Sunday, August 03, 2008
Current thoughts on attraction. On Friday I went out to lunch with my co-workers. Apropos of nothing, talk turned to whether opposites attract or whether we are attracted to people like ourselves. Katherine had been reading a book on the philosophy of Andy Warhol, in which he writes something to the effect that some people become what they idolise. So when you are attracted to someone, perhaps you are too similar to them; you are really attracted to the aspects of yourself (or the sort of person you want to be) you see in them.
I'd have forgotten about this except that on Saturday night the same topic came up in conversation. I mentioned some dude I was crushing on several years ago and was told: "That's so weird. I just can't imagine you two together; you're too similar." That was curious to hear because as these here blog archives will testify, at the time I agonised that we were too different, our tastes too divergent.
Do tastes matter at all? Are we wasting our time trying to impress people with our knowledge of film, wittily quoting from downloaded episodes of the HBO series du jour, by making them mixtapes showcasing our wonderful taste in music and by sending them YouTube clips of things we find really funny? Perhaps we are attracted to dispositions rather than tastes (which are expressions of dispositions) - cynicism, enthusiasm, intuition, stubbornness, impulsiveness, phlegmatism, etc. Perhaps we might even look for a certain kind of spatiality: a posture, gesture or way of occupying space.
It is a tough issue. I mean, I went looking for self-help books on this topic and I found one by this guy called Bret Easton Ellis. It was called The Rules Of Attraction so that sounded promising but then I was all confused when I read it because it was about disaffected bisexual liberal arts college kids in the '80s and didn't really set down any rules as such. I also found another book called How To Hug* but that turned out to be volume 12 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
*Also, I actually found this page on the internet.
I'd have forgotten about this except that on Saturday night the same topic came up in conversation. I mentioned some dude I was crushing on several years ago and was told: "That's so weird. I just can't imagine you two together; you're too similar." That was curious to hear because as these here blog archives will testify, at the time I agonised that we were too different, our tastes too divergent.
Do tastes matter at all? Are we wasting our time trying to impress people with our knowledge of film, wittily quoting from downloaded episodes of the HBO series du jour, by making them mixtapes showcasing our wonderful taste in music and by sending them YouTube clips of things we find really funny? Perhaps we are attracted to dispositions rather than tastes (which are expressions of dispositions) - cynicism, enthusiasm, intuition, stubbornness, impulsiveness, phlegmatism, etc. Perhaps we might even look for a certain kind of spatiality: a posture, gesture or way of occupying space.
It is a tough issue. I mean, I went looking for self-help books on this topic and I found one by this guy called Bret Easton Ellis. It was called The Rules Of Attraction so that sounded promising but then I was all confused when I read it because it was about disaffected bisexual liberal arts college kids in the '80s and didn't really set down any rules as such. I also found another book called How To Hug* but that turned out to be volume 12 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
*Also, I actually found this page on the internet.
