On relationships and familiarity

Often, we find ourselves falling for the same person with different faces and names. We don’t understand why but we constantly ask ourselves how we end up with the same partner through various versions across our lifetime. It is no surprise that these relationships end up failing most of the time, too.

How we fall in love with someone is complicated. When two people are attracted to each other, there’s often no clear explanation for how this happens, except for the brain activating the right neurotransmitters that allow us to feel this sort of chemistry. When we ask our friends why they like a particular person, especially initially, they don’t always have a detailed answer and can sometimes seem confused when they try to come up with reasons. “Love” works in peculiar ways.

Ever since we’re born, we are showered with unconditional love from our parents. We are fragile, weak, and cannot do anything on our own. We had to rely on adults to love us, nurture us, feed us, teach us and look after us. This is the love we got accustomed to throughout the early stages. There’s a certain degree of self-righteousness involved too. We were taught, indirectly, that we are entitled to be loved and that this love can come with little in return. We were taught that we ought not to voice our needs because these were very well known already by our caretakers and that, if anything, they were the ones guiding us in the first place about what we require in life. Surely not all our childhoods were beds and roses, and some of them were pretty tough or traumatizing, yet the idea that we began to exist because of a specific adult who managed to help us walk, talk, and clean after ourselves requites the notion of love on some level.

We become familiar with this type of love; more importantly, we become acquainted with the people behind the scenes, with our caretakers or parents who first triggered in us the feelings of belonging and attachment. In our first relationships, the ones with our caregivers, we learn certain attachment styles that have the ability to shape our lives later in adulthood. We either learn to develop emotional hunger, to live in isolation, to struggle with internal conflict, or to be secure and reciprocal in the best (not so common) case scenario. Yet little do we know.

And here’s the catch, the less we know about ourselves, the more the person we will indelibly be drawn to will have a lot in common with the first figures of our early lives. This has nothing to do with their character or looks. It has a lot to do with the deepest parts of ourselves that were triggered by these figures. We do not fall in love with someone new; we fall in love with the person who tethers us and knows exactly which damaged parts of ourselves to stretch and with whom there’s a great sense of familiarity in doing so.

We are intricately mad and insane, and so is everyone else. Yet failing to acknowledge this not only leads us to choose the most familiar — sometimes toxic — partner but also to demand a lot from them. We need them to understand us, to like us unconditionally, to know what we need and want without having to communicate what’s on our minds, to tell us what we want to hear without ever having to declare what rhymes most with our souls, only to further that attachment style beyond repair.

Before asking the partner to understand us, we need to comprehend ourselves and the deepest darkest parts of our characters. We owe it to ourselves first and to the other person to cultivate self-awareness and monitor our inner psyche. Internal cognition (i.e., how we view ourselves) and external awareness (i.e., how the rest of the world views us) are both crucial in this regard to choose wisely, to alleviate the sense of entitlement we usually feel in our relationships, to increase emotional resilience, and to help us understand where the other person is coming from. It is indeed one of the most difficult endeavors to undertake in life, as the more we grow, the more things we uncover about ourselves and our interactions with the world around us. But if we want a shot at happiness in love, we have to go the extra mile in being our own partner first.