how do we choose the people we fall in
love with in the modern world under the
ideology of Romanticism you meant above
all to trust your feelings love is a
mutual ecstasy at finding a beautiful
person inside and out with a rare
capacity to make us happy the romantic
attitude sounds warm and kind its
originator certainly imagined that it
would bring to an end a sort of unhappy
relationships that resulted from the old
ways of finding a partner the arranged
marriage the only problem is that this
call for us to trust our instincts has
very often proved to be a disaster of
its own respecting the special feelings
we get around certain people in
nightclubs or train stations parties or
on websites and that romanticism so ably
celebrated an art appears not to have
led us to be any happier in our unions
than a medieval couple shackled into
marriage by two royal courts keen to
preserve a sovereignty of a slice of
ancestral land instinct has been little
better than calculation in underwriting
the quality of our love stories there's
another school of thought this one
influenced by psychotherapy which
challenges the notion that trusting
instinct invariably draws us to those
who will make us happy that's because
the theory points out that we don't fall
in love first and foremost with those
who care for us in ideal ways we fall in
love with those who care for us in
familiar ways and there might be a big
difference adult love is modeled on a
template of love created in childhood
and is likely to be entwined with a
range of problematic attractions that
militate in key ways against our chances
of growth and happiness as adults we may
believe we're seeking happiness in love
but what we're really after is
familiarity we're looking to recreate
within our adult relationships the very
feelings we knew so well in childhood
and which were rarely limited to just
tenderness and care the love many of us
would have tasted early on was confused
with other perhaps more destructive
dynamics feelings of wanting to help an
adult who was out of control or of being
deprived of a
parents warmth or scared of his or her
anger or of not feeling secure enough to
communicate our trickier wishes how
logical then that we should as adults
find ourselves rejecting certain
candidates not because they're wrong for
us but because they're a little too
right in a sense of seeming somehow
excessively balanced mature
understanding and reliable given that in
our hearts such ripeness
feels foreign and unearned to choose our
partners wisely we need to tease out how
certain compulsions to suffering may be
playing themselves out in our feelings
of attraction a useful starting place is
to ask ourselves perhaps in the company
of a large sheet of paper or a pen and a
free afternoon what sort of people in
the abstract put us off and what kinds
excite us to try to trace back qualities
to the people who first loved us in
childhood and to ask ourselves how much
our impulses really are aligned with
things that might make us happy we could
stand to discover for example it's
slightly distant and sadistic people do
always seem more interesting to us than
the so-called nice ones that should make
a stop and think our honestly described
reactions are legacies they are
revealing underlying assumptions we've
acquired about what love for us can feel
like we may start to get a clearer
picture that our vision of what we're
looking for in another person might not
be an especially good guide to our
personal happiness examining our
emotional histories we learned that we
can't just be attracted to anyone we're
limited in the types we have because of
certain things that happen to us in our
past even if we can't always radically
shift these patterns it's useful to know
that we're carrying a ball and chain it
can make us more careful of ourselves
when we feel overwhelmed by a certainty
that we've met the one after just a few
minutes chatting at the bar or when with
certain someone is just wrong or boring
even though objectively they do have a
lot going for them ultimately we stand
to be liberated to love different people
to our initial types when we find that
the qualities we like
the ones we very much fear can be found
in different constellations from those
we encountered in the people who first
taught us about affection long ago in a
childhood we should strive to understand
and in many ways free ourselves from
you