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The challenges of finding love are highly complex, seldom systematically explored, and relatively new.
We have been looking for love the way we do now for, at best, only 260 years. We are still at the dawn of determining how to get into good relationships. Signs of our missteps are all around us.
For most of history, relationships were very different in two main ways. Firstly, people didn’t marry for love. They did so for reasons of sta...
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We didn’t expect to love our partners; we hoped – at best – to tolerate them. We ...
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The Marriage of Reason gave way to the Marriage of Feeling. We were now left to choose our own partners, without reference to the wishes of anyone else, be it family or society.
The ideal lover was to be found by Instinct, not by Reason.
Far from being a passing folly, the feeling of being ‘in love’ was now interpreted as a supremely reliable guide to half a century or more of conjugal happiness.
One would become aware of a variety of symptoms, amply described in literature and art: a quickened heartbeat, a sense of having alighted on ‘The One’, difficulty sleeping, an urge to speak (to almost everyone) about the beloved and a desire to listen to music and go into nature, together with The One.
The most notable aspect of our instinct in love is its particularity. 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.
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:
1 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.
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 se...
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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.
2 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;
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.
3 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 ...
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some of the qualities we find most attractive in adults are those that were once manifest in our caregivers from childhood.
In their arms, in an emotional sense, we come home. And, without anyone giving the matter too much thought, they sweetly call us ‘baby’.
III Our Problems With the People We Are Attracted To
Our society encourages us not to probe our three Instincts (for Completion, Endorsement and Familiarity) too much. We are encouraged to ‘go with our feelings’ and to ‘trust our instincts’.
degree of wisdom begins with the knowledge that our instincts will at points be extremely misleading.
1 The problem with our instinct for completion
The Instinct for Completion drives us towards strengths in others that promise to compensate for weaknesses in our own natures.
The success of love will depend on success at learning and teaching.
So although we’re attracted to strengths in others, we don’t necessarily accept that we have to correct the weaknesses in ourselves that fired our attractions in the first place.
2 The problem with our instinct for endorsement
This is very touching, but a huge problem in the long-term. It dissuades us from the difficult but necessary task of explaining ourselves: what we want, how we feel, why we are sad, what irritates us.
We start to believe that a good lover should simply know the contents of our minds without us doing anything to share them.
A sulk is one of the odder gifts of love. Our incensed background belief that a good lover should just know explains why on the evening when they unwittingly cause us offence at a party, we will sit quietly in the car on the way home and will reply with a simple ‘Nothing’ when they enquire if anything is up.
3 The problem with our instinct for familiarity
We are led by instinct to potential partners who feel familiar. In many ways, adult love is a search for a rediscovery of emotions first known in childhood.
In order to prove attractive, the partner we pick must re-evoke many of the feelings we once had around parental figures.
However, parental figures may not merely be associated with tenderness and understanding; they may have mixed up their love wi...
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We may reject candidates without particular flaws and not even know why, simply saying that they are ‘too nice’ or ‘a bit boring’. These are code terms for: ‘unlikely to bring me the sort of problems that feel necessary in their familiarity’; or ‘unable to make me suffer in the ways I need to in order to love’.
We might go so far as to say that we don’t primarily want to be happy with the partner we choose. We want a partner to feel familiar – and this may mean that we are driven to seek out unhappy circumstances, if the affection we knew as children was connected with certain sorts of pain.
The Repetition Dynamic is what we call the odd tendency in relationships where we repeatedly go for partners with a very flawed nature who don’t allow us to flourish or find happiness.
Challenging past experiences can also shape our relationship instincts in a very different way. Instead of being drawn to an adult who reminds us of a parent, our instincts may turn emphatically in the opposite direction.
IV Improving Our Problematic Instincts
We are not helpless before our instincts. By understanding the way they work, we can take steps to attenuate their worst consequences. We can learn to be intelligently suspicious of our first impulses, and submit them to reasoned examination before following their commands.
Love aims to be a safe arena in which two people can gently teach and learn how to grow into better versions of themselves. Teaching and learning does not symbolise an abandonment of love: it is the basis upon which we can develop into better lovers and, more broadly, better people.
2 Improving the instinct for endorsement
Even the most intelligent, sensitive lover cannot be expected to navigate around us without a lot of patiently articulated verbal indications of our desires and intentions.
3 Improving the instinct for familiarity
The instinct for Familiarity leads us to two kinds of difficult types: people who have the same bad qualities as parental figures; and people who have none of the bad qualities as parental figures, but none of their good qualities either.
we believe that we should direct our efforts to changing the way we characteristically deal with the difficulties we are attracted to.
