I’ve met a great guy. I want to fancy him, but I don’t yet ...

¦ I’m in my mid-30s and I’ve met a great guy. I want to fancy him, because he’s brilliant and lovely and we have great rapport.

All my past relationships have started with lust. Can you make sexual attraction happen?

>> Those lust-first liaisons haven’t worked out for you, so passion alone is not enough. There has to be chemistry for a relationship to work, but if sexual attraction is on a scale from 1 to 10, where 0-2 means ‘zero attraction’ and 8-10 is ‘lust on steroids’, then a relationship between 3 and 7 may have greater durability, because your emotional connection, and your judgement, are not overwhelmed by your physical response.

The ingredients of good relationship are intimacy (attachment and closeness), passion (sexual attraction) and commitment (the decision to remain). Relationships are not static, so these elements combine differently at different times. In the beginning, passion might be dominant; but attachment and commitment become increasingly significant.

This “triangular theory of love” was developed by the psychologist Robert Sternberg in 1986. Later permutations of the model describe relationships that don’t include all three elements — so your relationship is “companionate”, because it contains both intimacy and commitment, but is low on passion. Your previous relationships might have been described as “infatuations”, because they contained passion, but lacked intimacy and commitment.

Because you rate this guy, the more time you spend with him the more likely you are to find him sexually attractive. A wealth of psychological research confirms that proximity can increase attraction, so students who sit near to each other in class are more likely to be attracted to each other (Back, Schmukle & Egloff, 2008). The same applies to colleagues who work in proximity. Why do you think so many men have affairs with their secretaries? Or so many doctors end up dating nurses?

The phenomenon is partly explained by logistics, but it is also a result of shared experience and familiarity. Basically, we like the things, and the people, that are most familiar to us.

The “mere exposure” effect (Zajonc, 1998) contradicts the belief that one day we will all find, immediately recognise, and fall in love with, ‘the one’. The divorce rate alone should be enough to persuade us that this is a crock, but individualist cultures place a disproportionate value on the notion of passionate love. While I don’t advocate arranged marriages, in collectivist cultures where they are the norm couples don’t expect to be hit by a thunderbolt when they first set eyes on each other. They believe that love and lust grow from increased familiarity.

Sexual attraction may be the spark that ignites a romance, but ask any couple together for more than 20 years if it has determined the strength of their relationship. They will just smile at you benignly and tell you that you have a lot to learn.

The passionate phase of a new relationship typically lasts between six months and two years, tops, and beyond that time it is the level of commitment, and the willingness of both partners to engage in maintenance behaviours, that predicts the level of satisfaction they will enjoy.

In other words, if you both want this relationship to work and you are both willing to invest in it, it will.

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