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Have you ever felt this kind of pull?
Suddenly someone seems unusually magnetic. You can’t stop replaying their every gesture, wanting to know everything about them, looking forward to the next time you’ll see them, even parsing a single sentence or a single glance for hidden meaning.
Strangely, this feeling rarely happens with someone who clearly likes you back, or with someone with whom you could meet up any time you wanted.
Instead, it tends to happen with people who always stay just a little out of reach.
This person might be a teaching assistant at university. You see each other every week; he answers your questions, listens carefully to your ideas — you actually have plenty of chances to talk. But somehow, whenever you’re actually standing in front of him, you can’t find much to say. You think about him during the day, think about him at night, look forward to the next class, yet the line between teacher and student never goes away.
This person might also be a colleague you only cross paths with occasionally. You know he’s in a stable relationship, but every time you talk, you feel like your eyes linger on each other a little longer than they should. You can’t help wondering: Does he find me attractive too? If so, why has he never asked me out? Maybe, you tell yourself, there was never really a chance.
These people share one thing in common: They are not completely unavailable. They are only almost unavailable.
Between you and them, there is always a sliver of possibility. You feel that the two of you would fit well together; you can’t help imagining that in another time, under different circumstances, the story might have gone entirely differently.
I’ve increasingly come to feel that what truly captivates us isn’t “unavailability” itself, but this state of being almost, but not quite, within reach. Isn’t this a sweet spot of attraction?
I even suspect that attraction and a person’s availability don’t relate to each other in a simple, linear way.
If someone is completely available, then as familiarity grows, they gradually stop being a person full of possibility and become simply a real person — the mystery and anticipation slowly fade. If someone is completely unavailable, we are unlikely to invest emotionally in the first place and will eventually turn our attention elsewhere.
The position where attraction is most easily sustained may be exactly the middle ground — a relationship that still holds a little possibility, yet never quite comes to fruition. Perhaps what we’re drawn to was never the unavailable, but the almost possible.
Psychology offers a number of explanations for this. The Zeigarnik effect suggests that things without closure are more likely to stay lodged in our minds, so we keep returning to the same thought: “If I had said that back then, would things have turned out differently?” Research on reward prediction has found that the brain is most excited not when reward arrives reliably, but when reward is possible yet uncertain. Intermittent reinforcement explains why an occasional response, a glance, a single caring word, often lingers in the mind far longer than steady, everyday companionship.
These theories are all describing the same phenomenon: What truly fascinates us is rarely certainty — it’s possibility.
And yet, I’ve increasingly felt that while psychology explains why this kind of relationship so easily seizes our attention, it leaves another question unanswered: Why does this particular kind of relationship end up carrying so much fantasy, anticipation, and desire?
Psychoanalysis may offer another way of understanding this.
Jacques Lacan argued that what we desire is often not simply a concrete person, but the meaning that person comes to represent within our inner world.
A young and handsome teaching assistant might attract you not just because of his looks or personality (or even his English accent). He might represent maturity, confidence, calm, intelligence — a version of the person you hope to become one day. With the colleague from the office, what truly draws you in may not be him as he actually is, but rather the version of yourself you imagine when you picture being with him — more confident, more attractive, perhaps even living a different kind of life.
In other words, a person can become a kind of symbolic representation. What they carry is not only themselves, but also our ideals, our wishes, and possibilities in our own lives that have yet to be realised.
So what we’re truly infatuated with, at times, isn’t the person themselves, but the world that person allows us to imagine.
This also explains why people who are “almost unavailable” are so easily idealised. Because the relationship never really enters reality, we rarely get the chance to discover that the other person may not understand us as well as we imagined, may have habits that would disappoint us, or may simply be unable to give us the life we’ve fantasised about. Reality has not yet forced this person to shrink back down from a symbol into an ordinary, limited human being.
The more distance an object maintains, the longer it can go on carrying our projections. We can keep adding new meaning onto them without ever having to face whether that meaning truly belongs to them.
So the key point here isn’t only Lacan’s familiar idea of “lack.” More importantly, the “almost unavailable” person keeps an open symbolic space for desire. They are real enough to exist, yet not close enough to shatter the fantasy; they give us enough material to imagine with, but not enough reality to let the story fully solidify.
What we’re infatuated with, then, is not only a person not yet attained, but also a possibility not yet foreclosed by reality.
Once reality actually intervenes, that openness begins to slowly narrow.
Perhaps what truly drains passion isn’t possession itself, but the way reality keeps shrinking the space in which imagination could exist.
And so, what looks like simple lust may actually be carrying more than one unmet need at once — not only the wish for a person, but the wish to imagine, to try on possible futures, to rehearse who we might become. Seen this way, the attraction isn’t shallow; it’s doing some of the same work personality development depends on.
