We aren’t capable of falling in love with just anyone; we are powerfully led by our “types”. We may reject many good candidates who, on paper, could sound perfect. We may not be able to explain much more about their inadequacies other than to say weakly that they didn’t “feel right”. Alternatively, we can be powerfully impelled towards other candidates, this time less clearly suitable, for reasons wholly beyond our conscious command. We are extremely, fascinatingly choosy.
Why, then, do we fall in love with particular people and not others? Why do we have the types we do? What guides our attractions? We can identify three components:
An instinct for completion
One of the most powerful forces within love is the instinct for completion. All of us are radically incomplete: we lack a range of qualities in our characters, psychological but also physical. We might be missing calm, creativity, practical know-how, wit, strength or sensitivity. It is as if, somewhere within us, we recognise this incompleteness and experience an attraction whenever we enter the orbit of someone who possesses a complementary quality.
Through love, we seek to make good a defect and to complete ourselves. As all of us have very different kinds of incompleteness, it stands to reason that we will find very different people attractive. Certain candidates will have qualities that leave us cold, because we have these in spades already: we may not need, for example, someone who is as calm as we are. Things would threaten to get dangerously quiet. We might need an injection of creativity and irreverence instead. Our tastes will be as varied as our deficiencies.
This mechanism of attraction in love is similar to the mechanism of attraction we have around styles of architecture and design. When it comes to buildings and interiors, we also operate with an instinct for completion. The places we call “beautiful” (like the people we call “attractive”) are often those that have qualities we want but don’t yet have enough of. We are most likely to be drawn to one or the other on the basis of a quality we don’t feel we possess enough of in ourselves – such as elegance, drama or alternatively calmness and simplicity.
The instinct for endorsement
There is a second instinct that drives us in love: the instinct for endorsement. We have many issues and feelings that we are lonely with, misunderstood for and that most people don’t get or are uninterested in: perhaps we dislike certain people who are generally popular; maybe we are anxious about things that others are robust around; we might have sorrows that no one else seems to share, or we could have excitements and interests that carry no echo in others.
We might then be powerfully attracted to people who seem to understand the lonely aspects of us. We love them for their ability to endorse fragile, isolated, offbeat traits. They “get” us, in contrast to the legions of the insensitive who cannot.
When we are finally with the ideal endorsing candidate, we feel engaged in a small conspiracy against the rest of the world. We don’t have to explain very much about ourselves. They just know. They “get” things quickly, without us having to speak. They read our souls, so we don’t have to spell out their contents in the normal, arduous way. Our love is a dividend of gratitude for their magical ability to understand.
Perhaps we really like doing jigsaw puzzles – an interest that our more intellectual friends scoff at. Or we have a sexual quirk that we have never dared to share with past partners. Or we have sympathy for a political figure that everyone else seems to despise. Or we really love but also feel suffocated by our mother, and that has always sounded odd to people. Or no one seems to understand and forgive us for just how stressed we get around administrative tasks.
All of this the ideal partner will – on their own – simply know.
The instinct for familiarity
The way we approach love as adults is highly shaped by how we experienced love as children. In adulthood we will be attracted to people who remind us – more or less unconsciously – of the people we loved as children. The idea seems unnerving because of a natural feeling of disgust around thinking of parental figures as sexual. But this is not the point. It isn’t that we are attracted to people who are in every way like our parents.
It’s just that, with unnerving symmetry, some of the qualities we find most attractive in adults are those that were once manifest in our caregivers from childhood. The affection of our partners can end up tinged with a feeling of familiarity. In their arms, in an emotional sense, we come home.
This is an edited extract from ‘Collected Essays by The School of Life‘.
The School of Life is a global organisation that aims to help people lead more fulfilled lives through useful resources and tools.