Intermittent Attention Can Be Mistaken for Romantic Chemistry
Chris Williamson argues that modern romance scripts often mistake emotional unavailability for depth, teaching women to read inconsistency, conflict and the prospect of “fixing” a troubled man as signs of passion. He says the pull resembles variable-reward addiction: reliable interest can seem dull or suspect, while withdrawal and intermittent attention create attachment. His alternative standard is reciprocal enthusiasm from the outset, without chasing, persuasion or strategic withholding.
Uncertainty can be mistaken for romantic value
Intermittent attention can feel like evidence of a profound connection. The harder someone is to access, the more meaningful their eventual affection can appear. Chris Williamson argues that this is often scarcity being mistaken for value: not romantic depth, but an attachment to someone who is unavailable.
He compares the mechanism to addiction. Variable rewards, he says, are especially compelling—the same unpredictability that makes slot machines and social-media feeds hard to put down. A partner who alternates between attention and withdrawal can create a similar pull. When someone stops texting or seems to drift away, Williamson argues, the mind may treat their absence as proof that they matter more. Someone who plainly says they like you and want commitment, by contrast, can provoke suspicion: What is wrong with you?
It’s emotional immaturity masquerading as romantic spark, and it works on the exact same mechanism as addiction. You are not in love, you’re hooked.
Reliability can then look needy, while coldness, disappearance, and eventual return look like chemistry. Williamson’s concern is that people mistake conflict for compatibility, drama for depth, and brokenness for passion. Emotional burnout becomes an expected price of intensity rather than a warning about the relationship itself.
Culture repeatedly casts the stable man as the obstacle
Williamson traces this preference for volatility to a familiar romance script: the safe, responsible partner is positioned against a more chaotic alternative, and the audience is invited to experience the stable option as a barrier to “real” love.
His examples include The Notebook and Titanic. In each, he says, the established fiancé represents security, adult responsibility, and a visible future, while the emotionally charged alternative is impulsive, unstable, or unmoored. In The Notebook, Allie leaves Lon—successful, devoted, and kind—for Noah, whose earlier courtship involved threatening to jump from a Ferris wheel unless she agreed to go out with him. In Titanic, Rose rejects Cal’s secure future for Jack, who is broke, impulsive, romantic, and committed to little beyond seeing where the wind takes him.
Even where the secure partner is later portrayed negatively, Williamson argues, the story has already made him romantically undesirable by making him conventional, serious, and boring. He invokes novelist and humourist Jason Pargin’s observation that many films imply “the worst thing a man could be is a grown up”: the man the audience is meant to reject may have little wrong with him beyond having a job and behaving responsibly, while his rival is more childlike or emotionally unstable.
The Byronic hero supplies a longer-running version of the same pattern: isolated, morally ambiguous, alienated from society, marked by trauma, and attractive despite destructiveness. Williamson points to magazine treatments of “bad boys” as a continuing expression of it, including Teen Vogue’s “Super Bad: Why Are Smart Girls Drawn to Bad Boys?” and a Sun article on celebrities who choose them.
Safe is boring, danger is hot.
The fantasy he objects to is not simply attraction to someone difficult. It is the premise that difficulty signals hidden value: he’s hard to love, but I can fix him. Romance stories make that pursuit feel consequential because they tend to end at the moment of dramatic selection. They do not, Williamson says, usually portray what living with the volatile hero would look like over 10, 20, or 30 years.
The useful test is reciprocal enthusiasm from the start
Chris Williamson offers a more practical standard through Alain de Botton: contemplate dating only people who are enthusiastic about you from the beginning. The criterion is not perfection or a frictionless life. It is whether both people are plainly willing to participate, without one person having to secure the other’s basic commitment.
That rules out persuasion, begging, chasing, strategic withholding of affection, and repeatedly trying to obtain a commitment the other person is not prepared to offer. De Botton’s formulation, as Williamson quotes it, acknowledges why the coy and troubled person can be compelling—the person who does not reply, seems damaged in an alluring way, or appears perpetually on the verge of changing. But it is a game people ultimately cannot afford.
Williamson turns that standard into a direct diagnostic. It is not love if one person repeatedly messages while the other rarely replies. It is not love if the other person is evasive or directs covert attention elsewhere. It is not love if legitimate requests for attention are dismissed as “too intense.” And it is not love if commitment requires one partner to repeatedly convince the other to offer what they are already prepared to give.
The worthwhile partner, in his formulation, is “keen, open, and ready” without needing to be won over. Their commitment should be straightforward enough that a couple can focus on the unavoidable work of daily life, rather than securing the other person’s basic availability.
Williamson does not say that women’s mate choices, romance culture, or women’s magazines cause emotionally unavailable men; some men, he says, are simply “assholes.” His further claim is that incentives shape behaviour. Because he sees women as generally the selectors and men as the pursuers, he argues that men who believe flakiness, aloofness, or non-commitment are rewarded may adapt to those conditions in pursuit of sex. He cites Roy Baumeister’s formulation that men will do what is required to obtain sex, “and perhaps not a great deal more.”
The broader warning is to consider what behavior a dating culture rewards before asking why more people do not show up openly. If men are left choosing between buying flowers and ignoring texts to create attraction, Williamson argues, people should be careful about the incentives they create for those they say they want to be emotionally open.