Physical Attraction

Jos spoke to some relationship experts recently about the phenomenon of physical attraction...

Your blood courses through your veins as you stride confidently across the room to approach the spunk at the bar with thick eyelashes and a sculpted, golden physique. He turns around, flashes you a wink, parts his lips, and.... squeaks. The high-pitched tone spins you into a 'U-turn' as you gallop back to your pack of gossip hounds with the bad news.

"He wasn't what I expected" you say to relay the encounter to your curious girlfriends.

Such scenarios make up for many countless missed opportunities - That people choose to let slip when choosing whether to take a physical attraction to the next step and develop a relationship. The role of attraction is said to happen on many levels and depends on circumstance as well, says Lynley Lane - clinical leader of Relationship Services Waikato.

The question I put to her was: How important a role does physical attraction pay when you want to start an intimate relationship?

Lane says (and I think most of us would agree) that the first initial physical attraction sparks you to want to get to know someone better, and may be the starting place for a relationship. However, that may not be enough to carry a relationship through its course."There's that sense like when you first look across the crowded room. You may be on the hunt or the prowl. Then you might find somebody and be like 'right he looks gorgeous, he looks exactly like what I want'." She says from this, something will come over you to make an effort to get the attention of the other person. Here you may want to do something about it or you may just feel the attraction as it is.

Lane says someone's got to be pleasing to the eye to draw you towards them. "But then you may get to know that person and you find out he's a right prick, and so the physical attraction disappears. Here the physical attraction doesn't matter anymore and you don't want to progress any further.

Relationship coach Denise Corlett says in terms of looking at the level of attraction, it depends on the person and what they're looking for: "If someone is looking for a casual relationship, it may well be that they don't need a significant amount of attraction to have a short term or casual affair," she says.

Corlett thinks attraction is important to her clients as a starting point. "Attraction has a significant role to play in a relationship because without attraction as well as compatibility then the relationship probably has less chance of success over time".

The problem here is how people define "attraction". "It might be related to the obvious image and appearance of someone but attraction is also very much related to a person's personality and a number of things about them. And attraction may also come over a period of time. "If you look at some different cultures, for example, you take the Indian culture where you've had arranged marriages for many, many years. For many of those people that [attraction] develops over a period of time," she says.

By Joselyn Khor - Auckland