Interpersonal Attraction

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Hollywood movies often deal with troubled relationships, but the movie Julie and Julia is different. It revolves around a young blogger attempting to find purpose in her life by cooking her way through Julia Child’s famous cookbook, but this story plays against the reality of Child’s life: her love of cooking and her marriage to Paul Child are the refreshing background for the rest of the film (Parker-Pope, 2010b). It depicts not only the exciting beginning of relationships but also the possibility of happy, easy, fun, interesting relationships in which people can remain attracted to one another for a lifetime.

As discussed previously, we seek relationships to meet basic needs for companionship, stimulation, and goal achievement. But our reasons for forming specific relationships are as individual and complex as we are and rooted in unique needs and motivations, which develop and change over our lives (Westmyer, DiCioccio, & Rubin, 1998). Let’s examine how proximity, physical attraction, and similarity influence our likelihood of establishing particular relationships.

Proximity. As practical and unromantic as it sounds, one of the first criteria of relationship formation is simple proximity, or nearness. Think about how many of your friends you got to know because they sat next to you in elementary school, lived on the same dorm floor, or worked with you at Starbucks. Proximity is not just something we need in order to meet other people—it’s what enables us to interact in ways that form and develop relationships.

Physical proximity was once the most important factor in determining and maintaining relationships. If you were to move away from a neighborhood, switch schools, or change jobs, you would likely lose touch with old friends and eventually make new friends in your new surroundings. But as noted earlier, modern technology allows us to redefine proximity: in addition to physical proximity, we have virtual proximity with those whom we are able to interact with regularly through mediated channels, even if they are physically quite far away. Nonetheless, if persons are not in physical proximity and fail to establish and maintain virtual proximity—for example, if they avoid social networking or don’t have access to a computer—the chances of forming or maintaining relationships dwindle.

Physical Attraction. If you’ve ever watched a makeover show like What Not to Wear or The Biggest Loser, you’ve no doubt seen at least one client or contestant who expressed a belief that an improved physical appearance would enhance his or her prospects for love and career success. And as you’ve learned in earlier chapters, your physical appearance does indeed play an important role in attracting others, especially in the very early stages of a relationship, when first impressions are formed. People who are considered beautiful or attractive are often perceived as kinder, warmer, more intelligent, and more honest than unattractive people, and they have earlier opportunities for dating and marriage (Canary, Cody, & Manusov, 2008).

But before you focus only on physical attractiveness, remember two things. First, beauty is largely in the eye of the beholder, and individual tastes vary due to factors too numerous to discuss here, as well as cultural standards. For example, among the Padaung tribe of Southeast Asia, women wrap rings around their necks to push down their collarbones and upper ribs, giving them the illusion of having extremely long necks, considered a sign of beauty and wealth. Second, our communication affects perceptions of beauty. For example, Levinger (as cited in Canary, Cody, & Manusov, 2008) notes that “initial impressions of a beautiful person are outweighed by subsequent interaction” with the person. So your ability to use verbal and nonverbal messages appropriately and effectively probably has a lot more to do with your attractiveness than the perfection of your smile or the size of your jeans.

Similarity. The notion that “opposites attract” is so common in popular culture that many people take it as an undeniable truth. But despite the popularity of the concept, research shows that attraction is often based on the degree of similarity we have with another person, whether through shared hobbies, personality traits, backgrounds, appearances, or values (Gonzaga, Campos, & Bradbury, 2007). For example, consider close friends Liza and Cheryl. Liza is an African American student from Denver, a literature major, and a tomboy who loves the Broncos. Cheryl is a white student from Boston, majoring in engineering; she hates sports but follows fashion and rarely steps out of her dorm room without makeup. To an outsider, they seem like a mismatched pair. But ask either of them what they have in common and they’ll roll off a list of similarities: both grew up in urban neighborhoods, attended all-girl Catholic high schools, love indie rock, and take great pride in their ability to quote J. R. R. Tolkien. So long as the relational partners feel that they have much in common, as Liza and Cheryl do, they feel similar and attracted to one another.

Communication researchers have several ideas to explain how the degree of similarity works in relationships: attraction-similarity, matching, and genetic similarity (Amodio & Showers, 2005; Berscheid, 1985; Byrne, 1971; Fehr, 2001; Morry, 2005; Rushton, 1990). The attraction-similarity hypothesis suggests we project ourselves onto another person based on the attraction we feel for that person. Greater attraction to an individual leads to perceptions of greater similarity. The matching hypothesis also deals with attraction, positing that we seek relationships with others who have comparable levels of attractiveness. Finally, the genetic-similarity hypothesis argues that two individuals who hail from the same ethnic group are more genetically similar than two individuals from different ethnic groups. According to this hypothesis, the impact on our behavior is that we tend to help, favor, and form relationships with people from our own ethnic groups (Rushton, 1980). Nonetheless, physical and social attraction coupled with more societal acceptance is contributing to more pervasive intercultural relationships (Balaji & Worawongs, 2010; McClintock, 2010). And as people from various cultures interact more and more, they have opportunities to practice relational skills (like self-disclosure and empathic listening) and see similarities in each other (Jin & Oh, 2010).