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By Olumide Labulo
I remember the different phases and series of puppy love I experienced, and I can't help but say growing up was fun, really. It was so funny that my attraction per time could have been driven by sheer kindness, involuntary attention, or just beauty, or maybe by just being around them. That notwithstanding, attraction, mostly, was governed by invisible laws that the parties involved somehow understood collectively. Not the dramatic, cinematic kind where two people lock eyes across a crowded room while violins threaten everybody’s peace, or the kind that makes your heart pump fast, like Nollywood portrays every other time (we may never get tired of that sha). Mystery attracted people. Patience mattered. Presence did too. People planned conversations carefully and replayed small moments repeatedly in their heads.
Although everybody seems to be available all the time now, they are strangely harder to reach emotionally so much that conversations begin quickly, escalate rapidly, and disappear before meaning fully settles in. Attraction has become both immediate and disposable, and those subtle laws seem to be fading beneath the speed and exhaustion of modern interaction. Interestingly, the fading is not simply romantic; it is psychological. A person's emotional value is constantly weighed on the scale of responsiveness, and brutally scores low on delayed replies, viewed statuses, or inconsistent texting patterns. This was exactly my crime in 2024, I think. I really liked this girl, but there were times I couldn't just reach out for, sometimes, reasons I had no control over, like being too tired to text, or reaching out too late if I did at all. Worse off, it was the talking stage. And then I broke the golden rule of you-must-talk-to-me-everyday. I swear, it felt like a real 9-5 job. LOL. That being said, I should pointedly say that scarcity may deepen value for some.
Then there is performative confidence. Modern attraction increasingly rewards visibility over depth. Confidence used to emerge gradually through conversation, consistency, and emotional steadiness. Today, confidence is often confused with presentation, where whoever markets themselves best appears most desirable, like advertising: sharp angles, curated captions, strategic lighting, and emotional branding. Somewhere in the middle of all this, you will see that authenticity always takes the back seat. A while ago, a friend narrated how his first date with a girl went. He said when he finished telling her how he felt about her and what he wanted, the thing she said was "You know I was hoping you would talk your way into my heart, but I was wrong.'' Na so my guy weak. That's why guys who have mastered the art of deception don't hesitate to use all the words they want to hear. In fact, what seduces their mind is the promise of pleasure, those emotional experiences you seem to offer: excitement, validation, emotional intensity, or heart palpitation. That's why Robert Greene says in his book, "The Art of Seduction," that “people are constantly judging you in appearance and manner, and from this they unconsciously deduce your character.”
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It's one thing to be attracted; it's another to be decisive about it, and that's where today's endless talking stage comes in. If you've ever wondered why talking stages never end or transform into something definite, it's because they offer many of the emotional rewards of intimacy, like attention, validation, or desired feeling, companionship, flirtation, financial benefits, etc., with fewer of the responsibilities of exclusivity or long-term intention. This illusion of closeness is further complicated by constant texting and calling without relational depth. I remember how another friend of mine recounted his experience. He was like "Na she say mek I dey go". Now, how? My guy had been talking to her for over six months by constantly reaching out, almost on a daily. At a point, he just felt exhausted because, however hard he tried, he never got past her defence. So, baba decided to slow down and reduce the frequency of his reaching out, then the story changed to "You don't even talk to me". And that's exactly what it is: a strange emotional economy that births attachment without definition.
Humour has changed too. Genuine wit once revealed intelligence and emotional ease. Now people fear sincerity almost as much as rejection. Everybody wants to appear detached, unbothered, or “too soft for stress.” Ironically, the constant performance of emotional invulnerability for fear of embarrassment, mockery, etc., often creates the very loneliness people complain about privately. Whereas vulnerability, according to Brené Brown in "Daring Greatly", is the "core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it’s also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love”. No wonder research in Social Psychology and Clinical Psychology consistently shows that emotional suppression, which many consider smart today, weakens authentic social connections; reduces relationship satisfaction, and decreases perceived authenticity.
Then there is casual sex, where a simple "Hello, how are you?" can lead to sexual intimacy in seconds, not even minutes. It's that cheap now. Has sex lost its essence in honourable situations? No. What this type does is to bypass attraction processes, flatten and confuse or even destabilise attraction, depending on the anchoring context. To be honest, attraction often thrives on anticipation, curiosity, emotional tension, and gradual discovery. Esther Perel asserts in "Mating in Captivity" that desire often requires a degree of distance, imagination, and uncertainty to remain emotionally alive. Therefore, when intimacy arrives too quickly, some of the mystery sustaining desire can weaken prematurely. Research on couples who had frequent sex before marriage and then continued into marriage shows a complex pattern: sexual frequency alone does not guarantee long-term marital satisfaction. In fact, many studies suggest that while high premarital sexual activity may initially create strong intimacy and excitement, relationship quality after marriage depends more on communication, emotional stability, attachment patterns, and relational satisfaction than on sex frequency itself. For example, a longitudinal study published in the Journal of Sex Research found that couples with longer courtships or premarital cohabitation often started marriage with less frequent sex than newly passionate couples, though their decline in sexual frequency over time tended to be less steep. In other words, couples who were already sexually active before marriage did not necessarily maintain unusually high levels of sexual excitement indefinitely after marriage. Painfully, this is how things flow now: immediacy, emotional detachment, and the perception of endless alternatives that enable some individuals to treat intimacy less as emotional bonding and more as temporary validation or recreational experience.
While it's been proven that there's no one straight jacket rule that governs attraction, it's also been proven that some of these unspoken and unwritten laws have metamorphosed over time. And maybe that is the irony of attraction itself: no matter how modern people become, human beings still ache for the same ancient things: connection, recognition, gentleness, excitement, and the comforting feeling that somebody sees beyond performance.
