Jena Jake is a licensed therapist and certified executive coach in Connecticut. Most of her clients are women between 35 and 65 who keep falling for the same kind of person, and her work starts from an idea worth sitting with: the pull we call chemistry is often familiarity recognizing itself. Whatever love felt like when we were small, we tend to feel it again in someone else, and then we give that feeling a romantic name.
The idea is older than it sounds. Harville Hendrix built Getting the Love You Want around the observation that people tend to marry some version of their parents. The body registers the recognition first, as a quickening or a strange ease, and it arrives with a force that feels like certainty. That force explains a lot. A person can meet someone at thirty and someone else at fifty, in different cities and different seasons of life, and somehow find the same argument waiting at the same kitchen table.
If attraction is mostly recognition, can it be trusted at all?
That conclusion goes too far. Some people grew up with steadiness and kindness, and what feels familiar to them is also good for them. The trouble comes when recognition was learned in a house where love had to be earned, perhaps by shrinking, by keeping everyone else comfortable, or by staying quiet until the mood passed. In that house, the familiar feeling may be an honest report about childhood. People keep reading it as a forecast.
This is where the question becomes more interesting. Hendrix places much of the healing inside the partnership, with each partner helping repair the other’s old wounds. Richard Schwartz, in You’re the One You’ve Been Looking For, moves more of that work back to the individual. Heal first, then choose. That order is harder, because the work comes before any reward and nobody else can do it for us. It also carries a quiet hope for relationships already underway. A relationship is a system, and when one person in it genuinely changes, the whole thing has to rearrange itself around that change. Sometimes the other partner grows. Sometimes the change reveals that they won’t. Both outcomes are information.
The work begins with awareness, and awareness asks for specifics. Which pattern, exactly? What gets tolerated? What gets explained away? What gets said in the car on the way home after a hard conversation? And there is one question worth carrying out of any evening spent with someone new: in this person’s presence, what did I do with myself?
It takes a while to answer that honestly. Some people notice they grew louder and freer. Others notice they started managing the room again, the way they did at nine years old.
That question, of which self is doing the choosing, is part of what eventually led me to develop the Personal Portrait. Over the years, I have become increasingly interested in the difference between the identity we build in order to move successfully through the world and the person who was there before so much adapting became necessary. The Portrait helps bring that distinction into view. It also looks at the values and motivations that actually belong to us, rather than the ones we learned would earn approval.
That changes the search. Once someone begins to understand what genuinely moves them, the question becomes less about who makes their heart race and more about what kind of character they could build a life beside. A partner chosen by the social personality may fit the costume beautifully. The choice still belongs to the person. The Portrait simply makes it easier to see which self is making it.
Discernment also means learning that good qualities travel separately. Someone can be genuinely generous, the kind of person who helps a friend find a job, and still have very little capacity to sit with another person’s grief. From across the room, altruism and empathy can look almost identical. They reveal themselves as different the first time a family member gets sick.
John Gottman’s decades of research with couples identified four patterns associated with relationship breakdown: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Contempt deserves particular attention, because something changes when a complaint about behavior becomes a verdict about character. A partner is no longer someone who does something that hurts us. In our minds, they become someone who is the problem. Repair becomes much harder from there.
Wayne Dyer liked to use the image of squeezing an orange. When an orange is squeezed, orange juice comes out, because that is what was inside it all along. It doesn’t matter who does the squeezing. The image cuts in two directions. A partner’s sharpness under pressure may tell us something about what was already inside them. But the same is true of our own reactions, which is less comfortable, because it removes the easiest explanation for them.
Perhaps pressure does not simply create our reactions. Sometimes it reveals them.
There is also the matter of being alone. The alone that a divorce or other ending leaves behind can feel like a verdict. It can whisper that something has gone wrong, that time is passing, and that perhaps we should find someone before the silence becomes permanent.
But there is another kind of alone. It is built on purpose, with attention and care. Slowly, it becomes a life someone actually wants to live. There are friendships in it. Work that matters. Quiet mornings. Interests that had been neglected. A growing ability to sit in one’s own company without treating the empty chair across the room as evidence that something is missing. People who build that second kind of alone tend to choose differently afterward. They have stopped needing another person to rescue them from the first kind.
And perhaps that is when chemistry can finally become what we hoped it was all along. It is no longer an old wound recognizing its surroundings, or loneliness reaching for relief, or the social self finding someone who fits the costume. It is simply two people meeting with enough awareness to see what is actually there.
Consider the last person who felt instantly and powerfully familiar. What, exactly, was that feeling trying to recognize?
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© Dr. Doug Gulbrandsen