stepping willingly into the beautiful ruin of a knowing mistake. “Some kind of love tears your heart”… and yet we return to it, not out of masochism, but because something sacred hides inside the scorch.
Thank you for sharing this, Randolph! Kate Wolf’s voice holds the same gentle devastation Eros often carries, a murmur that rearranges you. Always grateful to be met on that path, where the burn is the compass.
The music of Kate Wolf was the gift of a not-so-long ago friend.
Favorites include
Here in California
Give Yourself to Love
(Her cover of) Peaceful Easy Feeling
But the most deeply impacting for me is
RISING OF THE MOON
which she gave me as we parted.
Engaged in these conversations with the wise & generous feminine (inner & outer) … listening this time, for the first time, I listened, feeling the weeping rise and asking to allow it to flow … but instead, I simply smiled. Such a gift … this love, like the river flows
Tamara, this is incandescent! Not only for its lyricism, but for the rare courage of its lens, one that doesn’t sanitize attraction into strategy, but studies it like an ancient language, half-lost, half-inherited. You’ve chosen to write from the inside out, treating desire not as a tidy algorithm, but as a feverish intelligence. Love it! Wild, disruptive, and impossibly precise. That choice alone deserves praise, because so few dare to tell this story from within the ache.
Your essay reminds me of Clarice Lispector, who once wrote, “I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”. That’s what this feels like: an earned simplicity—fierce, lush, and rigorously honest. Like her, you aren’t satisfied with the “what” of a thing. You insist on the “why,” and then the “why beneath the why”. To read your words is to sit inside a cathedral of mirrors, each sentence a reflection of what we suspect and fear and long for in quiet.
Your framing of attraction as “a kind of literacy” is revelatory. We’re so used to treating chemistry like coincidence—a spark, a swipe, a punchline. But you elevate it to something sacred and epistemological: a grammar of the unsaid. It reminds me of how Leonard Cohen sang of love not as resolution, but as fracture: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”.
You’ve given us the map of that crack. You’ve made it holy.
And how rare it is to hear someone say, without apology, that desire can be diagnostic. That our types are often echo chambers of unfinished business. You reframe our supposed “mistakes” not as failings, but as revelatory artifacts. It’s deeply compassionate, and frankly, so needed, to suggest that even poor choices can be precise in their excavation.
Reading this was like reading someone who has loved with their whole nervous system. Someone who knows that real intimacy is not efficient, not scalable, and certainly not safe, but honest. Disarmingly so.
Thank you for trusting us with this vantage point, from the edge, where the most meaningful truths tend to live.
You, Céline, you read my essay’s undercurrent, its breath. To be understood in this way, from within the ache, as you so perfectly put it, is rare and profoundly moving. And to be compared to Lispector? That’s a communion I don’t take lightly. She once said, “I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own”. That’s the spirit my thoughts came from. Not from conclusion, but from combustion. Not from analysis, but from the raw, stunned pulse that follows a misstep so intimate it teaches you your own name again.
I like a lot your phrase “cathedral of mirrors”. That’s how it feels, each attraction not just a person but a prism, bending the light of memory, myth, and unmet need until we can almost see ourselves. Almost. And yet never quite. We reach for others and touch our unfinished selves. That’s the ache. That’s the glory….
Yes to Cohen, to fracture, to the map of the crack. But also, yes to this kind of response… generous, literary, layered. You’ve made the dialogue incredible! Merci!
What an honor it is to meet your combustion with recognition, to find our metaphors brushing shoulders in the dark.
Your writing invokes, it does what sacred art does, disorients first, then guides, Thank you for showing that the ache is the answer. And for proving, with every sentence, that the most intimate knowledge of another is often born from the ruins of our most beautiful mistakes. With awe, always.
How? How do you do this? Every f@cking time. Excuse my expression. Born to Irish parents in Northern England. I never stood a chance. Swearing is second nature. How am I supposed to get anything done now for the rest of the evening. So much here is a wrecking ball wrapped in velvet that has me going wtf?? The resonance is off the scale and creating harmonic waves in my system.
I just experienced the most brutal end of a relationship and all of this that you present here I know in my bones. I am wearing it as a coat. In ceremony.
This is scarily perceptive. I am not going to quote your own lines to you. There are too many which are quotable. This doesn't have bits of gold in it..it is paved with the stuff.
I am going to walk in the woods now. To land this. It is shatteringly beautiful.
