the thing that makes someone instantly attractive

It's not their face. It's not their body. It's not how they dress or how they talk or what they do for work. All of those things are nice, but those are not it.

The most attractive thing about a person is how they listen. Watch how someone listens next time you're talking to them. Are they waiting for their turn to speak or are they actually hearing what you're saying? When you finish a sentence, are they responding to your thought or a thought that has been loading up in their brains?

Do their eyes stay on you or are they drifting away to their phones or to something in the background? Because being listened to, actually listened to, the feeling that every single word that you're speaking is understood and taken in by someone else, that they're actually caring about it, it's one of the most rarest experiences in the world right now. Everyone talks, nobody listens. We interrupt each other.

We are scared of silence. We prepare our responses while the person is mid-sentence. We have listened while scrolling or thinking about something else. We are performing our attention instead of actually giving it.

How many times have you nodded or smiled without knowing what the person just said or understanding it? And when someone really listens and you can feel them understanding your words, not just politely waiting for them, something happens in your body. You start relaxing. You say more.

You say the real things and more deeply and you start saying things that you don't overthink. You feel seen and being seen by someone who's listening is one of the most intimate things that two people can do. conversations I've ever had were with people that paused after I said something and were not afraid of the silence between the words because they wanted to give me the best reply for my thought. And those are the people who I fell in love with, platonically or otherwise.