Perhaps we’re drawn to someone with short-fuse – which makes us blow up in turn. Now if a partner (to whom we are magnetically drawn) gets cross, we respond as squashed, brow-beaten children: we sulk, we feel it’s our fault, we feel got at and yet deserving of criticism, we build up a lot of resentment. We loved them, and reacted by feeling that when they were angry we must be guilty. For instance, maybe we had a rather irate parent who often raised their voice.
Our problems are often generated because we continue to respond to compelling people in the way learned to behave as children around their templates. Rather than aim for a transformation in the types of people we are attracted to, it may be wiser simply to adjust how we respond and behave around the occasionally difficult characters whom our past mandates we will find compelling. We cannot magically redirect the well-springs of attraction. This is both theoretically appealing and often practically impossible. It is common to advise people who are drawn to tricky candidates simply to leave them and find someone more wholesome. We may describe someone as ‘not sexy’ or ‘boring’ when in truth we mean: unlikely to make me suffer in the way I need to suffer in order to feel that love is real. We may be constrained to look away from prospective candidates because they don’t satisfy a yearning for the complexities we associate with love. This predisposes us to look in adulthood for partners who won’t necessarily simply be kind to us, but who will – most importantly – feel familiar which can be a subtly but importantly different thing. Given the way the world is, love was liable to have come entwined with certain painful aspects: a feeling of not being quite good enough a love for a parent who was fragile or depressed a sense that one could never be fully vulnerable around a care-giver. The problem is that the love we imbibed in childhood was unlikely to have been made up simply of generosity, tenderness and kindness. We look for people who in many ways recreate the feelings of love we knew when we were small. We love along grooves formed in childhood. Our psychological history strongly predisposes us to fall for only certain types of people. Some very real constraints around whom we can love and feel properly attracted to come from a place we might not think to look: our childhoods. But in reality our choice is probably a lot less free than we imagine. We’re not being forced into this by social convention or match-making aunts or dynastic imperatives. Theoretically we are free to select the kind of person we love.
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