Why we are attracted?

I'm just curious how are we attracted to persons (no matter whatever your sexual orientation is).

How are we attracted?

Thanks!

A very good question...

Actually, two good questions: "why?" in the title and "how?" in the body of the post.

I hope you will get equally good answers from a varieties of perspectives.

Yup.... And sorry if the title is 'Why' and the body post is 'How'...

What's in our brains that makes us be attracted to someone, specifically sexually?

Do we develop that? Or is it instinct? I know a bit about Freud's libido theory wherein a child undergoes i think 4 stages...

I find his theory very funny and quite questionable.

A few tidbits:

1) the stuff he writes abour oral fixation is probably an artifact of the particular breastfeeding practices that were in effect in Austria as of the time of his writing. For the majority of the world's population over the centuries, infants do not / did not need to wait for oral gratification or whatever the thing is called:

"ORAL Stage This occurs from birth to about 1 year, and the libido is focused on the mouth. The individual may be frustrated by having to wait on another person, being dependent on another person. Being fixated at this stage may mean an excessive use of oral stimulation, such as cigarettes, drinking or eating."

Even in the Western societies now, mothers usually breastfeed their infants "on demand" (alternatively termed "on cue") - see LLLI | Feeding On Cue - so all the stuff about waiting on another person goes down the drain once babies do not need to wait to be fed.

If the oral stage is associated with breastfeeding, then his timing/staging is wrong - the birth to 1 year part was another artifact. Per Katherine A. Dettwyler (the most renowned researcher in the US, on anthropolgy and breastfeeding), human weaning should occur between 2.8 to 3.7 years old.

In reality, some kids take longer - my last child wanted to nurse after age 4.5 (I got too tired of it and told her to stop at age 4.5, and she did not like it - and no, long-term breastfeeding does not do anything bad and is not monkey-like/savage/third-world/unthinkable per se, and my daughter who wanted to nurse past 4.5 years now tests in the 99% percentile on the standardized tests and has exhausted the public library's collection for her age, so she is not behaving in ways monkeys do).

So both the idea or oral fixation and the time limits that Freud came up with do not stand the test of reality, if you think of the world as a whole, broadly, and not just of Vienna between 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939 (Freud's dates of birth and death).

2) An*l (for an unexplainable reason, the site would not let me spell this word in full) Stage This period occurs about age 2 and 3 yrs. Here individuals have their first encounter with rules and regulations, as they have to learn to be toilet trained. This encounter with rules and regulations will dictate the later behavior with rules and regulations. The libido is focussed anally, and frustration may arise from having to learn a somewhat complex cognitive and motor response. Being fixated at this stage can result in stinginess, stubborness, or orderliness, as well as messiness. Essentially, behavior related to retention and expulsion may be related to experiences at this stage.
(I am copy-pasting about stages from Freud's psychosexual theory)

Well, in my personal experience... I am very messy (way above average - the bedroom floor usually strewn with clothes etc.) and I went through completely uneventful toilet training, per my parents. Maybe other people have had different experiences.

3) PHALLIC Stage This period starts about age 4-5 years.

• Oedipus conflict - the boy begins to have sexual desires for his mother, and sees his father as a rival for her affections. The boy begins to fear that his father is suspicious of his longing for his mother, and that the father will punish him for his desires. That punishment, the boy fears, will be castratation, which brings us to the second critical episode for this stage.
• Castration anxiety. The fear of castration make the boy anxious. This anxiety begun with the fear of punishment from the father leads to the boy thinking that the father hates him eventually becomes unbearable and the boy renounces his sexual feelings for his mother and chooses instead to identify with his father, and hopes to someday have a relationship with a woman (though not his mother) just like dear old dad has with his mother.

When I originally read this stuff, being a bit older than you are, at 19, I found it meaningful and somewhat fascinating. Now, I find it delusional. Also, per the underlined part, boys, to go through all this stuff, need to live in a complete family - mother+father. In the US, there are lots of single mom households with boys, and the men who come out of those households are not STRIKINGLY different from the men who come out of full nuclear families, and yet if the theory were true, then the men who come out of single mom households would be lacking having gone through a critical developmental stage, and one would think that this lacking would manifest itself in some observable differences.

"...focus changes, for girls, from the mother to the father, when the girls realize that they don't have penises, so they develop penis envy. This realization coupled with the knowledge that her mother doesn't have a penis leads to her thinking her mother unworthy, and becoming attracted to her father, as he does have a penis.
Just as with boys, girls begin to suspect the same sex parent knows about their attraction to the opposite sex parent, and they hate them for it. These feelings go round and round for awhile until the point when the girls renounce their feelings for their fathers and identify with their mothers."

the stuff about penis envy is in regards to "PHALLIC Stage This period starts about age 4-5 years." - in other words, the time of which we have a conscious memory. Freud could speculate all he wanted abour oral fixation since we do not have a conscious memory of our infancy, but for something starts at 4-5 years, sorry, but we do have a conscious memory. I did try peeing while standing during that age, because I observed boys do that in my preschool, and I was upset when I failed, but after a short while I became very comfortable in the knowledge that I would not be able to pee while standing. That is the most I can REMOTELY relate to the idea of penis envy.

