The Mysteries of Implausible Relationships

Some relationships seem doomed for disaster, yet, despite the odds, the partners are intensely and magnetically attracted to each other. Many of these seemingly unlikely lovers cannot tell me why they choose to stay together. They know they are paying a high price, but something intangible keeps their relationship alive.

Some partners have a powerful sexual chemistry that simply eclipses the difficult interactions they endure. Even when they cannot bear their relationship problems and temporarily separate, they are unable to find the same mystical and passionate connection with other partners, and are unwilling to live life without it. Other couples feel certain that their puzzling relationship must have started in a past life, now driving them to do it differently this time around. They don’t know why those feelings exist, but they tell me that they knew the moment they met “again.”

These challenging, seemingly incomprehensible relationships may have many additional elements that hold them together. Some of the most common attractions appear to come from the need to heal heartbreaks or losses from the past. Whether those earlier relationships are remembered idealistically, painfully traumatically, or anywhere in between, they were left incomplete or unresolved. The current relationship has enough similarities to be a convincing stand-in, and the partners are trying to resolve these past issues in their present relationship.

Childhood abuse or neglect is an easily recognizable example of negative re-creations from the past. Many men and women are pulled towards sequential abusive relationships because they repeatedly choose partners who are symbolic of those who have traumatized them in the past. These formerly tortured children are seeking to heal those wounds in a familiar situation where they feel their adult selves are powerful enough to change the outcome. Unfortunately, they may be painfully unaware of the triggers that pull them back in time. They lack the skills to change their responses, and may be doomed to re-create their past traumas rather than heal them.

The loss of a beloved parent, whether by abandonment or death, is another example of an unresolved childhood trauma. Children who experience this level of unresolved heartbreak may spend their adulthoods unconsciously searching for that parental replacement. They tend to attract overly-rescuing people who have their own unresolved needs to create parent-child symbolic relationships.

Unfortunately, when people try to heal the past through symbolic replacements in the present, they rarely do so in the way they had hoped, and many recreate the original loss. The new partner may initially fulfill the need, but become weary of expectations that cannot be met. If they then choose to leave the relationship, the abandoned partner often ends up profoundly re-traumatized.

Sometimes an opposite rejection can occur. The broken partner does feel healed in the relationship, and then no longer needs the helping partner. Those initially chosen healers then can then find themselves useless for the exact reasons they were originally summoned. If they are re-experiencing their own childhood trauma of being used in the same way by caregivers, they can also be re-injured.

These repetitions of childhood experiences can be healed in the present relationship, but both partners must be unafraid to look at what each has brought into it. I have seen many partners use these re-enacting relationships and succeed in helping each other heal. It takes work, but mutual compassion and an intimate knowledge of what a partner can and cannot provide is crucial. No partner can go back in time and replace that early caretaker, but they can avoid re-injuring their partners in the present.

Mysterious attraction relationships also occur between partners who appear to be polar opposites, yet are inextricably drawn toward each other. It is as if both are trying to create one whole person between them. Life is filled with examples of frugal people being attracted to free spenders, social extremists to lone wolves, adventurers to homebodies, or the famous “slob and neatnik” duos.

Most people consciously or unconsciously search for wholeness. If, as children, they are unable to express the totality of who they are, they often seek those suppressed characteristics in a partner who is free to express them. It is not that opposites attract, as many believe, but that the hunger to be complete drives people to vicariously live through the other. For example, people taught in childhood to sacrifice self as a chosen virtue may seek partners who do not feel conflicted when they go after what they want. Or those taught to live in the moment without regard to future security may seek out partners who feel compelled to “save for a rainy day.”

If the partners have chosen each other to unconsciously complete themselves in some way, they will be attracted and critical of the same behavior. Over time, the criticalness usually wins out and the magnetic attraction begins to falter under its weight. The partners become more polarized as they spend time together, rather than find a way to understand what the underlying dynamic is. An extremely frugal person may spend inordinate amounts of time trying to control their partner’s spending habits, while the partner who lives for the moment pushes harder to try to challenge the other’s perceived limitations to enjoy the moment. Or a very social partner may try to drag the other to multiple friend and family occasions, only to find them hiding in a corner, miserable in their exposure to more connection than they can stand.

Miraculously, some of thesepartners not only recognize the reasons for their attraction to each other, but are determined to come closer by absorbing the behaviors of their opposites. They each learn to modulate their opposite behaviors and create more successful partnerships. They actually become more balanced and complete individuals by learning from, and integrating, each other’s opposite behaviors.

Here are just a few examples of some mysterious opposite attraction relationships that can either thrive or fail, depending on the partner’s willingness to change them.

Dominant/Easy Going

Rigid, righteous, and controlling people who dominate relationships are very often attracted to laid-back, extra-tolerant partners. At the beginning, these partnerships may look as if they are tongue and groove fits, but they more often fail over time. The easier going partners may actually enjoy the comfort of not having to make priority decisions at first, but eventually may begin to feel erased after too many of their desires have been overridden. When they begin to ask for more rights, the dominant partner often feels threatened and comes on stronger. These types of partnerships may continue for a while because of other positive attachments, but the gap will eventually widen. As the more accepting partner begins to feel too dominated, and the controlling partner disrespected, the relationship falls apart.

Dominating partners may really have underlying fears of being dominated, while at the same time often feeling exhausted and burdened by the constant need to lead. If their more easy-going partners are honest from the beginning about their important priorities, and not offended by their partner’s underlying insecurities, they may actually be able to gentle the situation over time. If they can then reveal what has driven their behaviors, they can learn to share decision making and validate each other.

