Lately I’ve been feeling pretty skeptical about whether any
kind of attraction actually exists independent of human creation. This likely
stems from one of the classes I’m taking this semester – Sexuality in Western
Culture – in which we’ve discussed sexuality and gender as social constructs.
This idea immediately resonated with me. Being asexual and wtfromantic, I’d
already been feeling dubious regarding sexual and romantic attraction. But once I started thinking about social construction
and learned behaviors, I started to wonder about other forms of attraction as
well. For example, the only type of attraction I experience with any
consistency is aesthetic attraction. One day I thought to myself: Would I even
find people aesthetically attractive if I hadn’t grown up surrounded by social
cues suggesting that attraction as a “normal” human response? Does anybody know
how to appreciate a quality film, beautiful music, good food, an engaging
conversation, or even another person, until they’ve been conditioned by their
surroundings?
I’m not really trying to make a definitive argument either
way, because I myself am still not totally convinced one way or the other. However,
I will readily acknowledge that just because attraction – in all of its depth
and complicatedness – might be socially constructed, that doesn’t make it any
less powerful. The same goes for sexuality, in fact. I wouldn’t dream of denying
that people experience all kinds of attraction in many different variations, I
myself among them. I believe that these thoughts and feelings are valid,
whether they are inherent in human beings or not. But I do see great danger in
assuming that any type of attraction is inherent in all people. Let me use my example of aesthetic attraction again.
From what I can tell, aesthetic attraction seems to mean something different to
every person who experiences it. It prompts different reactions, different
responses. There may be similarities in our descriptions of it, enough that we can
label our experiences with the same word, but the differences are still there.
Deciding that everyone experiences one type of attraction in the same way – or
experiences that type of attraction at all – means ignoring the copious variety
of legitimate experiences that people actually have, as well as devaluing them.
That said, I think that the potential use in looking at
attraction as socially constructed is that it reminds us that attraction is not
innately the same for every person. Each person learns differently, right? Nobody
is exactly alike, and thus, expecting
everyone to fit into the same model regarding attraction (or relationships) is
rather unfair and unreasonable.
So it seems to me, then, that the important question is this:
Why do people experience or (construct) attraction in the first place? From my brief twenty years
of existence and experience, I seem to be slowly concluding that the answer to
that question is love. I think that everyone experiences love in some way,
whether through family, friendship, or any of the countless kinds of attraction
and relationships out there. Of course, love changes in its expression from
person to person, from culture to culture. But it strikes me as the underlying
force behind all different attractions and relationships. I suspect that people
need to love, and to be loved, in some way. As a friend, a teacher, a student, a
parent, a sibling, a partner, a pretty face, a great person to have a
conversation with. The list could go on and on. We feel attraction because we
are searching for love in some form. Love is the root of attraction, is the
root of relationships, is the root of the human experience. At least, that
seems like a plausible theory to me.
