Why We Pick Difficult Partners ?
Theoretically, we are free to select the kind of person we love.
We might have chosen someone else. We're not being forced into a relationship by social convention, or matchmaking, or dynastic imperatives.
But in reality, our choice of lover is probably a lot less free than we imagine. 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...Our psychological history strongly predisposes us to fall for only certain types of people.
We love along grooves formed in childhood. We look for people who, in many ways, recreate the feelings of love we knew when we were small.
The problem is that, the love we imbibed in childhood, was unlikely to have been made up simply of generosity, tenderness and kindness. 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 caregiver.
This predisposes us to look, in adulthood, for partners who weren't kind to us. We may be constrained to look away from prospective candidates, because they don't satisfy a yearning for the complexities that we associate with love. We may describe someone as "not sexy", or "boring"...
But in reality, we mean that they are unlikely to make us suffer, in the way we need to suffer, in order to feel that love is real.
It's common to advise people, who are drawn to tricky candidates, to simply leave them, and find someone more suitable.
This is both theoretically appealing, and often practically impossible. We cannot magically redirect the wellsprings of attraction.
It may be wiser to simply adjust how we respond, and behave around the people we find compelling. Our problems are often generated because, we continue to respond to compelling people, just like we did, as children, around their templates.
For instance, maybe we had a parent who often raised their voice. We loved them and reacted by feeling that, when they were angry, we must be guilty.
Now, if a partner, we are magnetically drawn to, does the same, we respond as squashed, browbeaten children. Or perhaps we're drawn to someone with a short fuze which makes us blow up in turn.
Or if we had a fragile, vulnerable parent who was easily hurt, we readily end up with a partner, who's also a bit weak, and demands us to care for them. But then, we get frustrated by their weakness. We tiptoe around them.
We try to encourage and reassure, as we did when we were little. But we also condemn this person for being undeserving. We probably can't change our templates of attraction.
But rather than seeking to radically reengineer our instincts, we should try to learn how to react to desirable candidates. Not as we did as children, but in the more mature and constructive manner of a rational adult.
Take advantage of the wisdom you weren't capable of, as a kid, when you first encountered these characteristics in a parent.
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