Pessimists/Cheerleaders

Pessimists live their lives with the certainty that things will inevitably go wrong. They feel that relying on hopeful outcomes is naïve and will result in disappointment. Consequently, they use every negative experience as a re-enforcement and every positive one as an exception. Life will eventually disillusion, so why bother to pretend otherwise?

Cheerleaders are people who focus on positive possibilities and invite the rest of the world to join them. They not only search for the ways in which life is fulfilling and are unwilling to allow loss to bring bitterness or withdrawal, but cannot bear anyone to be unhappy. It follows that they are inexplicably drawn to the committed pessimist whom, they believe, has just not found the right person to change his or her outlook.

Cheerleading is often assigned to the female gender, but some of the most passionate optimists are men, seeking to rescue discouraged women. They find themselves pulled towards the classic damsels in distress who are looking for indefatigable supporters. Unfortunately, their efforts rarely pay off. Over time, cheerleader’s emotional pom-poms get heavy, and their pessimistic partners become more entrenched.

Cheerleaders may feel the need to help sorrowful people because their own lives have been more successful. As strange as it may seem, their feeling luckier than others often leaves them needing to make everyone around them happy before they are okay themselves. Or they may just be deeply compassionate people who fall in love with partners who have been traumatized, and are driven to help them heal.

To make this kind of relationship work, the cheerleader must have a partner who truly wants to see the world more hopefully, and does not erase the care that comes their way. The partners who have lived their lives reinforcing their disappointments must want to believe in possibilities again and to begin to trust that they can happen with their partner. The cheerleaders cannot give without making it clear to their partners that they need validation and appreciation of their efforts to keep giving. Otherwise, they are leaving themselves open to martyrdom and resentment if their efforts do not succeed.

Oppositional Relationships

There are couples who disagree with any opinion either offers about anything. They fight when they are alone together, and they fight when they are with others. Their constant squabbling seems to feed their intimacy in an odd kind of way, and they may still have successful sexual connections and friends who like them despite their contentious interactions. Yet, observing them together for any length of time, you wonder how their interaction survives the moment, let alone any long-term commitment. That is a reasonable assumption as, over time, their fighting becomes more damaging to their intimacy. Given the scars that inevitably will persist, these couples usually can rarely keep their love alive in the presence of so many battles.

Most often, these partners have both been raised in contentious families where flaring over any frustration was immediate and without compassion or consideration. Any showing of vulnerability or desire for intimacy is either mocked or toughened. They have simply never known any other way, even though most other partners would not put up with the constant challenge and embattlements.

The partners in oppositional relationships usually need a professional facilitator to find a new way to relate without an automatic “challenge and retaliation” response. Their reactions are so fast and their understanding of their behaviors so buried that they cannot see more positive, non-judgmental alternatives. Interestingly enough, with the right desires and commitments, these partners have a better than average chance of changing their interactions and learning to leave their negative rituals behind.

“Odd” Couples

This area of improbable attraction is so common that you will find it often represented in books, movies, and TV shows. The participants consistently irritate each other with their polarized positions of ultra-cleanliness versus chaos and clutter. Yet, they are somehow magnetically pulled towards each other. This is definitely a never-ending dance of control if neither gives in.

Chaotic, disordered people will argue that their lack of attention to keeping things in order is the positive root of their agreeableness and creativity. They almost delight in crossing the finish line ahead of the game, but only at the last moment and with as much unpredictability as possible. They cannot understand why anyone would be so concerned over unmade beds, irregular schedules, or innocently forgotten commitments.

Need-to-keep-order people cannot rest unless life’s choices are linear, predictable, and bound by specific rituals. They are easily upset if agreements are not met exactly as created. At their most compulsive, they may be driven by deeply rooted anxieties from childhood, searching for an unreachable stability in the face of plans gone awry and commitments broken. Or, they may just be built that way.

The farther apart these partners in their behavioral styles, the more they try to change the other. The unfortunate result is that they become more firmly entrenched in their own behaviors at the same time. Yet, both seem to need and crave the constant corrections they seduce from the other. That very instability can lead to positive changes for both if they let go of their negative past interactions and validate what is good about the other’s behaviors.

As you become familiar with these mysterious-attraction relationships, you will not only begin to recognize them in others, but also become aware of how you may be attracting these perilous interactions. It is the ways you may be unconsciously attracting partners who simultaneously intrigue and frustrate you. You know somehow that these patterns are familiar and that you have important lessons to learn, but just haven’t figured them out yet.

Many couples resolve these issues and stay together, but even if they eventually break up, they choose more compatible partners in the future because of the changes they’ve made. Those who do stay together in a transformed relationship find that what they’ve learned helps them in other areas of their relationship as well.

Why and how mysterious and implausible relationships work is open to multiple explanations. The partners within them may initially come together to justify their own locked-in patterns, or they may actually be attracted to the challenges these conflicts present. They may even be genuinely deeply pulled towards their partner’s other characteristics, then find themselves buried by unexpected, non-resolvable oppositions.

People are complicated and multi-dimensional. They often surprise me with creative solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems. Whatever the underlying reasons, partners who would normally stay away from each other find themselves incomprehensibly drawn to the relationship. If they figure out the mysterious attraction together and use its power to heal each other’s underlying issues, they can benefit hugely from the expanded awareness that journey creates. Learning, understanding, and validating opposite behaviors, both partners have the chance to become more balanced and integrated beings.