This moved me, a wrecking ball wrapped in velvet, I might borrow that, or better yet, tattoo it on the soul of this essay. Because that’s precisely what this kind of knowing feels like, a collision draped in tenderness, a demolition that somehow comforts as it levels.
I’m so sorry you’re moving through that kind of ending, the kind you don’t just get over, but carry like sacred wreckage. I recognise that coat. I’ve worn it too. It doesn’t keep you warm, but it makes you honest. Ceremony is the right word. Because when love ends, especially the brutal kind, we do more than grieve, we officiate. We bless what it gave us and curse what it took, often in the same breath.
Swear all you want, your Irish-Northern-English DNA gave you the perfect vocabulary for this kind of visceral poetry. And if my essay became part of your ritual tonight, part of the harmonics in your system, then I’m humbled.
Thank you, Paul!
In truth Tamara your essay allowed me to bask for a moment in a knowing that what I have experienced and what I have learned in the rebuild since the start of the year are on point. In truth nothing new here folks. But a perspective now from a place higher on the spiral of here we go again. I found a sanity in my madness. That I know now more deeply than ever before that attraction is recognition dancing with projection. That there was a 'her sized space' in me all along waiting for this collision. This just helped me confirm that. Thank You.
Tamara, I read your insights as if they were written just for me. Tomorrow I will spend an afternoon with a woman I was attracted to in a restaurant. I am an 85 year old man and former priest who actually went to the same Divinity School as the new Pope Leo. I was married 52 years after leaving the priesthood. And now it is as if I am reliving my adolescence that I missed while studying to become a priest. Your words made me aware of my encounter tomorrow with this 49-year-old woman who I feel an attraction to and have no expectations other than getting to know her and perhaps making her a friend. Thank you for your gift of insight into the deepest recesses of our soul.
What a profoundly moving note, thank you, Michael! I’m honoured, truly, that these words met you at such a charged threshold. The way you’re entering this encounter is wonderful: not with expectation, but with attention. That’s the rarest form of reverence. Bravo!
Attraction at 85 is no less true, no less vital, than at 25, it might even be more honest, stripped of performance and pretence. You’ve lived a life shaped by vows, ruptures, reinventions, and deep devotion. And now, here comes another moment, not a second adolescence, not at all, but a kind of spiritual renaissance. You missed it then because you offered your youth to something larger. And now it circles back as invitation, not as repayment.
That you are approaching this woman not to possess but to know, without grasping, without agenda…. that is the most exquisite form of presence. I don’t know what will unfold, but I know this, you are already living the wisdom most people never reach. You are awake to the mystery without needing to solve it.
Thank you for bringing your story here! It elevates everything I hoped my essay might be. May tomorrow offer not clarity, but wonder!
Don't know why, this teared me up, God bless you with be love Michael.
I love reading this about you, Michael!
What a beautiful affirmation that the soul is ageless!
Some friendships can feel like an Anam Cara, in the words of John O’Donohue. I’m currently in a transformative friendship with a young man almost half my age.
Isn’t is life affirming to feel so deeply like an adolescent? I’m right there with you!
Miriam, thank you for your heartfelt response. My penpal in Turkey thinks I am acting like a 15-year-old. Maybe so, but love is ageless. I wish you a happy relationship with a young man in your life. Thanks for your kind words.
My pleasure. I couldn’t help but reply to your heartfelt post.
Here’s to feeling 15 again!! 🎉🥳Enjoy every minute, Michael!!
It has always cracked me up talking to other men about what women find attractive. They get frustrated when women claim to want x set of characteristics, but end up with someone who has y set of characteristics, as if 1) stated preferences are somehow absolute or all-encompassing and 2) attraction works on some sort of utility-maximizing algorithm, as if evolutionary psychology holds the precise explanation for why they just got dumped.
I love your idea that what attraction might be is accrued knowledge, both of your partner and yourself, and how that knowledge is gained through disruption, not prescription.
Attraction is both highly exclusionary and indiscriminate. It's exclusionary in the most obvious ways; someone is "the chosen one", and everyone else in the line must be turned away. But it's also indiscriminate in that you are not actually in control of the "who" or the "why" of that next point of singularity, or as you brilliantly put it, "psychic apocalypse", where the fabric of you is altered.
I have to agree with what Céline just wrote: incandescent. And if I may, "inexplicably right". But at this point, your readers expect nothing less.
