You were set up with someone, and the date went well enough. Steady work, decent to their mother, nothing alarming in their past. Even your friends cannot find anything to object to. And you feel nothing — not dislike, which would at least tell you something, but a flat and slightly embarrassing nothing.
Then there is the other kind of person. Everyone can see that being with them will end badly. You can see it too. And yet in that person’s company something in you unclenches.
It is worth asking what is actually doing the choosing, because it is not the part of you that reads the résumé.
Your type was set long before you chose anyone
Who you are drawn to has a great deal to do with what happened around you before you could describe any of it.
Take a boy raised largely by his grandmother. She dressed the way country grandmothers of her generation did — baggy, elastic-waisted work trousers and no makeup. Twenty-five years later, which women does he find himself turning toward? Again and again, the frumpy ones — the ones nobody would call stylish.
He will describe this as personal taste: plain, natural-looking women make him comfortable, while glamorous women put him on edge or strike him as artificial. But what he calls taste is something he learned very early. His grandmother’s appearance became linked in his mind with safety, so when a woman looks like that, he feels at ease before he knows anything about her. He does not remember learning this, so the preference feels entirely his own.
It works the other way too. Take a boy whose mother was stylish — who liked short skirts and liked being looked at in them. He tends to grow up going for the sexy ones.
Or take a woman who grew up with a father who said very little. She meets a man who is quick and funny and generous with his attention — the kind of man everyone calls a catch. She finds him faintly unbearable. Everyone around her is delighted with him. She cannot say why she is not. She has no reason to give, only the feeling.
You were never choosing the better person
This is the part people tend not to like hearing, so I will put it plainly. What draws you to someone is not whether they are a good person.
We assume attraction begins by sizing up character: Is this person kind, reliable, and capable of intimacy? But before you get to any of that, something you learned long ago has already responded. As a small child, you learned what being close to someone is like — from how people spoke to you, how close or how far away they stayed, and how they showed affection. What you learned stayed with you as a set of expectations. Attachment theory, which studies how our first bonds shape the relationships that come later, calls these expectations an internal working model. Think of it as a template.
When someone gives off the signals you knew back then — the same distance or the same warmth, the same unpredictable moods, the same kind of appearance, the same tone of voice — you feel drawn to them. When their signals are very different, you may feel put off, the way the woman with the quiet father was put off by the talkative man. Either way, it happens before you have begun to think about them at all.
You do not weigh anything up. It takes less than a second.
And when someone fits the template, what you feel is ease. It is like walking into a room you have been in before. This person is a stranger, and yet somehow you do not have to adjust to them at all.
We have a word for that ease. We call it attraction.
Why the sensible choice tends not to hold
Because attraction comes from that early template and not from a list of good qualities, one kind of decision tends to go wrong: choosing a partner because they meet your requirements, when you feel no pull toward them at all.
Their job has to be secure. Their income has to be above a certain figure. The two families have to be able to sit in a room together. You draw up the list, you check the boxes, everything checks out, and you decide to marry.
Marriages made this way tend to struggle, and not because anyone in them behaved badly. The trouble is that a list of requirements can be completely met, and once it has been met, it has nothing more to give you.
Meeting the requirements cannot create an emotional bond that was never there. You may value your partner’s stability and still keep searching for what the list never gave you: a sense of familiarity, of feeling alive, of being understood. That is why, when someone outside the marriage pays you attention, it can stay on your mind long after the moment has passed. A marriage like this does not by itself cause an affair, but it leaves you open to one.
The problem is not that practical judgment is wrong. Whether someone fits your life on paper and whether you feel a real bond with them are two separate questions. A relationship chosen only because it meets your requirements can be sensible and still leave you lonely.
The same mechanism keeps people with the ones who hurt them
Here the pattern stops being merely interesting and starts to do real damage.
Some of you grew up in a house organised around a father’s drinking, or a mother’s gambling, or something else that everyone worked around and nobody named. You learned to read a face from across the room and tell what mood was coming. You learned when it was safe to ask for something. You learned to swallow your disappointment, to smooth things over and to wait, and you learned all of it early, when you were too young to choose not to learn it.
Later, someone as unstable as that parent comes into your life, and you understand them at once. You already know what to do: watch their face, pick your moment to ask, swallow the disappointment, calm things down. The relationship may hurt you. But it gives you a role you already know, so it feels easier to handle than a stable relationship in which you do not know who to be. That is why familiar tension can feel more natural than a calm that is unfamiliar to you.
John Bowlby, the psychiatrist who founded attachment theory, held that the earliest relationship becomes the working model — the template — for the ones that follow. Not the best relationship you have known. The first one.
So is the template fixed?
The template does not go away. I would not promise you otherwise, and I would not build a plan around trying to get rid of it.
What you can do is notice the template working on you while it is happening: as you sit across from someone, you realise that the ease arrived before you knew a single thing about them. Knowing that the template is at work makes more of a difference than it sounds.
If you do not know this, you call it taste: “This is simply the kind of person I like.” You say it every time, for thirty years, and never ask why.
If you do know it, you can ask two questions instead of one.
Is this person easy for me to be with? Is this person good for me — do they treat me with respect and keep their word?
Those are not the same question. Familiarity creates ease, but ease does not prove that the person is safe or good for you. Unfamiliarity creates discomfort, but discomfort does not prove that the person is wrong for you. A stable person may feel emotionally flat to you simply because stability does not match the pattern of closeness you learned as a child.
Bring to mind whoever you are currently drawn to, or whoever you cannot make yourself want. Then ask yourself the awkward question of where that feeling is actually coming from — from the person in front of you now, or from much further back, from the people who raised you. The answer may not come. It does not need to. Just asking the question loosens, a little, the grip of a pattern that has been choosing for you all along without ever being questioned.
References
- Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. New York: Basic Books. — the internal working model.
- Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory. London: Routledge.
Related
- Snap Judgments: Why You Decide Before They Speak
- Why the Inside Dries Out
- Codependency: Why I Can’t Leave a Relationship
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board