David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

relationships

Without growth on similar paths, two people drift apart, love dies

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Falling in love is one of the real miracles of life.

Many relationships are based on far more shallow things such as physical attraction or mutual need or mutual loneliness. But in certain cases, two people meet at a time when their needs and desires and understanding of the world are similar enough that they open up to one another and real love grows.

We celebrate those moments and we like to pretend they always last. Every romantic movie with a Hollywood ending treats those moments as a culmination of something — as a moment when two people join in love and then live for the rest of their lives as the same people they were in that moment.

But that’s a simplistic lie. It might be a well-meaning lie, but it’s still a lie. When two people come together and fall in love, they might be at similar points on their life paths, but unless they continue in growth together — with both individuals and the relationship itself both growing — those two people quickly drift apart and love inevitably dies.

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What if our best romantic decisions come by listening to ‘selfish genes’?

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What if love is really just a manipulative tool of biology? What if the best mating decisions we make come from our genes instead of our conscious brains?

I’ve become obsessed lately with the idea that something inside us simply knows the romantic decisions we need to make. I don’t mean to imply that every romantic pairing is automatically right. I also don’t mean to imply that we always choose the right partners with whom to reproduce. (Those notions are obviously and demonstrably untrue.)

But what if there is some mechanism inside us that sometimes whispers — in a language we don’t consciously comprehend — words to the effect of, “This one is a right fit for you,” when we encounter someone new?

I’ve often considered the idea that there’s something inside us that just knows when one person is right and another is wrong, but I’m suggesting it goes even deeper than I’ve considered before. I’m suggesting that the “selfish gene” inside us — to use Richard Dawkins’ term — knows what we ought to do — and that romantic happiness comes from obeying the whispers of those genes.

Let me tell you about an experiment I used to do involving pictures of attractive women I knew.

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Will you uncover your blind spots? Or will you ignore red flags again?

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Human beings tend to make the same mistakes — over and over again — but we can be incredibly slow to recognize what we’re doing to ourselves.

I used to ignore red flags in relationships, at least until it was too late for me to deal with them gracefully. As a result, I made the same sort of mistakes again and again — and I was too blind to realize what I was doing for a very long time.

It’s very rare for me to fall in love. I can count the instances of long-lasting romantic love in my life on one hand — and probably have fingers left over. But when I recognize what I want, it’s easy for me to become blind to a woman’s faults. It’s easy for me to make excuses for her. It’s easy for me to assume her tremendous strengths will eventually overcome the scary weaknesses that lie hidden inside her.

As a result, I’ve put a few women on pedestals — only to find that real flesh-and-blood human beings don’t belong on pedestals — because they’ve disappointed me with weaknesses which I didn’t anticipate. I ignored red flags — because I was oblivious to my blind spots.

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