This might be one of the sharpest dissections of male bafflement I’ve ever read, thank you! It’s true, isn’t it? The desperate need for attraction to be rational, symmetrical, fair, as if desire were a loyalty programme, or a well-calibrated algorithm waiting to be debugged by the next Jordan Peterson disciple.
But attraction was never a transaction, it’s an interruption. You’ve captured the paradox better than most textbooks ever could, this maddening duality of attraction as both hyper-specific and entirely out of our hands. Yes, it chooses one, but it does so with the randomness of a lightning strike, not the logic of a checklist. And your critique of utility-maximising men is perfect. There’s something almost tragic (and a little comic) about watching someone try to reverse-engineer desire like it’s a failed investment portfolio.
What’s so often missed in those conversations is that stated preferences are not blueprints, they’re decoys. What we say we want is often the armour; what we choose reveals the fracture beneath. And as you put it beautifully, the “accrued knowledge” attraction offer doesn’t arrive gently. It arrives as a rupture, a reordering of internal logic that says: “Forget what you thought you knew. Start here”.
Thank you for this kind of resonance, Andrew, for always meeting my words with meme than agreement, with articulation. To be understood at the level of “psychic apocalypse” is a rare thing, and yes, I’ll take “inexplicably right” any day over algorithmically approved!
This is stunning work, and deeply incisive. But we expect nothing less at this point. What you’ve articulated, especially the idea that “attraction is literacy,” reframes desire not as randomness but as recognition, patterned, precise, even diagnostic. And that’s the nuance I want to underscore: attraction is revelatory and it’s predictive. It reveals not only the unconscious content we carry, but the shape of the work still left undone. It’s not foolishness; it’s data—messy, emotional, often encrypted, but data nonetheless.
To your point about misrecognition, many of us aren’t drawn to people by chance, but by internal algorithms we haven't debugged. Attraction becomes a kind of psychological Rorschach where we project not just longing, but unfinished internal negotiations. It’s rarely about who they are, and more often about what part of ourselves they animate: protection, risk, worthiness, loss, hope. Which means that to “study” the object of our desire is, in fact, to study the self in real time.
I think we need a more mature psychology of attraction, one that doesn’t dismiss it as base impulse or dress it up as fate, but treats it as a signal system: imprecise, yes, but rich with insight. As you said, it's not about optimizing it, it’s listening to it, tracing its logic, understanding what part of us is doing the choosing, and what part is being revealed in the choice.
An excellent essay, one that I’ll remember for a long time.
Grateful for this thoughtful expansion, thank you, Alexander!
Yes to all of it: attraction as encrypted data, as a psychic signal system, as diagnostic rather than decorative. The metaphor of the Rorschach is especially striking, what we project onto the object of desire is longing, to which we add the negotiations we’ve postponed, the questions we’ve refused to answer. Every crush is a thesis on unprocessed history.
Then, I couldn’t agree more that what we need isn’t a rebranding of attraction, but a reframe, not as cosmic lottery or carnal chaos, but as emotionally-coded intelligence. Messy, yes. Misleading at times. But never meaningless! We don’t just fall for people… we fall toward parts of ourselves that are still learning how to speak, as I mentioned in my essay.
Thank you for giving my thoughts such a rigorous, generous second life. I’ll be quoting you!
And the highest praise for me: to be quoted by the one and only Tamara.
My first thought was oh! how I’d love to print this out and send it in a letter to someone I shouldn’t and most likely won’t.
And then. The comments here! I’ve never seen anything like it. Tamara your writing is breathtakingly gorgeous. Your audience is brilliant. And the care given back and forth! What an absolute treat to witness. Thank you all.
What a beautiful impulse — to send it in a letter to someone you shouldn’t and most likely won’t. That line alone holds an entire novel of restraint, desire, and secret knowing. Ohhh now I like it!!!
And yet, isn’t that what true attraction often does? It writes the letter for us, even if we never post it. It fills the margins with unsentences and almost-confessions.
I’m so moved that you noticed not just the essay, but the ecosystem around it. The comments here feel like a salon of the soul, my incredible readers offering more than just reactions but revelations. I’m endlessly grateful to be part of this dialogue, and even more so when someone like you steps into the room and sees the whole thing shimmering.
You’re part of it now! Letter unwritten, but heard! Thank you!
