Forget chemistry. Getting things hot is all about physics

It was a particularly cold winter evening in London. My friend and I arrived fashionably late to the pub. Too late for a chance at a table with pub heaters, we constructed a makeshift quilt of hoodies, scarves, caps, and gloves, and tucked into a bottle of shitty pink wine. Our conversation revolved around their recent breakup; despite the lingering grief, it was heartening to hear them speak decisively about staying single for a while. They wanted to explore how their sexual identity might evolve outside of a relationship, believing that dating widely and deeply would be their next meaningful adventure.

I’ve been living the single—capital S—life for three years now, so I figured I could offer some sage insights. Soon enough, I was off on a trademark introspective spiel—this time about how my current approach to dating emphasises honest communication more than it used to (though my WhatsApp archives might say otherwise). “These days,” I said sagely, “I aim to be clear and transparent right from the start, rather than only when it’s convenient.”

Instead of the admiration I expected, I got silence and a blank stare.

"What?" I asked, irritated. Was my wisdom so profound it had flown over their head?

Finally, they said, "But doesn’t that take all the fun out of it?"

To my friend, spelling everything out kills the mystery—and with it, the spark—making the interaction feel “a bit whatever, you know?”. Traditional sex theory would say they were suggesting there wouldn’t be any sexual tension: the physiological manifestation of uncertainty. It’s the force that has shaped seduction for centuries—so powerful, we’ve practically canonized it. It turns hesitation into heat, silence into suspense, and distance into a magnetic pull; stretching out moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed. 

Fuck. Maybe they were right.

The problem was, whether they took my advice or not, my friend would soon realize that a little bit of certainty and structure is hard to avoid in what was about to become our shared dating pool (Single East London)—especially with dating apps, where questions demanding honest answers come before you even meet in person. With so many ways to date now, making sure you’re aligned on the basics is becoming the norm, not the exception. If you want to keep things light and fun, you need to open up.

I realized then that my starting point had to be separating mystery from spark—they had treated mystery as the spark itself, rather than just one way to create it.

That distinction mattered. If mystery and spark weren’t the same thing, then losing one didn’t have to mean losing the other. And if that was true, then maybe transparency wasn’t a threat to desire, but another way to fuel it. At this point, even if my friend wasn’t going to be convinced, I was slightly concerned I’d transparency-ed myself out of a sex life, so I was determined to figure out if I’d made a terrible mistake.

Tension is, at its core, a physical phenomenon. Many of our erotic metaphors—magnetic pull, electricity, spark—come straight from physics, describing attraction in a visceral, clear-cut word or two. Just as physical tension creates energy and movement, so too does sexual tension in our minds and bodies. When we stretch an object, it stores potential energy—released explosively when we let go.  Thinking about tension in these simple terms had the added benefit of speaking my physicist friend’s language—something I figured they’d appreciate and understand.

When it comes to deepening desire—if that’s the goal—it’s not tension itself that matters, then, but the hot, sticky, charged energy it creates. That’s what my friend didn’t want to lose—the kind of charge that makes every moment feel electric, every interaction reverberating for days to come. I didn’t need to prove that candor could preserve their precious tension; I needed to prove it could invert the dynamic in an equally electrifying way. Physics, I was relieved to discover, had done the hard work for me here.

Tension is a force, and like all forces, it has an opposite. Its opposite? Compression.

While tension stretches things apart, compression pushes them together—like pressing down on a spring, storing energy until it rebounds. What if, rather than disrupting tension, introducing clarity and structure into early connections worked like a kind of sexual compression (trademark pending)?

It’s the slow, deliberate press of bodies in a loaded hug goodbye. The warm weight of certainty when plans for the next meeting are made before the current one ends. The charged energy that builds when two people lean in rather than hold back.

When both partners are open, they don’t pull away—they press in, drawn together by their own clear intentions rather than the force of distance or uncertainty. Instead of the charged pull of tension, this is something different—an energy that doesn’t stretch the space between them but condenses it, making it denser, heavier, and more electric.

It struck me that navigating a connection is really about balancing candor and mystery, sexual compression and sexual tension.

We don’t do ourselves any favors by fixating on mystery as a shortcut to thrilling connections. Maybe a better analogy than a rubber band is a sexy ball of slime. I’m still working on this one, but hear me out: elastic, adaptable, able to be stretched and compressed in different ways. This kind of flexibility allows for a richer, more dynamic experience of attraction.

That’s what I’ll plan to tell my friend over another bottle of pink wine next week.

Sometimes, you need communication to charge a connection, and there’s room for both honesty and mystery in our sex lives. Closing ourselves off to different pathways of attraction? That’s the real passion killer.