Why We Want Those We Can’t Have
By: Octavia Morrison
Tags: Self Improvement, Relationships, Advice, Love, Dating

I should respect myself more, right? This is what you read in the thousands of articles that are trying to tell you how to find yourself first, before expecting to find your perfect mate. This is what you read in self-help books, that no one will love you unless you love yourself. This is how helpful friends and family encourage you just to be yourself and know your self-worth. And love will find you. Hah.

“We accept the love we think we deserve.” Stephen Chbosky

Well, apparently, there is a lot more to that, than just self-esteem issues. And wanting someone who we can’t have is more human and more common than we would think.

Undervaluing me and overvaluing them

When it comes to romantic and sexual attraction, regardless of what we expect from the other person, we tend to overestimate their qualities. At the first moments of meeting, when we subconsciously decide about them, we size them up. If we have chemistry, we immediately assign more value to them than they deserve. Just because we are attracted to them with all of our senses, we are getting a hormone cocktail that waves goodbye to our rational minds.

We see, we hear, we smell, we touch, and if it comes to that, we taste. The stronger the chemistry, the worse our capability is for evaluating them properly.

“I’d never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member.” ― Woody Allen

If the chemistry or the later attraction stays strong enough, without really knowing them, we start to overvalue them and undervalue ourselves. It doesn’t matter if we see them in a distorted reality, the less we know about them, the more gaps there are to fill with our imagination.

And sometimes even a person with an average level of self-esteem will start degrading themselves to keep up the gap between the overvalued crush and them. It is because of cognitive dissonance when we are trying to post-rationalise our decisions to stay sane — but in this case, it works against us.

The myth of busyness and breadcrumbing

We live in a busy world, and we live hectic lives. We are spreading ourselves thin, and we romanticise busyness. We place more perceived value on busy people, and we tend to appreciate people who respond less or reciprocate our initiations less. We think that someone’s busyness is correlating with their popularity, and we believe they must really be worth it since they are in such high demand.

Someone’s perceived busyness makes them look like scarce resources and their value increases. It results in us thinking they must be spending time with others, that lowers our self-esteem even more; and we are even more grateful for the tiny bits of attention they are showing as if it was a great sacrifice from their side.

Someone’s lack of response shouldn’t imply a higher value, as it is usually a sign of disinterest, lack of communication skills or just plain rudeness.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to walk away, because of the intermittent reinforcement their infrequent appearances causes. When we like someone, our brain releases dopamine to make us feel good whenever the message or talk to us. We get addicted to the hormone rush and start to go after our next kick of it. The intermittent attention strengthens our craving and makes the relief even more powerful, thus making us even more addicted.

As Erika Ettin, founder of A Little Nudge dating website, says: “Our brains love the unpredictability because the highs are higher than if we got the desired reward all the time. This is why breadcrumbing has sadly entered our lexicon recently.”

Breadcrumbing is when someone texts or calls on a sporadic basis, generally because they know you will respond. They will seem to be pursuing you, but in reality, have no intention of being tied down to a relationship. They just like leaving you breadcrumbs, like a trail in Hansel and Gretel, to string you along.

We let them treat us this way just to get our even higher dopamine rush anytime they unexpectedly appear.

The erotic equation

The term erotic equation was coined by Jack Morin in his book, The Erotic Mind. Central to Morin’s understanding of sexual passion is what he calls “The Erotic Equation”: attraction plus obstacles equal excitement. He says that although most couples envision a harmonious love life, sexual arousal thrives upon conflict and “the dark side of lust.” He suggests that sex is paradoxical, which in his equation means full of obstacles. He says a foundational, healthy approach to sex involves “embracing the paradoxical perspective.”

According to Morin, the four cornerstones of eroticism are longing, prohibition, power and ambivalence. Explaining our attraction to unavailable people, we get to some factors that show that longing and anticipation are strengthened by prohibitions and obstacles and also by ambivalence.

This means the more we aren’t supposed to have something or someone, and the more conflicted we feel about our own emotions — the higher the excitement and the arousal becomes. And the greater our desire is the greater satisfaction comes from getting it — even to some extent.

We all say that we crave stability, but studies show differently.

According to a study, attractive potential partners were described as having either low, intermediate, or high availability. When asked who they would most like to date and what kind of restaurant they’d take that person to, participants tended to choose the low availability target and, they decided to take them to the fanciest restaurant

In another study, participants were told that an attractive person liked them a lot, liked them an average amount, or liked them at an unknown level. Participants then rated how attracted they were to the target. Not surprisingly, people were drawn to the prospect who liked them a lot over the prospect who liked them an average amount. However, they were actually most attracted to the prospect who liked them an unknown amount!

Uncertainty works on a few levels here. On the one hand, being uncertain about someone else’s feelings can be seen as an obstacle to pursuing something with them (and attraction plus obstacle means excitement). However, uncertainty could also create a sense of mystery that draws you in, further increasing excitement.