This is just exquisite. Hard to express how much I feeeeeel all of this so deeply. 🪄✨Ahh that sweet ache. That thinking it’s the other, but really it just a meeting of myself in the mirror of a glance.🥹🪄
Ohhhh that exquisitely inconvenient ache, the kind that dresses up as desire but is really the self, slipping out of its disguise. That mirror-glance moment, where you think you’re gazing at them, but it’s really some long-lost version of you looking back, still bruised, still beautiful, still asking to be met. The magic, I think, is not in avoiding the ache, but learning to read its grammar. And you clearly speak the dialect fluently, Suzy, thank you!
Gaaah…yes! exactly that! “learning to read its grammar rather than avoid the ache”…to see myself as the storm and the other as merely the lightening strike. Ooooof soooo farking beautiful isn’t it? To realise the desire, the hunger, the ache between the hips is me LOVING me and love and life surging through me, FOR ME! Something very powerful about that.
Of course, to unleash it with someone who can meet me there…not gonna lie, love me some of that too!🥵😁
Yes, that right there! When you realise the ache isn’t a lack, but a life force, your own aliveness pulsing through, calling itself back home. The storm was always you. The lightning just made it visible. And yes, finding someone who can meet you in that current? Divine chaos. Sign me up, too!
I’m not going to attempt to be as eloquent as so many of these comments because they all resonate.
In one word- FIRE …
Your metaphors for attraction seep into me with a liquid of desire while my head shakes in nods of yes. I’ve lived these attractions with wonder and inexplicable frustration causing heartache and deep learning.
I’m so glad I found your words. 🙏🔥🙏
That one word — FIRE — might be the most honest summary of what this whole essay tried to light and barely contain. Because that’s exactly how real attraction feels, not a spark, but a full-body combustion. The kind you don’t control, you just try to survive with a little grace and maybe one unburned corner of your pride.
Your phrase “a liquid of desire” is its own gorgeous metaphor because that’s what it does, doesn’t it? It seeps. It floods the places we thought we had walled off. It’s both ache and alchemy. And yes, it teaches, but only after it unravels. I’ve lived those attractions too, the kind that arrive with wonder and leave you muttering existential questions into your coffee.
I’m so glad you found these words too. Fire loves company, Shelley! Thank you!
"But desire has never been a good capitalist. It is inefficient, unscalable, rude. It lingers where it shouldn’t and leaves where it should have stayed. True attraction resists productisation. It’s not a preference you can tick in a profile. It’s a psychic event. A little apocalypse that rearranges your inner furniture, sometimes permanently."
Sharp truth, eloquently delivered and dissected as always Tamara! At first I was struck by your bold (yet accurate) claim that desire has never been a good capitalist, but the real pop of gold here is your acknowledgement that attraction is a "psychic event". Attraction is both to our light and our shadows, our unhealed wounds and our tended ones. Attraction is a self-discovery of self, our good bits and our blind spots. Whilst attraction is centred around the relationship of two people, its core is about ourselves, what we know and what we don't until it's revealed by being with another. It's the complicated and illogical dance our soul gets us into, and when the light switches, we get ourselves out of or remain in. It's a divinatory dance with no real destination, until of course we figure this out by the end of our lives. The process of revelation, as you suggest, is a painful one for modern audiences to understand or comprehend. But like seeing and feeling the texture of the petals of a flower, the unveiling of our humanness is an extraordinary thing to behold and experience over the course of our lives.
You're right that attraction is a literacy - "a way of reading what the self hasn't yet spoken" - a profound way of understanding what the essence of attraction is beyond chemistry, green-flag behaviour and a list of characteristics. Literacy encompasses so many things - nuance, flavour, language, scent, history. What a brilliant way of observing and perceiving attraction! "A soul map sketched in glances, gestures, and misread text messages." Yes!
Thank you a breathtaking response, Joanna! You wove an entire tapestry with my thread, pulling in the unseen, the sacred, the messy choreography of shadow and self-discovery. I like your line a lot: “a divinatory dance with no real destination”, yes, attraction is less a journey toward another and more a spiral inward, lit only by the flare of our own contradictions.
You’ve beautifully underlined the central paradox that attraction feels like it’s about them, but it’s always a revelation about us. Our blind spots, our hungers, our unfinished stories with different faces. It’s soul-led, often against our better judgment, and its timing is absurd. But its intelligence? Relentless!
Your point about the pain of revelation is so necessary, especially now when we’ve become obsessed with self-optimisation and aesthetic closure, we’ve already discussed about it several times, you and I. We’ve become allergic to the awkward, the unscalable, the sacred mess. But that’s exactly where the texture lives. The flower, as you say, not just admired but felt, petal by petal, bruise by bruise.
