On Sentiment Override & Attraction
“Stacy fancies me?! Well… now I think about it. She’s kinda cute.”
I’ve thought a lot about what attracts me to certain people, the interplay between physical, emotional, and logistical. And how sometimes our understanding of what someone thinks of us can affect our estimation of them back. Reasonable when we understand we want an in-group feeling of sticking with people who are most like us. But in the context of just 2 people liking each other back and forth, that’s got to be a positive feedback loop, no?
And Maya would have said that I was too flirty, but for every one of her accusations of disrespecting our connection when interacting with others, I never said the same of her, nor did others see the same risky behaviour in me that she claimed. In fact, it’s my universal warmth and learned approachability that I am known for. A tricky bind.
Ponder this point, rarely articulated in love-talk: attraction isn’t static — it warps based on where we are emotionally. The exact same trait can feel endearing, neutral, or unbearable, depending on the love-temperature of the moment.
There’s a strange optical illusion in relationships: the very quirks we once found adorable — the snort-laugh, the obsessive recycling, the way they narrate what they’re doing while cooking, the way they sing the countermelodies in Abba songs rather than the tune — later become irritating. In the early stages, these traits feel like texture, like proof that the person is real and complex and relaxed in front of you. But when there’s friction, those same quirks can start to grate. We’d do well to remember it’s not the quirks that changed but the emotional lens. When love is glowing, blemishes are beauty spots. When it dims, imperfections are excuses. This reversal is often a quiet signal that the relationship needs tending — or that part of us has already started slipping away.
In relationship-science literature this is known as positive sentiment override, a term coined by psychologist John Gottman from his decades of couple observation research. The idea is that every person has a default sentiment through which ambiguous or even neutral behaviour is interpreted. Under PSO, bared teeth are smiling rather than gnashing, a guttural rumble is cooing rather than growling, and a forgotten errand is the consequence of an overloaded week, rather than carelessness. Gottman’s research had trained outsiders regarding a real task in deliberation undergone by a couple. With various things said by one of the pair, observers were likely to detect a neutral tone, whereas the other partner found the tone to be emotionally loaded, and vice versa, showing that emotional temperature is the variable affecting interpretation, not the behaviour.
One of the most influential factors in deciding if we like someone is whether they like us first. It’s as though it adds +40 attraction points in the RPG of life. A previously overlooked option for a romantic or sexual partner suddenly pops onto the radar once we learn they have eyes for us. They’re worth investing in, not because they’ve changed, but because information about them has changed. They are invested in supporting us.
This is known as the Reciprocity of Liking effect. We tend to like people who signal that they like us, a finding replicated across friendship, workplace, and romantic contexts since the early social psychology literature of the 1960s. But there’s a sharper, more useful refinement in American Psychologists Elliot Aronson and Darwyn Linder’s 1965 Gain-Loss Theory of Attraction. They ran an experiment where participants overheard a confederate’s opinion of them shift across several conversations. There was one condition that produced more liking even than constant approval: approval that arrived after initial coolness. A person who starts unconvinced and warms up generates more attraction than a person who liked you from the first hello, and someone who cools off after initial warmth is disliked more than someone who was lukewarm throughout. In other words, it isn’t a high sustainment of ‘being liked’ that moves reciprocation in the likee, but the liking gradient and distance travelled, the detectable shift from indifference through interest, to respect. Later experiment replication attempts have had mixed results.
American mentor Coach Ken explains how for BPD sufferers, the incoming attraction from a person can be an ick: “Borderlines say, ‘I’m broken. This person thinks I’m great. Therefore they are a terrible judge of character.’ And they detach.” This thinking leads borderlines to stay longer with people who mistreat them. Incoming warmth or admiration registering as suspicious or aversive, and the person consequently gravitating toward partners who mistreat them maps onto another topic I write about [See — On Rejection Sensitivity].
Dialectical Behavioural Therapy, developed by Marsha Linehan, is the standard treatment here because standard CBT underperforms for BPD’s emotional intensity and interpersonal volatility. DBT focusses on the perception stage, the ‘Input’ stage of my wider IPRO Therapy framework, working specifically on unknotting emotional miswiring.
