Are We Rejecting Them Because They’re Wrong – or Because We’re Hurt Inside

On the face of it, ‘not liking’ someone during the dating game is everyone’s great prerogative. Who could possibly question our tastes if we complained – on leaving a restaurant or museum – that we found someone too loud or too stupid, too weak or too supernaturally inclined? If we said we didn’t like their chin, or that there was something a bit odd around their hips? Surely, it is up to each of us to decide according to the movements of our own hearts – and, on that basis, to be met with appropriate sympathy for repeatedly failing to find, despite enormous effort, someone worthy of our time and desire.

However, after we’ve cycled through a certain number of candidates, after we’ve returned home from our 20th or 87th fruitless date, after we’ve once again discovered (aged 42 or 55) that the person across the table from us wasn’t quite right, we may be encouraged to ask ourselves a few pointed questions. These help us to judge whether the problem truly lies with them, or whether it might, delicately put, have something to do with us – reflecting a deeper emotional avoidance in relationships.

Though many people will undoubtedly be flawed in a panoply of ways, there are cases where the wrongness we detect primarily reflects a psychological dynamic within us – a bias towards rejecting people not because they are unsuitable per se, but because, just out of reach of our day to day consciousness, proximity to anyone (however accomplished and viable they might be) is associated with danger and intrusion.

When Closeness Feels Like a Threat

Though we may say – in extremely moving tones – that we are highly interested in finding love, it may be that the prospect of actually finding it is not, in fact, at all simple. It may reignite a fear, probably related to disappointments or perverse loyalties formed in childhood, of what could happen if love really did come along. Way back, our attachment to our earliest caregivers may have taught us that loving people is not, in fact, either safe or advisable. We may have learnt, in the vagaries of our family lives, that trusting people was likely to be followed by disappointment. That those who know us from up close are prone to betray us catastrophically. That making ourselves vulnerable will invite abuse. That kindness doesn’t pay. That tenderness is a route to exploitation. Or, alternatively, that to love someone outside the family circle means having to disappoint people who seem unable to survive without us.

We may not be aware, as we play the dating game, that we are carrying such complex emotional legacies and double binds. We may sincerely believe that we crave love above all else and would embrace it open-heartedly if ever it came along – and yet a part of us may still, somewhere in the background, be working overtime to ensure that every single new candidate that the apps or our friends have put forward is ruthlessly examined and definitively rejected before they ever come close to threatening our isolation. We may publicly be committed to a relationship while privately wedded to the only state we associate with safety: solitude.

Is It Them – or Emotional Avoidance in Relationships?

How then might we judge the difference? How to know whether we are rejecting people out of a pathological wish to stay alone, born out of childhood wounds – or else rejecting them because they suffer from a maddening conversational tic and have a weird thumb?

There is one acute question we might raise with ourselves to tell the difference: if this prospective partner were a bit less keen, a bit less attentive, a bit less enthusiastic about seeing us again – might we like them more? Might distance improve their prospects in our eyes?

If the question makes little sense, if we can’t remotely imagine why any of this would make a difference, if there’s nothing at all about them not messaging us for days that would alter the unbudgeable problem with their chin or their laugh, then the problem may, on balance, properly lie with them.

If, however, we recognise – pretty much as soon as the question is asked (it may make us smile involuntarily) – that yes, strangely, somehow it does appear that we would like them rather more if they texted less often, that we would make more of an effort if they were busier, that we’d even start to desire and long for them if we didn’t pass muster in their eyes, then what we may be dealing with is not another flawed candidate so much as the activation of a temperamental attachment mechanism formed by our experiences in abusive, untrustworthy, claustrophobic or neglectful childhoods.

It is a major achievement when we have understood enough about our pasts to finally cease to feel revulsion or suspicion around those who threaten us with love. When we can take kindness at face value. When we don’t seek to annihilate or punish those who want to be sympathetic towards us. It’s a seismic moment when we can bear to reflect that the real problem may lie not so much with them for liking us, as with our pasts for not allowing us to tolerate another’s curiosity and goodness. This is how we begin to outgrow emotional avoidance in relationships.