Why did I fall in love with Him???? Her ?????

Why do we fall in love with the people we do?

The basic reason is what I call the images that are created from our past- they are a buried internal images created in childhood of one or both of our caretakers. This image serves two purposes: it helps the baby recognize and distinguish the parents from other adults so that nurturing can take place; and in adulthood, this unconscious image of the parents helps you to unconsciously select a person to fall in love with — a person who is similar to your parents. This image includes the positive and negative traits of both  of your parents, and also includes your parents’ limitations in nurturing, loving or supporting you. We are attracted to people like our parents in order to finish the business we didn’t finish with them. Unconsciously, we feel like we’re in a survival mode, and so when we meet someone who is similar to our parents — we go into a kind of euphoria because deep down inside we believe we’re now going to get what we didn’t get in childhood. That’s what triggers the impulse most commonly called “romantic love.” The definition of romantic love I like the best is that it is  looking forward toanticipated need satisfaction that will soon be disappointed.”

How long does romantic love last? I’ve been in a relationship for six years now, and it still feels very romantic.

After six years in a relationship, if there has been much time spent together, there has to have been some ruptures in the romantic illusion: something one of you is doing really irritates the other, and the energy of the response to that irritation is intense. When the illusion breaks down a bit, you see some reality in your partner. You don’t say, “Hey, that’s like my mother or my father,” but you nevertheless react.

In the romantic phase, we don’t do much analysis — we just try to repair the rupture when it occurs, saying, “Oh well, it was just a bad day,” or “We love each other; we’ll get over it.” Lovers make lots of excuses to sustain the illusion. The romantic impulse is built into us, so it’s a natural response.

Research indicates that the bonding seems to end in most people after about three years;  When the bonding is secure, there’s a growing shift in our perception towards irritability, disappointment, frustration, increasing conflict — “You’re not the person that I thought you were” kind of thing. Neurochemists say that there’s an amphetamine high when you fall in love, which reduces into an endorphin sense of well-being. And when the bonding is there, the endorphins begin to be replaced by adrenaline. Then you’ve moved into the “power struggle,” which is where most couples stay fixed for most of their marriages: they either function in a “hot marriage” — fighting — or a “parallel marriage” — living together but not interacting much. Or they get a divorce and end it all, or they do what I recommend: become conscious in their marriage, heal each other, and go on to live out their dreams.

Stay tuned for my continuing blog on Why we fall in love with the people that we do.