On Category-Level Versus Target-Level Attraction
“Please… c’mon.” Ben leant closer. “C’mon.”
“Nooooo.” Chitha said. That one syllable bore her thick Tamil accent. We were sitting on a balcony in her family home in North Bangalore.
“Please.” One eye winked, then the other. It was supposed to be a blink, but must like his posture, his face was capsizing. I looked over at Johnny, his face was locked in a drunken half-grin. He, like me, didn’t know what to say.
“Noooo. Ben!” She said it with a smile. But maybe if she hadn’t, he wouldn’t have then asked:
“But why not?”
“Well amongst other things… because I don’t fancy you.”
“If it’s any consolation, Ben,” I said. “I definitely wouldn’t leave me and Johnny here to take you to the bedroom and have you writhe gracelessly on top of me before you puke and pass out either.”
“Fuck you, Ryan.” Ben sipped his Tiger beer bottle, or rather tried to, but sort of missed his face. Johnny just laughed.
“Can I just apologise, sanam?” I tried my best to get Chitha back on our side. Even if she were attracted to him and sexually liberated [See — On Sex Positivity, LIberation & Enlightenment], she still had Bens’ competence to contend with [See — On The Orgasm Gap]. I needed to change the subject before she really started regretting bringing us all to her place for a night cap after picking her up on the roof bar of the Ritz which closed too early for our liking.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I live in a country full of his sort.” Ben pretended not to hear.
“Cheers to that,” Johnny said, raising his Tiger above Ben’s bowed, hiccuping head.
“Not cheers,” I said. “We say something else now, right Chithi? What was it again? Parp?”
“Parp!” she said, raising her drink. “It means ‘sin’.”
There is an oft-encountered but seldom recognised phenomenon in dating systems: the distance between being naturally magnetised to someone’s character sheet, and fancying them in person. We can easily imagine one without the other, and comparing a highly eligible batchelor who turns out to be a bit of a dick, with a card carrying KKK member who is disarmingly likeable, not unlike the on-screen David Duke as portrayed in BlacKkKlansman (2018). Attraction then can operate on 2 levels, and they do not always align.
First, there is Category-Level Attraction to a group in principle: a gender, a body type, a social category. This is the level at which sexual orientation, identity labels, and stated preferences are usually described. It answers the question, “What’s my type?” It is portable, articulable, and the kind of thing one might put in a dating bio without anyone blinking.
Secondarily, there is Target-level Attraction to a specific person. It depends on factors that category cannot capture: affective chemistry, relational safety, power dynamics, voice, movement, timing, mannerisms, and more. Familiarity and context play an outsized role here, in a way they never do at the category-level.
An C-T Attraction gap exists when category-level interest is not followed by target-level pull. In action, we feel a clear, almost ideological attraction to a person without the corresponding erotic or romantic charge. Recognising this distinction helps daters separate identity from experience, which in turn reduces the shame that creeps in when lived attraction doesn’t “match” the label they’ve given themselves. It runs the other way: target-level attraction without category-level groundwork produces the bewildering experience of fancying someone who is ‘not one’s usual’ and then spending days trying to retrofit a theory that explains it.
In the Literature
The empirical backbone is proposed by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel, working out of Northwestern, who spent close to two decades testing whether people’s stated ideal partner preferences. Their study of speed-daters found that participants’ stated ideal partner preferences did not predict which lucky person would be the target of subjects’ romantic interest on the night or in the following month. In a more controlled lab version of the same question, participants reported more romantic interest in a potential partner’s written profile when its traits were built to match their stated ideals, but the moment they actually met the person, that effect vanished entirely. The leading explanation is that people simply reinterpret what a trait means once they’re looking at an actual face attached to it.
A subsequent meta-analysis confirmed the pattern: a large body of work has failed to find consistent evidence that the match between someone’s stated ideal and a real partner’s actual traits predicts how attracted they end up being to that person. How many times have you heard the phrase “I never would have dated someone like my partner if I’d just found his dating profile”?
Lisa Diamond’s longitudinal work on women’s sexual orientation adds a complementary angle. Her ten-year tracking of women’s attractions kept surfacing a pattern that maps onto the C-T gap: Women someone with a stated gender preference can find themselves intensely drawn to individuals who fall outside it. The next step is to conduct a gender-obscured test for a bunch of straight guys and girls and watch half of both squirm when they finally learn the gender of the person they’ve been talking to through a messaging service.
Why we backfill the reasons
Orion Taraban makes a related, blunter observation: people will tell you, with complete sincerity, that they’re looking for kindness, generosity, vulnerability and more nouns found on the wall of a primary school classroom, but fail to notice that these traits only register as attractive in someone once they’re already pulled toward them. The stated virtues aren’t generating the attraction; the attraction is allowing the assessment of the virtues’ presence.
It’s worth sitting with your own crushes, the ones that don’t fit your stated category at all, to work out what’s actually doing the pulling. It’s rarely one thing. It can be physical, but just as often it’s a register of attention, a specific competence, a way of holding a room. My own list of man-crushes included Derren Brown and Darren Criss with no obvious folksonomy connecting them except their enigmatic energy and first names.
It’s clear then that true attraction is directed at category-level but finessed at target-level, so what good is it to write down one’s type on paper, even things not as immutable and obvious as height, profession, and wealth, but their politics, availability, and ambition? That very idea reminds me of a line from One Tree Hill (2003) when Brooke Davis reveals her somewhat non-monogamous philosophy on dating, saying, “it’s important to have somebody that can make you laugh, somebody you can trust, and somebody that turns you on, and it’s really, really important to make sure that these three people don’t know each other.”
