i will not comment, often thought along these lines, but wish i wouldn't think..
"We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, 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 most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s 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 are wrong but because they are a little too right — in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable — given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.
The romantic story of love tells us that our search for a partner is inspired, above all else, by a desire to find someone who can make us happy. But the truth is a little more confused and peculiar, for one of the oddest aspects of love is that in tracking down a mate, we don’t, in fact, look out for just anyone who seems kind, good, and attractive. We look out for someone who can fulfill a number of pre-existing psychological requirements — which could include a subterranean appetite for frustration and humiliation.
We are constrained in our love choices by what we learned of love as children. Adult love is in central ways a search for rediscovery of emotions first known in childhood. In order to prove exciting and attractive, the partner we pick must re-evoke many of the feelings we once had around parental figures, and these feelings, though they may include tenderness and satisfaction, are also likely to feature a more troubling range of emotions.
[…]
Without being fully aware of our wish, we need our partner to have a failing that our parents once had, so that we can repeat a flawed but potent dynamic we once experienced as children.
[…]
It seems we are fated either to seek out the fault of a parent in a partner, or to mimic the fault of the parent with a partner. Either way, the fault of the parent remains central to our love choices. Without it, we may simply not be able to feel passionate and tender with someone. We might imagine we would only be attracted to admirable traits — to perfection, to very positive things about another — yet just below the conscious radar, it is the failings that lure us in.
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