Apparently, we are free to choose the Person in our life as our partner but in reality, the choice of picking up the other half is not as free as we think it is. Some other important constraints develop our minds and mold our hearts towards the person we think we love; the most crucial and basic factor that develops our likeness towards a particular type of people is our Childhood.
Under the umbrella of romanticism, we first trust our feelings and instincts to pick a person. Our emotional and Psychological history along with the Nature Vs Nurture phenomenon develops our character and our template of attraction. We actually look for individuals who in different ways recreate the Feeling of Love we experienced in our childhood. This leads us in our adulthood to partners who look and feels familiar not necessarily loveable, cute, kind, etc. The love we ideally look for does not always come from beautiful aspects like care, generosity, kindness, etc but the behavioral attitudes of our parents toward us when we were children.
So if our childhood was full of complexities then we naturally tend to attract a complex person who gives us the same tough time that one of our parents or both have given us in our childhood. That is how we associate those feeling (no matter in secure and weird) with love, even if the other person is cold, not expressive, etc that doesn’t matter to us, all we fight for is to grab his attention and care as we have exercised in our childhood from our parents in search of love. In other words, unconsciously we demand to suffer as we need to suffer to make us realize that love is real.
Theoretically appealing and practically difficult candidates are our tricky psyche to hold on to. So we compel our past mandates as we have learned in our childhood to respond towards those particular templates. We don’t fall in love in an ideal way but in familiar ways. We may believe that we seek affection and happiness in love but we pursue familiarity. We relocate the same feelings as we have experienced in our childhood, no matter that has less to do with tenderness and care and more to do with less constructive dynamics. For instance, if our parents used to raise their voice and make us feel guilty most of the time, so we develop this thinking and psychology that it’s our fault when the other person raises voice. Now if our partner with whom we have magnetically drowned, shows us the same ignorance and leftover feelings, we feel familiar and that’s how we trap in this idea of Love and affection. Similarly, if our parents got easily hurt then either we find a partner who needs us to care for them or who can easily heal us when we get hurt.
Deprived of love or scared from parents’ anger and high pitch of voice tone in childhood suppress kids from openly expressing their deep wishes and desires. The confused idea of love for these adults often leads them towards destructive dynamics, like feeling to help or console the other person. We sometimes reject the person not because he/she is bad for us but because a little too good to be with us. The sense of having to balance, happy and wise people sounds unfamiliar, strange, and simply not relatable; and we end up calling them “not of my type”. Such people don’t easily accept unearned and blessed feelings as they have grown up earning and fighting for love and affection. Distant people and distant relationships attract such people and when they suffer because of such unaffectionate and distant behavior from their beloved they perceive this suffering as love.
We probably cannot redirect the good spring of attraction and can’t change our template of attraction but there is always a bright side to the picture so if you are lucky enough to have a healthy environment around you once you are an adult, then you can somehow overcome on your fears and insecurities. Yes, we can change or mold our childlike responses to the adult responses we are aiming for in a better way. For example, instead of finding a loud person and raise voice, we can find an opposite person who is less vocal, polite, humble, and respectful. This type of person might not make you feel guilty but secure and protected. Furthermore, instead of finding a person who thinks you are stupid, go for the one who sees your worth as no one else can, and so on.
Many of us have some issues with our psychology from our childhood that make our decisions and childlike defensive moods. So instead of running away, avoiding and feeling insecure the same way we used to feel as a child, behave like a responsible adult to face and normalize things. Not only those coming from your already insecure partner but your unprotected psychology as well; if both partners will try to balance the relationship they can surely win it. We certainly cannot change others’ or our psychology and childhood experiences but we can surely behave in an adult way toward our partner’s less mature side.
Hence, to choose a partner wisely, we need to consciously fix our compulsion of suffering and change them to happiness and togetherness.
If you don’t come from a happy family make sure happy a family comes from you
