ATTRACTION AND DESIRE AND ATTRACTING A PARTNER
Although many myths exist as to what men and women find attractive in each other, scientists believe that many of the associations we form in infancy help to determine whom we choose as sexual partners, or soul mates, and that patterns laying down tendencies for love relationships are etched into our brains.
The infinite range of human experience through holding, touching, feeling, stimulating, trusting, talking and listening is involved in the sexual attraction of a loving couple and their desire for each other.
Attracting a Partner-Both our ability to love, and our style of loving, begin to develop from the moment we’re born. Scientists believe that many of the associations we form in infancy help determine whom we choose as sexual partners, or soul mates, and that patterns which lay down tendencies for love relations are etched into our brains.
I can show you how this might be so by looking at how just one of the five senses — smell — predetermines a particular choice. Each of us, even in our highly deodorized society, has a unique odour that is the sum of our glandular secretions – a “smell signature”. Whether our smell signature is attractive to other people — for instance, because it reminds them happily of their mothers – or is off-putting because it reminds them of detested ex-spouses, say, depends on those people’s own associations. Associations are linked to smell because the olfactory bulb involved with smell reception feeds into the part of the brain that is intimately linked with emotion and affective memory.
In the same way, we can learn to like the smells of our loved ones. Studies have shown that lovers can pick each other out of a group solely by their unique aromatic signatures (and that is how babies first bond with their mothers). If we lose our ability to smell, we normally suffer a pronounced slump in sex drive.
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