Jennifer Beall
How do you choose your romantic partners? You probably have a list of qualities you’re looking for. Maybe you want someone who’s a good listener, or who has a great sense of humor, or who shares your love of baseball. Maybe you’re looking for someone who likes to go to concerts, or who prefers to stay home and watch classic movies. Maybe you want someone who makes you feel a strong spark of attraction the first time you meet.
You probably don’t want someone who won’t listen when you talk, or who spends hours on end playing video games instead of spending time with you. You’re probably not looking for someone who will embarrass you in front of family and friends. If you have an alcoholic parent, you’re very likely to be on the alert for any sign that a possible partner has a drinking problem.
How is it, then, that we end up with partners who have the qualities we try to avoid? For one thing, the beginning of a dating relationship is like a job interview. People lead with their best qualities, not their worst. Also, we find what’s familiar in a romantic partner, not necessarily what we want.
Whether we realize it or not, we develop our ideas about how romantic relationships work from watching our caretakers as we’re growing up. Then, as adults, we unconsciously compare our possible partners to those early examples. Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. says that we find partners that have both positive and negative characteristics in common with our childhood caretakers, but the negative characteristics have the greatest influence. We are, without realizing it, recreating our childhood conditions in the hopes that we can make things right the second time.[i]
In the “Bad Boys” chapter of her book Don’t Help a Man Be a Man: How to Avoid 12 Dating Time Bombs, Rachel Iverson talks about the fact that many women feel chemistry with “bad boys,” not “nice guys.”[ii]
Like Harville Hendrix, she points out that the chemistry we feel with a potential partner is the recognition, in that partner, of the familiar pattern we learned in childhood. She calls this pattern our “complementary issue.”
To figure out your complementary issue, she recommends asking yourself what, in your ideal universe, you would have gotten from your caretaker that you didn’t get in real life. Whatever that thing is, your tendency will be to look for a partner to give it to you; however, the partner you actually find will likely be someone who doesn’t give you enough of it. Your goal, as she puts it, is to find someone that fits your familiar pattern well enough to create chemistry, but whose associated negative qualities are at a reasonable level.
In order to be able to find a relationship like this, she suggests that you become the healthiest version of yourself. While she doesn’t explicitly recommend therapy, I do! That’s what therapy is all about. If you’d like to learn more about how you can get to a mental and emotional place that will allow you to find a healthy relationship, please fill out the contact form, book a consultation, or call or text me at 410-888-0590.
[i] Hendrix, H., Ph.D. (1988). Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
[ii] Iverson, R. (2005). Don’t Help a Man be a Man: How to Avoid 12 Dating Time Bombs. Rebel Girl Publishing.