The qualities that make us stand out the most, and the main reasons that people find us attractive, can be a blessing and a curse. Sometimes our most appealing traits can become a reason for a breakup.

“The ick” was one of the more unusual words to be added to the Cambridge Dictionary in 2024. The phrase describes the feeling of suddenly seeing something about a partner in a new light, and finding it so unattractive it can’t be unseen. Once you have the ick, it is unfortunately incurable.

While the phrase might be intended in a lighthearted manner, it shows that there can be unattractive qualities about a partner that are not immediately obvious. In fact, we might have found those qualities really attractive earlier in the relationship. This is called “fatal attraction” – when a person comes to dislike aspects of a partner that they were initially attracted to. “It doesn’t mean fatal in the sense of deadly, but fatal as in the sense of prophetic,” says Diane Felmlee, a social psychologist from Penn State University in the US.

“I like to think of it as having ‘too much’ of an attractive quality,” she says. “Disenchantment with a partner can occur even when people get what they want, and perhaps because they get what they want.”

During her own research, Felmlee asks people for reasons they were first attracted to a partner, why they became dissatisfied and why past relationships ended. Most people listed various needs that were not being met by their ex-partner as a cause for a breakup. But Felmlee noticed some of those missed needs were related to reasons they were attracted to an ex-partner in the first place.

For read the full text click here:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250221-fatal-attraction-why-your-most-attractive-qualities-can-become-a-turn-off

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