In having a conversation with a male friend of mine the other night my mind pondered on something. We were discussing what you look for in the opposite sex and within that a little miscommunication came in the way of us finishing off this conversation. Then it struck me – I often shut down lines of communication when someone hits me with something I feel is tantamount to psycho-analysing me and coming up with an incorrect result. For example he implied that I would be open to dating someone – no matter their moral fibre, physicality, personality etc as long as they looked after their funds and made regular money. Which is far from the case and he misconstrued what I said completely.

But anyway…

After that it was pretty much an ‘ice-off’ and we both ended the conversation after a few spare words and trying to ‘figure out,’ what the other originally meant and failing… miserably but that’s when the idea for this article came. Do we actually end up attracting the opposite of what we want because we secretly fear what we’d do when confronted by it?

So, for example – I’m someone who would consistently say (especially due to previous experiences) that I really need NOT want – need someone who is good at communicating to me how they feel and won’t hide or hold back …but I find sometimes that I get myself interwoven into situations whereby I fall into the sole ‘communicator’ role and I’m picking at eyelashes trying to get the other person to open up. More recently, when presented with times when people from different areas of my life (not just romantically speaking) want me to tell them exactly how I feel… I just… don’t. I’ll give them chapters and verses about how I feel regarding certain things but I won’t jump into the whole story. It’s pretty easy to see how this could lead to conflict and confusion both in my own mind and in the possible other person’s mind.

Similarly, I’ve found in a lot of others when talking about what they desire in a mate that they seem to metaphorically run from exactly what they say they are looking for.

Examples:

a) Dane wants a woman who’s not interested in the typical social scene of people his age and someone who is in to the things he likes i.e. playing videogames, staying in instead of clubbing etc but when this person is presented to him he rejects them for not being exciting or impulsive enough for him.

b) Vanessa  always says she wants someone who can handle her aggressive nature and be assertive but avoids these kind of men like the plague and only wants someone who can be more so submissive to her.

Maybe the truth is that we either don’t know what we truly want and need or sometimes aren’t emotionally mature enough to recognise what it is within us that is disputing who we say we wish to attract and who in actuality we do attract.