And thank you for picking up on the layers within literacy. It’s not decoding, it’s embodiment. It’s sensing meaning in the unsaid, the flicker, the scent of someone’s grief beneath their grin. That, to me, is the kind of reading worth learning.
You’ve mirrored this piece with such insight and grace, and I’m grateful!
I had an inkling you would like that line ("a divinatory dance with no real destination")! Your idea of "sensing meaning" is a powerful one because there's a big difference between being "delivered" meaning over sensing it out for ourselves. It's primal and can't be packaged.
Thank you for being so generous and present with your responses Tamara, I've noticed you've been getting some well-deserved pick up in your writing of late :)
Indeed :) Thank you, Joanna!
Tamara this is my second time reading something for you in the course of few days. In a nutshell I cried for good 30 minutes halfway through this before finishing it up. It was as real and disturbing as real attraction is supposed to be, and i felt so free and human in that cry. I was halfway through it when i said “fuck now i’m gonna have to reread this again and think very carefully about what i think of it because it’s scary” i love ur writing, you’re a vision and a dear human.
What a devastatingly beautiful thing to share, thank you, Umaima! That cry, that freedom in the middle of it, is the highest compliment I could ever receive. If the words reached into you far enough to undo something, to shake it loose, then they did their job. Not to comfort, but to recognise. To remind us we’re not crazy for feeling this much in a world that keeps telling us to filter, flatten, or reframe it into something more manageable.
I know exactly what you mean by “scary”. Real attraction isn’t cute, I t’s unseating. It threatens our storylines. And yet, that disturbance? That’s the pulse of being alive. You met it head-on, with tears and truth, and I’m honoured to have written something worthy of that moment.
Phew. Tamara, this is the kind of piece that demands you stop what you're doing, reread it, and then spend the next three days subtly re-evaluating every romantic decision you've ever made. You've bottled the sheer, glorious, terrifying illogic of attraction, and it's absolutely brilliant.
"Attraction isn’t a preference. It’s a literacy." That line. That's it. It's not about a checklist; it's about reading the subtext, the scent, the sorrow. The "knowledge" aspect, the way it just insists: this one. That visceral, unexplainable pull that defies every sensible filter you've ever tried to apply. You're right, Darwin never stood a chance against a man rolling up his sleeves.
"Attraction doesn’t read Darwin. It writes in dialect." This is gold. It's the language of the unconscious, bubbling up, making you ache for someone you have "no good reason to want." The actor who barely spoke but listened like he'd survived a fire. The one who sent lunar metaphors. The manipulative ones. You've captured that magnetic, often self-sabotaging, pull perfectly. It's not stupid; it's revealing. It's the ultimate diagnostic tool, showing you your own unfinished business.
And the way you dissect the modern attempt to "bureaucratise desire"? The swipe economy, the optimization? You're right, desire is inefficient, unscalable, rude. It's a glitch in the algorithm, a psychic event that rearranges your inner furniture, sometimes permanently. We try so hard to be "securely attached" that we forget the point is not to be invulnerable, but to be pierced in new places. That's the truth.
"Masculinity is not the enemy. But our reduction of it… is." That's a crucial, necessary, and incredibly brave point to make. And your description of true masculinity–weird, stumbling, crying during shampoo commercials, building stories retroactively in sheds in bad weather... that's the tender, real heart of it.
This piece, Tamara, is a reckoning. It's uncomfortable because it's so honest. It asks for a level of curiosity and grace that's rare. It reminds us that Eros, in its deepest sense, isn't always kind. It can devastate, it can demand. But it always leads somewhere real. And that's what makes it worth pursuing.
Consider me utterly captivated.
Thank you, Zadie, for this comment that leaves me sitting still for a moment! You understood the heart of it: desire as literacy, not logic. A psychic event. And yes, Darwin never stood a chance against a well-timed sleeve roll.
I’m honoured, truly, by the care and clarity in your words.
Tamara,
This struck me like a front range bolt of lightning. Call me crazy, but there is a part of our psyche, a quality, or part of its structure, something that can only exist when we share it with someone; when we share one and the same part. There is only one between us, and its presence creates a deeply profound connection. When a change occurs in this part, it affects both people. This part of us does not, cannot exist individually. So, its absence sparks a profound longing in each of us and we are drawn because it holds the promise of intimacy. Suddenly we’re looking in a mirror and many of our thoughts, feelings, our subtext are looking back at us.
