Fatal attraction

Fatal attraction is the term Brooke Easton applies to a romantic paradox: qualities that make a person appealing can also contribute to the relationship’s undoing. In Brooke’s account of her relationship with Hans, his kindness and romantic sensitivity inspire her love, but his instinctive warmth toward everyone else turns those same qualities into a source of conflict.

Definition and Application

Brooke recalls learning the term from her interpersonal relationships professor. It describes a process in which the traits that first attract someone to a partner become the traits that threaten the relationship. She uses the concept to understand her own mixed response to Hans, rather than treating his appeal and its complications as separate matters.

Hans’s Kindness as Both Appeal and Strain

Brooke adores that Hans is kind, gentle, and romantic, and contrasts his sensitivity with her parents’ response to her earlier breakup with Ronald McKnight: they had taken out a life-insurance policy on her. But Hans’s tenderness is not exclusive to Brooke. She describes his embrace through an extravagant image of a coat made from living, singing puppies, then identifies the problem beneath the fantasy: he makes everybody feel equally cherished. The warmth that reassures her therefore also sharpens her jealousy and unwillingness to share his attention.

Conflict and Significance

The concept also illuminates a confrontation in which Brooke accuses Hans of failing to recognize that a younger girl was flirting with him and of nearly touching her breasts. She knows her tone is unfair and acknowledges that Hans is too optimistic and trusting to perceive ill intent easily; those traits, she says, are part of why she fell in love with him. Her accusation thus stages fatal attraction in miniature: his innocence remains lovable to her even as she sees it as leaving him unable to protect their relationship from competition. The term gives a name to this contradiction without resolving it: Hans’s gentleness is both the source of Brooke’s devotion and the reason she fears that his affection is not hers alone.