WASHINGTON — I’ve noticed a weird pattern, in fiction and life, about sexual encounters: Women decide they’re not attracted to a guy they’re nestling with. Limerence is not in the cards. But they go ahead and have sex anyhow.

First, we have college student Margot in The New Yorker’s much-discussed short fictional story “Cat Person” who recoils as she watches Robert undress. “But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon.” Margot doesn’t want to seem spoiled or capricious, so she takes a sip of whiskey to “bludgeon her resistance into submission.”

Then we have the 23-year-old Brooklyn-based photographer who hooked up with comedian Aziz Ansari at his TriBeCa apartment and talked about it anonymously to the website Babe. She was distressed by his arbitrary choice of white wine at dinner, his rush to sex, the way he jammed two fingers in a V-shape down her throat.

But at his request, she gave him oral sex twice; he briefly performed it on her once.

On “60 Minutes,” Stormy Daniels told Anderson Cooper that she was not at all attracted to Donald Trump but she had sex with him (without a condom). She said that she thought maybe “I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone.”