The forbidden fruit and its power over us…
A Roman poet, Ovid, wrote years ago, “We always strive for what is forbidden, and desire what is denied.” Think about that for a moment. Why does something become more attractive simply because it is out of reach? Why can a person occupy so much space in our imagination precisely because a relationship with them is complicated, unavailable or perhaps impossible? And why does the heart sometimes seem to have a preference for situations that the mind finds rather inconvenient? Someone you met on holiday. You live in different countries. Yet somehow the conversations become unusually memorable. Someone who is already emotionally committed elsewhere. Their unavailability creates a boundary, and that boundary becomes a part of the attraction. In each situation, the person may be perfectly ordinary in many respects. Yet the circumstances surrounding them make the experience feel extraordinary. Sometimes, the obstacle becomes part of the attraction. Think about shopping. A watch that is available everywhere may not attract much attention. But put the same watch behind a glass cabinet, label it a limited edition and tell people there are only three left. Suddenly, it becomes much more desirable. Psychologists call this the scarcity effect. When something appears difficult to obtain, we may assign it greater value. Human relationships can sometimes follow a similar pattern. The person who is always available may become familiar. The person whose attention is unpredictable can become unusually fascinating. The interesting question is whether we are responding to the actual person or to the difficulty of having them. When we are in an ordinary relationship, we encounter the whole person. Their habits. Their moods. Their irritating little routines. But when a relationship can’t fully develop, we often don't get to experience all those ordinary details. Instead, the imagination fills the gaps. The person becomes partly real and partly a character created by our own imagination. And imagination can be a very generous editor. It removes the inconvenient details and gives us a version of the person that is sometimes difficult for reality to compete with. We may end up falling for the person, the possibility and the story we have created around them. This is perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of forbidden attraction. Sometimes, what draws us towards someone is not entirely about who they are. It is also about how we feel when we are around them. Perhaps we feel: More interesting than usual. More attractive. More understood. A person can unexpectedly reconnect us with a side of ourselves that has been sitting quietly in the background. For someone who spends most of the day being a parent, spouse, professional, caregiver or responsible adult, that feeling can be surprisingly powerful. It may not always be the other person who makes the experience extraordinary. Sometimes, it is the version of ourselves that seems to appear in their presence. Something can appear that reminds us of all the possibilities that life might have taken. A different version of ourselves. The attraction may therefore carry a meaning beyond the person. It may represent curiosity about an alternative version of our own story. And perhaps that is why some attractions feel much larger than the time we actually spend with the person. Sometimes we want the person. Sometimes we want the excitement. Sometimes we want the mystery. And sometimes we may simply indulge in the emotional adventure of imagining what could have been. These feelings can overlap, making the experience rather difficult to explain, even to ourselves. Perhaps that is what makes forbidden attraction such an enduring subject in literature, cinema, music and ordinary conversations. It becomes about desire, imagination, curiosity, possibility and the complicated ways in which we understand ourselves. The creative world understands this perfectly. What movies have you seen that resonate with this aspect of human behavior? Until tomorrow, Bob
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