Attraction is fantastically attractive, especially when it is powerful and mutual. Attraction can provide a link to another human so irresistible that it feels like an enchantment, one that renders all other needs and duties oddly meaningless, tiresome and irrelevant.

Away from the object of desire, one is irritable and distracted, unable to eat, unable to sleep, unable to concentrate. All that matters is the next encounter, for with its consummation one will feel euphoric, blissful, thrumming with life and with tenderness. With that other person, one will feel that nothing is missing any more. Couples so drawn, talk of being two halves, complete only when they are together.

Who would refuse such luxury, such security and such communion? Who would not want to be so lucky?

Attraction, after all, can be so overwhelming of the individual, and of the individual's other necessary duties and relationships, that during most of Western history it has been considered dangerous and destabilizing enough to be constrained as much as celebrated. The Greeks portrayed sexual attraction as a weapon, a dart that might pierce the flesh and possess a soul, causing chaos among humans and gods alike.

For example for Dante or Petrarch, courtly love was a kind of divine torture, with young men pining and fading for years at the sight of a chaperoned maiden who besotted them. The great literature of love Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary warns of the dangers of being driven by desire.

Even in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, forbidden love leads to disaster and death. Except in this work, though, there is a sense that it was splendid, even sacred, nonetheless. Wagner contended that it was wrong, not right, to fight or fear erotic longing. His idea caught on, and plenty of people now subscribe to the belief that a truly significant passion should be gleefully accommodated, not resisted.

Wagner's vision can credibly be argued as one which helped to dismantle views about attraction, desire and love that had for thousands of years been forged in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That, sensibility, warned against being carried away by sexual passion, and portrayed such emotions as an unreliable foundation on which to build anything as fragile as love, or nurture any creatures as vulnerable as children.

By the second half of the 20th century, though, this culture of restraint had been jettisoned, and replaced by the idea that self-denial was self-abnegation.

Now, in its general thrust, our culture is in love with the idea of love, awash with cock-eyed romanticism and unable to tell any more what's attraction, what's lust and what's love.

People don't really like it when scientists tell them that attraction is all down to pheromones, or waist-to-hip proportion, or instinctive recognition of genetic differentiation. There's disgruntlement as well, when churchmen tell us that togetherness is tough work involving ceaseless dollops of selflessness and commitment to the needs of others.

Humans, like all other animals, tend at times to be in search of a mate. At such times, each encounter, with anyone who might possibly be considered a candidate, is an audition. Without even being particularly aware of it, people tend to size up potential partners and even just potential friends all the time. Research has shown that people make complex judgments about others based on age, physical appearance, sartorial presentation, deportment, demeanor and social context in a matter of seconds rather than minutes after seeing or meeting them.

So, people who are physically beautiful tend immediately to dismiss those they consider less beautiful than they are. People who reckon themselves stylish are repelled by a fashion faux-pas.

For example, a beautiful young woman, for example, may decide that she is not going to barter her beauty and youth in the sexual marketplace in order to snare someone who is as young and beautiful as she is. She may decide instead that she'll cash in nature's chips for old and rich. It's a fair exchange between consenting adults, but one that's seen as pretty risible.

Can overwhelming attraction, whether or not it develops into anything that endures, actually be at root narcissistic?

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