32. Laws of Attraction

A friend and I got talking yesterday about the concepts of lust and attraction. It was kind of interesting and it got me thinking so I thought I’d write about it here.  

This friend is someone whose opinion I happen to value quite highly, so when she told me she had read my most recent blog entry, I asked her what she thought.  After making sure I knew she was not condemning me (like I have said before, while I do think the church as a whole has done a lousy job of the whole ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ concept, most of the people I know seem to be able to actually do it) – and after all, I had asked – she told me that she thought it was a sin.  I was kind of shocked, to be honest… the possibility that I was sinning by allowing myself to experience an attraction to a woman hadn’t even occurred to me.  After I expressed my shock, and after she’d thought about it for a minute, she agreed that it probably wasn’t a sin, it was just dangerous, and that she tends to build fences around potential areas of sin… a concept I completely understand and to some degree I practice it as well.  The thing is; I’m not entirely sure what the ‘sin’ would be that I would be building a fence around here.  The ‘sin’ of developing a crush on a woman? The ‘sin’ of falling in love with a woman?  Like I said in that last post, this girl was straight (and she smoked) so there was no possibility for a relationship there, so even assuming that homosexual behavior is a sin, would experiencing these emotions be a sin?  

Actually, that last part we didn’t talk about at all… that just occurred to me now.  The ‘fence’ I build around developing an attraction to a woman is not to protect myself from sinning; it’s to protect myself from getting hurt.  

Anyway, we started talking about what I meant by ‘allowing myself to feel the attraction’, and I really couldn’t explain it… so instead I started talking about what I didn’t mean, about lust, because I can actually define that.  So… here’s my definition of lust: Lust, for me, embodies a desire to ‘own’ and consists of taking (mental) liberties where you have no right.  So, according to my personal definition of lust, it is not possible for a person to lust after their spouse, because they have that right, and they actually do sort of own them.  The implication that this definition has for me is that when it comes to people I actually know (as opposed to celebrities or whatever), if my thoughts start to stray in a sexual direction, something in me will usually stop it from going any further.  And that ‘something in me’ actually has very little to do with my belief that lust is a sin (which I do believe)… when it does happen (I’m not a saint or anything), the guilt I feel is not towards God (at least not entirely) but towards the person I let myself lust after, because I feel like I’ve violated them somehow.  

The most notable exception to this rule was M, who I’ve mentioned before… but that exception can actually be explained using my definition.  M was one of those girls whose entire self worth was wrapped up in her looks.  She knew she was sexy, and that was her main way of relating to people.  The way she moved, the way she talked, the things she talked about, the way she dressed… it all oozed sex, and it was all very deliberate.   And she flirted with me incessantly… and so she sort of gave me her implicit permission (if not actually the right) to engage in the mental liberties I took with her… I could think all sorts of things without feeling bad about it (at least not bad towards her), which was probably a large part of the obsession.  

The reason I got into all of that was because my friend made the comment that my attraction towards Circus Girl was obviously physical. (Oy, I may have to start asking Liadan for help with my pseudonyms, because “Circus Girl”??  That sounds like a bad comic book superhero.)  And while I cannot deny that I found this girl physically attractive, I did not like having my attraction to her labeled as purely physical.  I mean, I have no idea if I would have even noticed what she looked like if I hadn’t found her intensely interesting.  That may sound impossible, but I have had it happen before where I’ve known someone for ages and something will happen that will make me realize that I have no idea what they look like.  The friend I had this particular conversation with, for example, I had known her for about 4 years before I realized we were basically the same height (she referred to herself as short one day… I remember thinking “really? You’re short?”).  I don’t pay attention to what married people look like (at least not to the point of noticing whether I find them attractive or not), and if I’d known that Circus Girl smoked before I met her, I probably would have taken no notice of her appearance either.  The point is; my attraction to her was not purely physical.  

I started to try and explain this to my friend and her response was basically that, if this was the case, then she’s had the same thing happen – she’s met women on weekend retreats that she thought were really cool and wanted to spend a lot of time with them… and here is where I got lost, because my friend is straight – completely straight… to the point that I think it is really hard (and sometimes it seems like it’s downright impossible) for her to wrap her head around the idea of a woman being attracted to another woman.   She is not the first straight woman to say this sort of thing to me, which seems to me to be an attempt to ‘explain away’ my attraction to women… like, maybe I’m not attracted to them at all, maybe I just think they are really cool.  

And the thing is, I do not know how to explain the difference.  I mean, there are lots of women (and men for that matter) that I think are really cool, and smart, and funny… and some of them I actually have noticed that I think they are good looking… and I’m not attracted to them at all.  Of course, most of my friends are married now, and married people are sort of off of my radar, but they weren’t always married, and I do meet cool single people every once and a while, and I don’t fall for all of them.  So what is the difference?  What tips the scales?  It can’t all be physical, because while I do have a ‘type’, the fact is that I have been attracted to so many different ‘types’ (blondes, brunettes, tall, short, big, small), so that can’t account for all of it.  

I’m actually really interested in what you all think.  What is the difference between ‘attraction’ and…uh… thinking someone is really cool?  I don’t think that this is an exclusively ‘gay’ thing… I think it’s hard to define with straight people too.  So, what do all of you think?