Theoretically, we are free to select the kind of person we want to fall in love with because we are not forced into relationships by social convention, matchmaking, firm moral standards and values or enormous imperatives. It’s easier to fall in love with anyone because you simply just wish it but in reality, our choice of who we love is a whole less free than we imagine.
It’s confusing when a plenitude of humans decide to fall and be charmed by those who’ll cause them pain, why they decide to pursue those who make them feel angry, bitter and insecure and leave tons of messages from those who truly care about them with no replies. So what governs attraction? What dictates the kind of person that looks appealing to us?
Constraints around who we love and feel properly attached to come from a place we might not think of — childhood. Our psychological history strongly predisposes us to fall for only certain types of people we love around grooves formed in childhood. We fall for people who in many ways recreate the feelings of love we know when we were younger.
The problem here is, the love we imbibed in childhood is unlikely to have been made up simply of generosity, kindness and tenderness. Given the way the world is, love is likely to have formed with certain painful aspects. A feeling of not being good enough, a love for a parent who’s fragile or depressed. This may strongly incline us to look in adulthood into those who aren’t just simply kind to us but those who’ll make us feel “familiar” which can be a subtle but importantly different thing.
We may be constrained and compelled to look away from prospective candidates because they don’t satisfy a yearning or desire for complexities we associate and identify love with. We may give excuses but in truth, we strongly believe anyone who does not make us suffer the way we need to suffer to feel that love is real does not truly and genuinely love us.
For instance, as children, maybe we had a rather irate and hot-tempered parent who often raised their voice. We truly loved them and genuinely believed we did and we reacted by feeling guilty, timid and would do anything to please them. Meeting someone like that in adulthood strongly reignites or triggers a feeling of “love” and we unexplainably find ourselves helplessly attracted to them.
If we had fragile and vulnerable parents who easily get hurt but we still loved dearly, we readily end up getting attracted to someone who’s also a lot like them. We get frustrated and certainly dislike their weakness but we still involuntarily get charmed and love-struck when we meet them.
Now, we probably can’t change our templates of attraction but rather than seek to radically re-engineer our instincts, what we must do and try to learn is to react to desirable candidates not as we did as children but in the more mature and emotionally intelligent manner.
Getting attracted might be a little bit uncontrollable and irresistible but staying with such a person is something that’s our choice to make. Try to reach a compromise because you cannot necessarily change someone completely. What we can do is try to adjust to suit someone we strongly desire and love.
However, if who you are attracted to is not ready to bravely combat the difficulties that come with loving them, we might need to become better only by deploying a dash of life-sustaining ruthlessness and mercilessly cut them off at least for our mental comfort and wellbeing.
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