you don’t want them. you want to look at them.
Natalie Portman is the most beautiful person I have ever seen.
Do I want to date her? I have no idea. I don’t know her. Do I want to sleep with her? No. Not remotely. Can I watch her in a film and never once get bored of her face?
Yes. Endlessly.
That’s aesthetic attraction, and it’s the one I feel most in my life, and I think it’s the one our culture is most confused about.
the sunset test
Here’s the cleanest way I can put it.
When you look at a sunset and it stops you, you don’t want to do anything about the sunset. You don’t want to possess it. There’s no next step. The looking is the entire event, complete in itself, and then it’s over and you go inside.
Aesthetic attraction is that, aimed at a person.
You see someone across a train carriage and something in you goes still. The way they’re put together. The way they carry themselves. The specific competence of how they’ve dressed. And there is no want underneath it. No secret second thing you’re actually after.
You just find them beautiful, and finding them beautiful is enough.
why nobody believes this
Because we’ve built a culture in which beauty is understood as a summons.
If you find someone beautiful, you must want them. If you want them, you must pursue. Beauty is treated as the opening move in a transaction, and to receive it without responding is treated as either dishonesty or dysfunction.
So people who feel aesthetic attraction, which is everyone, mistranslate it constantly.
The straight man who thinks another man is stunning and has a small private crisis about it. The person who develops a “crush” on someone they have never spoken to and would not enjoy speaking to. The person who spends eight months pursuing someone gorgeous and dull and cannot understand why the reality is so much thinner than the wanting.
All three of them are experiencing aesthetic attraction and calling it something else, because they’ve been told the looking must be for something.
it does not obligate you
This is the part that changed my life, and I mean that with no hyperbole.
You can find someone beautiful and do nothing.
You can find them beautiful and never speak to them. You can find them beautiful while in a relationship with someone else and it means nothing whatsoever about the relationship. You can find someone of a gender you’re not attracted to beautiful and it is not a message from your subconscious.
Beauty is not a demand. It’s just information about the world, the same as noticing that the light is good, that a building is well made, that a piece of music does the thing you like.
The moment you understand that the feeling doesn’t come with an obligation attached, an enormous amount of anxiety simply drains out of your life.
what I actually experience
I look at people the way I look at architecture.
Someone will walk past me and I will think: what a pleasure it is that you exist and I got to see you. Their whole self. Not just their face. The way they hold a coffee. The way they’re bad at walking in those shoes. The way they’ve decided to be a person, visibly, in public.
And then they’re gone, and nothing has happened, and I’ve received something anyway.
I used to think there was something missing in that. That the correct response to beauty was hunger, and I was defective for feeling only gratitude.
I don’t think that anymore. I think I’m getting the better end of it, honestly. I get to find the whole world beautiful and I’m never in any danger from it.
for you
Most of you reading this do feel sexual attraction, and so aesthetic attraction is harder to see in yourself, because it’s usually bundled. The two arrive together and you never have to distinguish them.
But try, once.
The next time you find someone beautiful, ask what you actually want. Not what you’re supposed to want. What’s actually there.
Sometimes the answer will be I want them. Fine. That’s real.
And sometimes the answer will be that you wanted to look, and you looked, and it was good, and there was never anything else you needed from it at all.
That’s five of the seven. The last two are the ones you already have words for, and I want to end with them, because I think you understand them less well than you think.
up next — romantic attraction, and the question of whether you’ve actually ever felt it