(I love this part) “A way of reading what the self hasn’t yet spoken, a fluency in subtext, in scent, in sorrow barely concealed by a smirk...
... I mean the quiet, involuntary, irrational insistence of the body that says: this one.”  something we just “know.” “That flinch of fascination. The peculiar quickening when someone’s presence rearranges the air around them like a weather system.” The uncanny similarities in our ways of thinking.
Yes, the quantum entanglement of it all. And fulfilled or not, somehow simultaneously comforting, and terrifying— the ache. 
Yes, the ache. That exquisite haunting that comes not from lack, but from recognition. You’ve put words to something I’ve only circled: that there are parts of our psyche, our soul, even, that don’t fully exist until they’re mirrored. As if they require co-presence to be animated. A shared psychic organ. A mutual haunting. A singular thread running between two nervous systems that never asked to be braided.
What you’re describing is deeper than chemistry, it’s ontological resonance. That eerie familiarity, that mirror that doesn’t just reflect but responds. It’s the part of us that doesn’t exist in us alone, but between us. And when it disappears, it leaves a hole, and it collapses a dimension.
You’re not crazy. You’re brave for naming it.
And yes, quantum entanglement is exactly right. Two particles linked in such a way that a change in one is instantly felt in the other, regardless of distance. That’s attraction in its most metaphysical register… terrifying, tender, non-consensual, holy.
Thank you for this reflection, CK!
Somehow devastated now. Not sure why. Yes, the throbbing ache. I must’ve flown too close to the sun.
I’m going to take a break.
When you come across such an article, penned by an Eastern intellectual bound by social and religious constraints, your mind instinctively draws a comparison—between you, the reader, and the author, the bearer of the message. You begin to trace the narrow space allowed for expressing emotions like love at first sight, which some mockingly refer to here as “a scoundrel’s kind of love.”
A love that is born, grows old, and dies in mere seconds—yet in that fleeting moment, it binds you with a thousand chains. Attraction cannot be rationalized, and love’s chemistry seeks no permission.
Only failed love stories survive to become poetic sagas—tales told with veiled metaphors and subtle hints. Our Arab heritage brims with such stories: pure, idealistic love that finds beauty in missed chances and sanctifies what was never fully lived.
Thank you for this elegant reflection! You’ve brought something essential to this conversation: the geography of restraint, the poetry of what cannot be named aloud. In cultures where direct expression is narrowed, desire doesn’t disappear, it refines itself. It becomes subtext, metaphor, the glance held half a second too long. And in that constraint, something exquisite is born: a love that isn’t performed, but encrypted. A love that lives not in declarations, but in ache.
“A scoundrel’s kind of love” — how perfectly ironic. As if spontaneity were sin, as if the body’s instinct were betrayal. But as you say, attraction seeks no permission. It operates outside the gatekeepers of logic and lineage. It is both exile and homecoming, often at once.
And yes, perhaps it’s only the failed loves that achieve the dignity of myth. Our cultures store them like heirlooms, these stories that didn’t get their ending, and so never got diluted. The unrealised has a strange sanctity. A kind of fidelity to what could have been, unmarred by what was.
Thank you for reminding us that attraction is not just personal, it’s historical, political, cultural… and always, deeply human.
OMG. You do not flinch in your subject matter, even the mystified gossamer of Attraction. You elegantly enunciate the ineffable, but, alas, barely pierce the mystery. Yet this is the greatest "objective" attempt I have ever read to manicle the intellectual essence of the impossible. Attraction, like Eros, will not be fucked with. Attraction is Elvis, James Dean, Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Bridget Bardot. One might say that the 50's was a mini Age of Attraction. But Attraction would say, "Piss off, little pretender. You are out of your league. Go home to mommy. Attraction is for Big Boys(and Girls)." You are absolutely correct when you say Attraction is a kind of Intelligence. Not the kind of IQ or Kuder Preference Test intelligance. No, it is seductively veiled, like Michael Jordon 25 feet away, back to the basket, draped by two defenders. Some kind of Intelligence akin to the Intelligence of Attraction, makes a decision to leap into the air, do a 180 pirouette, and in an instant, quietly flick the ball off of his fingertips to the awaiting twine of the hoop, which it sublimely swishes, without ever touching iron. Now, THAT is Intelligence from Heaven. I am Attracted to THAT.
