In the modern world,

under the ideology of 'Romanticism'

you're meant above all, to Trust Your Feelings!

Love is a mutual ecstasy

at finding a beautiful person,

inside and out,

with the rare capacity, to make us happy.

The romantic attitude sounds warm and kind.

It's originators certainly imagined

that it would bring to an end the sort of

unhappy relationships

that resulted from the old ways of finding a partner,

the arranged marriage!

The only problem is that this call for us to trust our instincts

has very often proved to be a disaster of its own.

Respecting the special feelings we get around certain people

in night-clubs, or train stations; parties or on websites

and that romanticism so ably celebrated an art,

appears not to have led us to be any happier in our unions.

The Medieval couple shackled into marriage by two royal courts,

keen to preserve the sovereignty of a slice of ancestral land.

Instinct has been little better than calculation

in underwriting the quality of our love stories.

There's another school of thought:

this one influenced by psychotherapy

which challenges the notion that trusting instinct

invariably draws us to those who will make us happy.

That's because the theory points out

that we don't fail in love first and foremost

with those who care for us in ideal ways.

We fall in love with those who care for us in familiar ways.

And there might be, a big difference.

Adult love is modeled on a template of love created in childhood.

And is likely to be entwined with a range of

problematic attractions

that militate in key ways

against our chances of growth and happiness, as adults.

We may believe we are seeking happiness in love

but what we are really after is familiarity.

We're looking to recreate 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 many of us would've tasted early on

was confused with other perhaps more destructive dynamics.

Feelings of wanting to help an adult who is out of control

or of being deprived of a parent's warmth.

Or scared of his/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're wrong for us

but because they're a little too right.

In a sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced,

mature, understanding

and reliable,

given that in our hearts such rightness feels foreign and unearned.

To choose our partners wisely,

we need to tease out how certain compulsions to suffering

may be playing themselves out in our feelings of attraction.

A useful starting place is to ask ourselves,

perhaps in the company of a large sheet of paper, a pen and a free afternoon,

what sort of people in the abstract put us off and what kinds excite us.

To try to trace back qualities to the people who first loves us in childhood

and to ask ourselves how much our impulses really

are aligned with things that might make us happy.

We could stand to discover for example that slightly distant and sadistic people

do always seem more interesting to us than

the so-called 'nice' ones.

That should make us stop and think.

Our honestly described reactions are legacies.

They are revealing underlying assumptions we've acquired

about what love for us can feel like.

We may start to get a clearer picture

that our vision of what we're looking for in another person

might not be in a specially good guide

to our personal happiness.

Examining our emotional histories,

we learn that we can't just be attracted to anyone.

We're limited in the types we have

because of certain things that happened to us in our past.

Even if we can't always radically shift these patterns,

it's useful to know that we're carrying a ball and chain.

It can make us more careful of ourselves

when we feel overwhelmed by a certainty that we've met the one

after just a few minutes chatting at the bar.

Or when we're certain someone is just brawn or boring

even though objectively, they do have a lot going for them.

Ultimately, we stand to be liberated to love different people to our initial types,

when we find that the qualities we like

and the ones we very much fear

can be found in different constellations.

From those we encountered in the people who first taught us about affection long ago,

in a childhood we should strive to understand

and in many ways, free ourselves from.