The introduction went well enough. Steady work, decent to their mother, no obvious wreckage in the history. Your friends have run out of objections on your behalf. And you feel nothing — not aversion, which would at least be information, but a flat and slightly embarrassing nothing.
Then there is the other case. Everyone can see where that one ends. You can see where it ends. And 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.
The shortlist was drawn up a long time ago
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 wore the baggy elastic-waisted work trousers every grandmother of that generation wore, and nothing on her face. Twenty-five years later, which women does he find himself turning toward? Overwhelmingly, the frumpy ones — the ones nobody would call stylish.
He will describe this as personal taste: natural-looking people make him comfortable, while glamour feels tense or artificial. But the preference translates an early association. His grandmother’s appearance became linked with safety, so a similar appearance later produces ease before he knows anything about the woman herself. Because he does not remember learning the association, it feels entirely spontaneous.
Reverse the household and the result reverses with it. A mother who was stylish, who liked a short skirt and liked being looked at in it, tends to produce a son who goes for the sexy ones.
Or take a daughter of a father who said very little. She meets a man who is quick and funny and generous with his attention — by every account a gift. She finds it faintly unbearable. Everyone else at the table is delighted. She cannot say why she is not, and she has no argument to offer, only the fact.
You were never choosing the better person
This is the part that tends to land badly, so I will put it plainly. The sorting is not running on quality.
We assume attraction begins by appraising character: Is this person kind, reliable, and capable of intimacy? But an internal working model formed in early relationships responds first. Familiar cues — distance, warmth, volatility, appearance, or tone — produce attraction or aversion before conscious evaluation begins.
It is not deliberation. It does not take a second.
And when the template is matched, what you feel is ease. The room is one you have been in. A stranger somehow does not require any adjustment from you.
We have a word for that ease. We call it attraction.
Why the sensible choice tends not to hold
The practical consequence shows up in a particular kind of decision: the one made on the specification, with no pull underneath it.
The work has to be secure. The income has to clear a line. The families have to be able to sit in a room together. You draw the list, you check the boxes, everything checks, and you decide.
Those arrangements struggle, and not because anyone in them behaved badly. A specification is a thing that can be satisfied.
Once the practical conditions are met, they cannot create emotional attachment if no attachment was present. You may value the person’s stability yet continue searching for the sense of familiarity, aliveness, or emotional recognition the checklist did not supply. That is why attention from someone else can remain in your mind long after the encounter.
The problem is not that practical judgment is wrong. It is that practical compatibility and attachment answer different questions. A relationship chosen only by criteria may be sensible without becoming emotionally binding.
The same mechanism keeps people beside the ones who hurt them
Here the idea stops being interesting and starts being expensive.
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 the reading of a face from across a room. You learned the timing of a request. You learned to absorb and to smooth and to wait, and you learned all of it early, in the years when learning is not yet optional.
Later, someone with the same instability enters your life and feels immediately understandable. You know how to monitor the face, time the request, absorb the disappointment, and restore calm. The relationship may hurt you, but it gives you a familiar role and therefore feels easier to navigate than a stable relationship in which you do not know who to be.
John Bowlby, who assembled attachment theory out of exactly this kind of observation, held that the earliest relationship becomes the working model for the ones that follow. Not the best relationship available. 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 on trying.
What is available is knowing what the template is doing to you at the moment it does it — noticing, as you sit across from someone, that the ease arrived before you knew a single thing about them. The difference between knowing and not knowing is larger than it sounds.
Not knowing, you call it taste. This is simply the kind of person I like — and there the conversation ends, every time, for thirty years.
Knowing, you get one distinction back. Two questions instead of one.
Is this person easy for me. Is this person good for me.
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. A stable person may feel emotionally flat simply because stability does not match the relationship pattern your body learned first.
Bring to mind whoever you are currently drawn to, or whoever you cannot make yourself want. Then sit with the awkward question of where that feeling is actually coming from — from them, in front of you now, or from somewhere considerably older. The answer may not arrive. It does not need to. Having asked is already a small loosening of a thing that has been running without being asked anything at all.
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