I had earlier asked "Is there a rule that will determine when "Opposites attract" and when "Birds of the same feather flock together"?
A friend and I were trying to answer this question. There are two kinds of love that a person has.
- A love for something, an attribute (I call this a strong attribute; say, honesty), that a person themselves espouses. The person may not tolerate any person who does not have that strong attribute. In cases of such attributes, the person will flock together with people who share the same attributes. There are other attributes, weak ones, which a person likes (rock music, traveling) which may be personal preferences and in such cases the person may still like other people who do not share these attributes.
- A love for something, an attribute (say, tolerance, kindness) that a person needs and themselves don't have. Such a person will repel other people who are similar to themselves.
What does this tell us about ourselves?
When we find that we cannot spend a lot of time with another person, either the other person:
We do not give the same weight to all the attribute that we seek in another person. For example, in the movie Six days and Seven Nights, the man lived in a remote island and the woman was based in New York. The thought of being together was very difficult to digest initially. Subsequently they each figure that the other person had many other things which made their conflicting location preferences seem like a much smaller issue. (We do know what happened after they were together for 3 years. That is a very different story!)
Additional Reading:
- doesn't share an attribute that we have or
- the other person doesn't complement us; they don't have that thing that we also lack.
We do not give the same weight to all the attribute that we seek in another person. For example, in the movie Six days and Seven Nights, the man lived in a remote island and the woman was based in New York. The thought of being together was very difficult to digest initially. Subsequently they each figure that the other person had many other things which made their conflicting location preferences seem like a much smaller issue. (We do know what happened after they were together for 3 years. That is a very different story!)
Additional Reading:
