Contents
Why exactly him? Why she? Each meeting from which love is born seems to us the result of a chain of miraculous coincidences. In fact, the choice is predetermined by the entire previous course of our life.
Why do we meet millions of people and love only one?
Why did Marina and Ilya, having worked together for three years, look at each other with new eyes only now? What pushes Elena into the arms of Mikhail, when, it would seem, there are so many factors that separate them: age, education, and social status?
Is it a coincidence? Of course not. Even if each acquaintance seems to us the result of a chain of unforeseen coincidences, in our souls there is always a certain set of criteria that we cannot consciously formulate, but which nonetheless determine our choice.
According to the French psychologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann, every person is like a hermit crab: our personality is sentenced to eternal seclusion in a shell, and the only chance to get out of it is to trust a loved one … to reinvent each other.
“And we are still collective beings,” adds psychoanalyst Lola Komarova, “we have a biological need for contact.”
We meet someone we already know
You don’t need to be a sociologist to state that our chances of meeting you are significantly increased if we study at the same faculty, work in the same company, live in the same area, go to the same fitness club… But this does not mean at all that we only get to know people our circle. Love is a more subtle matter.
A partner attracts us because his image has been living inside us since childhood.
Sigmund Freud was the first to express the idea that we only meet those who already exist in our subconscious. “Finding an object of love ultimately means finding it again” — this is how the law of mutual attraction of different people can be formulated. Marcel Proust means the same thing when he says that first we draw a person in our imagination and only then we meet him in real life.
“A partner attracts us because his image has been living inside us since childhood,” explains psychoanalyst Tatyana Alavidze, “hence, a handsome prince or princess is a person whom we have been waiting for and “knew” for a long time.”
Get away from loneliness
The emotional connection with the mother leaves an indelible mark on our soul, and therefore, in adulthood, we invariably strive to repeat our early experiences.
“For a small child, a relationship with a mother is equivalent to life,” says Lola Komarova. No other relationship will ever be as meaningful. The childish irrational fear of being alone entails a need for close connection with another that accompanies us all our lives. Such a fantasy may also arise: if I remain small, helpless, the other will not leave me.
That is why 23-year-old Julia chose Boris: “I love to taste the dishes that he lovingly prepares for me. I can see that he really cares about me, and only in his arms do I feel really protected.
Sometimes it seems to us that we have known someone for a long time, whom we fell in love with only recently. “As if they had always known each other!” The lovers are surprised.
“We have a desire to be understood, and this is also connected with the relationship between the child and the mother,” explains Lola Komarova. — The life of an infant depends on whether the mother feels his desires well, whether she understands him without words. And if we didn’t have this in childhood, we will strive even more strongly to find a person who will understand us.” If our parents did not give us warmth and affection, we can become emotionally dependent on our partner.
“I can’t leave Igor: who will love me then? I’m scared to be alone,” says 30-year-old Nina.
“The lack of love in this case becomes a “hook” from which it is very difficult to get rid of,” comments existential psychotherapist Svetlana Krivtsova. — Very often, the relationship of such people is practically “blind”, they can be defined by the words: “I need your love so much that I don’t want to think about whether you need mine.”
The one who completes me
Today we put too many hopes into relationships, we want them to be flawless, ideal. Perhaps that is why we are looking for a partner who looks like a person who has everything that we would wish for ourselves. We are looking for a mirror that reflects a positive image of ourselves.
This is what 28-year-old Veronica felt when she met Alexander: “He was beautiful: rich, confident, always cheerful. He had everything that I lacked so much, and most importantly, he had a family, a father and mother, which I could only dream of in my childhood at the orphanage. I thought: since such a wonderful person loves me, then I really am worth something.
“There may be a rational reason to look for a partner who would complement us,” says Lola Komarova, “but it may also be that a person does not want to recognize some of his qualities and seems to “transmit” them to another.
For example, subconsciously considering herself stupid and naive, a woman will find a partner who will embody wisdom and the ability to make adult decisions for her — and thus make him responsible for herself, so helpless and defenseless.
To see another in another is a great psychological achievement.
We can “pass on” to another those qualities that we don’t like in ourselves – in this case, a partner constantly becomes a person who is weaker than us, who has the same problems as us, but in a more pronounced form.
In psychoanalysis, this tactic is called «exchange of dissociations» — it allows us not to notice our own shortcomings, while the partner becomes the bearer of all those properties that we do not like in ourselves. For example, to hide her own fear of action, a woman may fall in love only with weak, depressed men.
“To see another in another is a great psychological achievement,” says Lola Komarova. “Sometimes we choose a partner because he plays for us the role of some part of us, not necessarily positive, often on the contrary, unpleasant and rejected.”
People with similar complexes cluster together, fueling their own problems.
For example, I do not like my own laziness and slovenliness, and it turns out that my loved one has exactly these qualities. Thus, I get the inner right to say that he is lazy, but I don’t have this problem.
Search for Oedipus
From the point of view of classical psychoanalysis, in a mature relationship, the partner correlates with the images of our parents — either with a plus sign or a minus sign. He attracts us so much because, with his qualities, he resembles or, conversely, denies the images of a father or mother.
“In psychoanalysis, this choice is called the “search for Oedipus,” says Tatyana Alavidze. — And even if we consciously try to choose a «non-parent» — a woman unlike her mother, a man unlike her father, this means the urgency of the internal conflict and the desire to resolve it «on the contrary.»
How to explain that 34-year-old Anna, the daughter of a prosperous university professor, falls in love with a reckless rock musician without a penny?
In many cases, the choice of a partner that is radically different from the image of the parent indicates protection from the «oedipal» relationship model, in which the threat of incest is possible.
A child’s sense of security is usually associated with the image of the mother, it can be expressed in the image of a large, full partner. “A thin man in such pairs usually strives for a “nursing mother”, who seems to “absorb” him into herself and protects him, says Tatyana Alavidze. “It’s the same for a woman who chooses big men.”
Our brain looks for complementary factors in another person.
“It would be naive to believe that the partner is really superimposed on the image of one of the parents,” says Lola Komarova. “In fact, he does not coincide with our real father or mother, but with the unconscious idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbthem that we had in infancy.”
Give what we don’t have
In love, we want to get what we cannot get — feelings that connected us with the objects of former affections. We want to enjoy again the joy that they gave us, or heal the wounds that they inflicted on us. But when we expect someone else to make up for what we missed at the time, we harbor false hope.
19-year-old Alexander loves Irina, who is 16 years older than him. His friends do not understand this connection and are angry with his beloved, because of which Sasha stopped meeting them in the evenings. But in relations with Irina, the young man seeks not only affection and understanding — he needs strictness and a sense of security, which Alexander did not receive in childhood and which she generously gives him.
Be ready for the main meeting
Our acquaintance involves not two people, but at least six: on the one hand, I, father and mother, on the other, you, your father, your mother. Plus a few more of our ancestors, a first love in kindergarten, a beloved uncle or cousin who played with us in childhood, and some other people.
That is why the charm of each other at the initial stage of acquaintance with such difficulty turns into a strong and long love relationship. To this natural complexity is added the problem of time: we can simply meet at the wrong time — not to be ready for love at this moment, not to free ourselves from the previous romance internally.
You can miss the man or woman of your dreams because of a small unpleasant detail: an arrow on a stocking, an ugly grimace — it would seem, nothing special, but magic will not work in this case.
“Each of us enters into a love relationship, carrying our own life situation,” says Svetlana Krivtsova, “and for some, a spark of new love is a blessing, while for others it is a sad belated echo of missed opportunities: “It’s a pity that we don’t met a few years ago. Now that I like you is not the most important thing in my life.
The situation when people meet at the wrong time is not so rare, although it also happens that then they get a chance to meet again.”