On the whole, the penis envy idea seems pretty delusional, again. I mean, very seriously delusional, and not just "slightly weird".

I do like the word "phallic" though, and prefer leeks to onions not just because of their milder taste and the ease of use (you do not cry when chopping leeks, but boy do you cry when chopping onions), but because of the phallic shape. But I only developed my visual and tactile preference for phallus-formed objects (leeks, wine bottles, etc.) after I became sexually active with men (not immediately, but after a few years), and, I only like phallus-formed objects that are like ERECT penises - I do not care for flaccid penises. So how would a 4-5 year old girl, outside of severe sexual abuse situations, know about ERECT penises? OK... but an interesting idea, for sure...


4) "GENITAL Stage Begins at puberty involves the development of the genitals, and libido begins to be used in its sexual role. However, those feelings for the opposite sex are a source of anxiety, because they are reminders of the feelings for the parents and the trauma that resulted from all that."

I personally have known that I am heterosexual (I did not know the word until late high school, though - I grew up in the Soviet Union where sexual topics were more or less banned) since elementary school, because I liked it when boys liked me, and since 2-3 grade I would occasionally like boys myself (reciprocated) on a pretty long-term basis, etc., and that was a big part of my life, without any sort of genital involvement of any kind. Per my mother, I first caressed a boy at age 3, but I do not remember that. I started puberty very late - with the menstrual period at almost 16, WAY later than average. So in my case, the sexual orientation came YEARS before puberty.

On this site, I read a lot about people who do not know their sexual orientation until the 20s. That means, in their cases, that sexual orientation can come YEARS after puberty.

So if feelings of that type can come either before or after puberty, then where is the association?

Granted, for most people there is an association, and puberty does appear to have a true, non-delusional relationship to the development of sexual desire.

Pasting again, "those feelings for the opposite sex are a source of anxiety, because they are reminders of the feelings for the parents and the trauma that resulted from all that." - I do not recall much anxiety. I DO recall horrible anxiety during my childhood and adolescence on account of a few occasions of getting lost and realizing that my family (parents, grandparents) would not know where I was and would be worried and frightened. I still remember the sensation that my limbs would just give out - they felt soft as if without bones. Nothing of that sort ever experienced in connection with the feelings for the opposite sex. So, very dubious about the anxiety connection per se and about the reminders of feelings for the parents as the underlying source of the alleged anxiety.

And, from the link above, a reasonable modern critique of the theory for you:

• Evaluation of Freud's psychosexual development theory
  
  
  Four points:
• difficult to test, but the evidence that has been gathered is not favourable
• the crucial events (e.g., how the libido is used) are unobservable, and there are no good means to measure them
• there is an awfully long time between the occurence of the causal stimulus and its presumed effect; relationships between early events and later traits tend to be weak and inconsistent
• this theory of development was conceived without studying children; rather, it was developed from patients' recollections, dreams and free associations

Plus, since you MIGHT identify as homosexual and Freud does not have a good non-pathologizing explanation for that kind of attraction, YOU PERSONALLY should not look to his ideas as a source of truth regardless of the stuff about the non-testability of his ideas.

I hope it helps and hope that you will get good ideas in responses from people who report their own genuine experiences rather than engage in wild speculations.

Okay.......

The question remains.. Also, what's so special with a certain person's face that we find him handsome/beautiful.

I mean of course let's say Luis is handsome but what's so special with his face that Anthony gets attracted with it.

Is it because of the formation of face? And so, how come it is programmed to Anthony's brain to get attracted with that kind of face formation.
--
Also, actors generally are handsome. I mean in this case, Louis is being attracted not only to Anthony but also to many more others.

I have read that it is because of symmetry. Humans are more attracted to symmetrical faces.

Physical attractiveness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia has something about it.

The mix-up of first names is called a Freudian slip, and that part of the Freudian legacy is actually quite helpful and benign.

In the western world, big eyes tend to attract us to faces

It also apparently changes over time.

I watched a Chezh movie yesterday, for the second time. The first time was in 1992.

Two female stars (I am not sexually attracted to females, but esthetically, I very much am):

Lena Olin (back then, I thought that she was no more than a little cute, and now I find her mercurial facial expressions, very tender complexion, huge eyes, and full lips absolutely gorgeous)
Juliette Binoche (back then, I thought that she was stunningly attractive, and now I am bored looking at her face).

No rhyme or reason.