Physical attraction is good. Full stop. God designed you to notice beauty, to feel drawn toward another person, to experience the pull of desire. Theology of the Body doesn’t ask you to shut that down. It asks you to understand it — because attraction that stays on the surface can miss the person entirely, and attraction integrated with truth becomes the beginning of real love.
The Deeper Story
Here’s what John Paul II actually taught about desire: “Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount indicate that lust in itself does not reveal that meaning to man, but on the contrary dims and obscures it” (TOB). Notice — he didn’t say attraction dims the meaning of the body. He said lust does. There’s a crucial difference.
Attraction sees a person and responds to their beauty — the beauty of a whole human being made in God’s image. Lust isolates the body from the person and responds only to what it can consume. One moves you toward someone; the other moves you toward using someone. The feelings can look similar from the inside, which is exactly why spiritual maturity matters.
John Paul II taught that “in its masculinity or femininity the body is given as a task to the human spirit… by means of an adequate maturity of the spirit it too becomes a sign of the person” (TOB). That phrase — a sign of the person — is transformative. When you look at the person you’re attracted to and see a sign pointing toward an unrepeatable soul made in God’s image, your attraction is doing what God designed it to do. When you look and see only a body, something has gone wrong — not with the attraction itself, but with the vision behind it.
What This Means for Your Dating Life
Next time you feel attracted to someone, don’t panic and don’t indulge mindlessly. Pause and ask: what am I actually seeing? Am I drawn to this person — their character, their way of being in the world, the way they reflect something of God — or am I drawn to a surface that I haven’t bothered to look beneath?
Build the habit of praying briefly for the people you find attractive. It sounds small, but it rewires your gaze. You can’t pray for someone’s good and reduce them to an object at the same time. Over time, this trains your heart to lead with love instead of appetite.
Where to Go from Here
Read our explainers on the Nuptial Meaning of the Body and Concupiscence and Dating to go deeper. Understanding why your heart pulls in two directions is the first step toward integration — and freedom.