1. Appreciation Boosts Attraction

A 2025 study published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences proposes the idea that love is, at its core, a “significance quest.” The authors emphasize the fact that people are drawn to partners who make them feel seen and valued, or simply as though they matter. Within this framework, attraction is something that grows when a partner both perceives and appreciates your best qualities.

Imagine, for instance, that your partner has spent hours preparing for a presentation at work. Rather than a passing “Good luck,” you instead tell them, “I know how much effort you’ve put into this. You’re incredibly thoughtful in how you approach things, and I really admire that about you.” This moment of appreciation is both sincere and securely grounded in who they are as a person.

Beyond offering a confidence boost, moments like these strongly reinforce how your partner sees themselves through your eyes. At the same time, you also become associated with that sense of being valued. In turn, attraction becomes reciprocal: both partners feel more drawn to each other because of the emotional significance they co-create.

But without this baseline of appreciation, partners forget to pay attention to each other’s efforts. Their good qualities start fading into the background. In time, the relationship may even start to feel emotionally flat, despite nothing “major” having gone wrong. This is because attraction in a relationship demands partners to truly see one another, in the most profound sense of the word.

2. Novelty Boosts Attraction

In a 2015 review published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, researchers highlight a significant pattern that has been observed across many studies globally: that sexual desire and arousal tend to decline with familiarity and increase with novelty. This applies to both men and women, though the effect is seemingly stronger in men.

The mechanism behind this correlation is simple: the brain is wired to respond to newness. Novel experiences activate attention, curiosity and excitement, all of which are strongly associated with sexual and romantic attraction.

Picture, for example, a couple who have fallen into a steady routine. Every day, they eat the same dinners, watch the same shows and rehash the same conversations. Then, one weekend, they decide to try something different — say, a beginner’s salsa class. They’re both slightly out of their comfort zone, laughing at missed steps, adjusting to a totally unfamiliar rhythm. There’s a shared sense of play, as well as a mild uncertainty.

As cheesy as they might sound on paper, experiences like these are, indeed, impactful enough to fundamentally change how you see your partner. Your view of them immediately becomes more dynamic, less predictable. The context itself injects its novel energy into the relationship, and very often, that energy translates into renewed attraction.

Conversely, when novelty disappears entirely from a relationship, partners start to feel overly familiar in a way that dulls their interest in one another. Their interactions fall into an automatic pattern, and daily exchanges start to lose their charm in turn. Here, fading attraction reflects the relationship’s lack of novel emotional or sensory inputs, rather than incompatibility.

Thankfully, even small changes can be enough to make a profound difference. Trying a new restaurant, exploring a different conversation topic, altering your routine slightly — the change itself can be small, so long as it’s a real change.

3. Humor Boosts Attraction

A 2010 study in The Journal of Psychology found that individuals described as having a good sense of humor were rated as significantly more attractive and desirable as long-term partners. This is because humor, as the evidence shows, can signal various endearing traits at once, such as warmth, intelligence and social adeptness.

Humor is invaluable in everyday life, yet it emerges in fleeting opportunities that are easy to miss. For instance, imagine your partner coming home visibly frustrated after a long day of work. Instead of responding with tension or trepidation, you make a joke that you know will put a smile on their face.

When used in these contexts, humor serves two important roles at once in a relationship: it decreases stress while increasing closeness. This is because shared laughter is an essential means for creating a shared sense of “us”: an emotional space, reserved only for you two insiders, where you both feel safe and understood. And over time, that banter — the unique, witty emotional rhythm that you share — can become deeply attractive.

In the absence of humor, interactions can become overly serious or transactional. Conversations lose their flair when they solely revolve around logistics and responsibilities, as everything starts to feel like a problem to be solved. Of course, these conversations are necessary in daily life, but it’s equally important to remember that they aren’t enough to sustain romance. Humor reintroduces play, and play is a core ingredient of desire.

Curious about where your relationship currently stands? Take the science-backed Relationship Satisfaction Scale, and have a deeper look at the dynamics that influence your relationship connection, including attraction — and where small shifts can make the biggest difference.