The Hidden Patterns Of Love

Representational Photo

By Nasir Geelani 

Two souls, one heart. Love overcomes all hurdles. We have all heard and read small quotes like these in our environment since childhood, from the time we start perceiving our surroundings. We have watched countless movies and serials about relationships, love, and marriages, etc. However, without realizing it, most, if not all, of these information sources about the idea of love only talk about the beginning, or metaphorically speaking, the first quarter of love. What happens after this part – how love and relationships start, and why we love the people we love, even when we know we shouldn’t – is mostly unknown to us. When we fall in love with someone and then get married, we have intentionally done so for all the right reasons, but there is more beneath the surface. This is largely, if not entirely, due to our primitive childhood unconscious forces driving our decisions.

The Unseen Forces in Our Relationships

When we get attracted to someone, we think it’s mostly based on who they are, how they look, and what they are. All of us embark on this unknown and shaky territory with the right intention of finding peace, happiness, family, and completeness. However, little do we know that most of our love and relationship interests are driven by unconscious familiarity rather than conscious factors and reasons. The templates of our interpersonal relationships are laid in our infancy and childhood, even as early as our first year of life, as proposed by the Kleinian psychodynamic school. The attachments we form with adults in our infancy and childhood decide whom we will choose and get attracted to for our marital journey. Since most relationships these days are based on emotions and feelings, which are very primitive and start at birth, like a child’s birth cry. 

Why We Seek Familiarity Over Happiness

In our formative years, we develop attachment styles, which are broadly categorized as secure, anxious/insecure, and anxious/avoidant. We are attracted to people through different permutations of these attachment styles in dating pools. For example, people with secure attachment styles – who are very rare – have stable relationships and are settled when they get married. Therefore, most people in dating and marriage pools are anxious and avoidant, attracted to each other like magnets through unconscious push-pull dynamics. We unconsciously try to repeat our relationship templates formed in childhood in our adult relationships. This is why we gravitate toward familiar emotional landscapes over unfamiliar ones. For instance, we might consciously find a person a good match, but often feel they don’t strike the chord we long for. They are good but not “good enough” to hurt us in the familiar ways we expect – the way we got hurt in our early relationships. Since no one’s childhood is perfect, and no one can achieve perfect parenting, we all carry emotional scars that we seek to heal. We are eager to repeat those familiar patterns, not out of bad intention but to give them a good, logical conclusion. Even if one learns from a failed relationship what the red flags were (which we often talk about but make little use of), we seldom make a different conscious and informed choice when entering another relationship. We give ourselves all the reasons in favor of unconscious forces and against logical reasons. So, again, we get lured into this vicious cycle.

The Drama Magnet: Why We Gravitate Toward Emotional Chaos 

As Alain de Botton says (author of The Course of Love), the first question we should ask the person we want to marry is not, “What do you do?” or “How are you good in different ways?” but rather, “How are you mad in different ways?” De Botton suggests that everyone has their accidents and flaws, and the real question in relationships isn’t about finding someone without issues, but rather finding someone whose “madness” is compatible with your own. 

We must accept that we are driven by this unconscious pull and drama, and we need to make our unconscious marriages and alliances conscious by developing and supporting our well-chosen, conscious behaviors. 

Evidence from media and popular culture – our obsession with intense, unpredictable love stories – supports this idea. Common readers may be skeptical about these unconscious determinants and theories, but I would like to draw their attention to media, novels, and popular culture. We are drawn to dramatic romantic movies and novels, while more realistic and mundane stories often bore us – even though they reflect reality. In fact, we should get used to less intense stories, movies, and anecdotes because normal is often not exciting; however, every exciting thing isn’t necessarily healthy, like cocaine and heroin. So, here we might be reminded of the common fact that cocaine and feelings of love, as we commonly call it, give the same high. 

To conclude, I want to emphasize that while we may believe we have control over our relationships, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the dynamics operate unconsciously, and these processes are very automatic and quick to lead us through that rabbit hole. One wonders, if human beings are so biased in their decisions, how will we be guided? The answer is that guidance should come from outside our subjective bubble. That is why human beings are endowed with willpower and divine guidance through revelation. By using our willpower and adhering to revelation and the way of life exemplified by the Prophet (PBUH), we can navigate these strong forces of human nature and make our unconscious marriages conscious based on values and virtues. 

Next, we will talk more about unconscious forces and then lightly discuss strategies to make our relationships and marriages healthy and thriving for us and as a healthy template for coming generations. 

To be continued. 

The author is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, M.Phil. Clinical Psychology and currently works at Cyma Care Clinic. Reach at: nasir.geelani@gmail.com