This response is its own ecstatic riff, thank you for the jazz of it, the full-throated riffing on mystery with the swagger of someone who knows better than to claim certainty. You’re right, Jeff! Attraction is a diva deity with no PR team and zero interest in clarity. It won’t be domesticated, defined, or diagrammed, and it definitely won’t return your calls.
I flinch constantly, by the way. I just try to flinch with style. Because when writing about something as volatile as Attraction, all you can do is approach sideways, with metaphors, misdirection, and a willingness to be seduced by your own sentence halfway through. We don’t explain it, we orbit it. That’s the job. And as you said, the best we can do is manacle the mystery for a moment, knowing it will slip the cuffs and strut out the door in Brando’s white tee.
Your invocation of MJ, that pirouette, that swish that never touched iron, that’s exactly the kind of intelligence I meant. Not measurable, but felt. Not taught, but known. The kind that doesn’t ask permission because it’s too busy flying.
You’re right to say the ’50s were a mini Age of Attraction, before commodification caught up, before branding tried to replace charisma. Back then, we were still stunned by it. Still afraid. And that fear, that awe, is part of the intelligence too….
Thank you for reminding me that some readers don’t just absorb, but they riff back. This was a duet. And I’m grateful!
Manacle didn't look right, but I thought, "WTF. Brando wouldn't care." I forgot, however, that you would. Tamara, my manacle mistress.
This is Derrida About love: he is very good making the difference between the who and the what .
1.Do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are?
2. I love you because you are you.!
3. Or do l love your qualities, your beauty, your intelligence?
4. Does one love someone, or does one love something about someone?
5. The difference between the who and the what.
6. Does my heart move because I love someone who is an absolute singularity,
7. or because I love the way that someone is?
8. Often, love starts with some type of seduction.
9. One is attracted because the other is like this or like that.
But of course, Derrida always slicing language until it bleeds ambiguity. The “who” and the “what” of love: his impossible grammar of intimacy. And isn’t that the heart of it? The question that never settles?
Your comment touches the bone of my essay’s obsession. That flicker between loving someone and loving something about them… a smile, a cadence, a story they told once while distracted. It’s so often the what that lures us in, the shimmer of a trait, the echo of familiarity, but if the love endures, it has to become about the who, that unrepeatable singularity that cannot be pinned to a list of attributes.
Attraction, in that sense, is the seduction of the “what,” but the ache? The ache belongs to the “who”. That’s where it gets destabilising, when the object of desire stops being an object and starts being a presence, irreducible and unruly.
The real trick, I think, is realising that the “what” may be the bait, but it’s the “who” that haunts us. Derrida would probably say we never quite love the person, we love the idea of their singularity, which of course is always deferred. But sometimes, if we’re lucky (or doomed), the illusion is so precise it teaches us something real.
Thank you for this, Juan Carlos! A perfect disruption.
The healthy bait should be one who wants to love and another who lets himself be loved
From Kate Wolf’s SOME KIND OF LOVE
Some kind of love tears your heart,
when you knew it was wrong from the start,
but try to explain, the moth to the flame,
Some kind of love tears your heart.
https://youtu.be/A4owPD-RNUc?si=rPusiKmOIvLBlCXN
Thanks for another walk embraced by Eros
Ahhhhh the moth and the flame, forever pretending it’s about warmth when it’s really about incineration. That lyric cuts with the same clean ache my essay tried to map: that sense of stepping willingly into the beautiful ruin of a knowing mistake. “Some kind of love tears your heart”… and yet we return to it, not out of masochism, but because something sacred hides inside the scorch.
Thank you for sharing this, Randolph! Kate Wolf’s voice holds the same gentle devastation Eros often carries, a murmur that rearranges you. Always grateful to be met on that path, where the burn is the compass.
The music of Kate Wolf was the gift of a not-so-long ago friend.
Favorites include
Here in California
Give Yourself to Love
(Her cover of) Peaceful Easy Feeling
But the most deeply impacting for me is
RISING OF THE MOON
which she gave me as we parted.
Engaged in these conversations with the wise & generous feminine (inner & outer) … listening this time, for the first time, I listened, feeling the weeping rise and asking to allow it to flow … but instead, I simply smiled. Such a gift … this love, like the river flows
https://youtu.be/NwcFTK928kE?si=UsZZLpQmmESEwy9d
Beautiful!