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At any online dating site, you’ll enter into a seemingly reasonable universe offering help in finding your true mate.
You’ll begin by answering questions about yourself and about what you look for in a mate. Most of these questions will be about superficial and idealized characteristics—physical, educational, vocational, and pleasant traits.
The assumptions are two-fold: 1) that people understand themselves and others well enough to be able to spot the positive characteristics they desire in others, and 2) that potential mates know what is good for them and can list traits they actually have, rather than ones they think they have.
Online dating operates as a well-intentioned but faulty game. The participants believe they are getting at essential aspects of how they relate to and fall in love with other people. Nothing could be further from the truth of how we select our dating “types,” whether online or in person.
Recently Yoobin Park and Geoff MacDonald from the University of Toronto reported that people do select types of people for relationships. And when relationships fail, people look for the same types of people and fall in love with them again, unable to correct their mistakes in selection. Park and MacDonald were unable to answer the question of why people repeat these patterns.
In my book, Living on Automatic, my co-author and I answer this "why" question, highlighting our collective 80 years of research on how people select mates to date and marry. We found that attraction by superficial characteristics of looks—tall, dark, and handsome, the great smile, or sexy voice—job, religion, or hobbies have nothing to do with what links people up.
Every day people reject good potential partners because there is “no chemistry,” meaning no immediate attraction or connection, and not being one’s type. People do this often before they speak with someone and become acquainted. We discovered people hook up with their type because of what they learned in their families as children about the hidden personality characteristics of others.
Every family has types of people, and we learn to respond differently to them, depending on what type we are and they are. We learn to indulge some people, riveting our attention and energy on them. Other people, we learn not to pay much attention to. We call this learning process emotional conditioning.
Ultimately, we learn to respond emotionally to what type of person we perceive each to be—those requiring our utmost energy and focus, and those not. This becomes an automatic response that we mistake as an attraction to our type or rejection for not being our type.
Most often, this automatic attraction to our type backfires, as we fall in love with people who are not good for us—or to us. Some partners exploit us. Other mates may overindulge us until they fizzle with fatigue and burnout. Then we get angry at them for not meeting our every want.
Many marriages end in divorce only to have the automatic patterns repeated when both mates begin dating again, using the only models they know. It is no wonder rates of divorce, marital conflict, and interpersonal abuse are so high.
For you to break this pattern of dating and falling in love with only your type, you need to discover and understand your early emotional conditioning in your family and what emotional patterns and standards of relating you learned as a child. Only then will you be able to look at all the other available people for dating and marriage.
References
Yoobin Park, Geoff MacDonald. Consistency between individuals’ past and current romantic partners’ own reports of their personalities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 10, 2019; DOI:10.1073/pnas. 1902937116
