Читать книгу The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself - Steve Biddulph - Страница 24

Liking is the safest, easiest kind of human attraction. You can like all kinds and all ages and sexes of people – you can even like people you don’t approve of, or would never buy a used car from. Often you will like some things about a person, and dislike other parts of them. (If you like everything about someone, stick around; something you won’t like is bound to show up.)

As you get more involved with a person, either as a friend or as a lover, then you might ask them to change behaviour you don’t like. Relationships involve changing ourselves all the time. It’s no big deal: if you are giving your lover a back rub, you might do it vigorously, because that’s what you enjoy. They explain they like a gentler massage, and so you change. If you live together, you might like to make the kitchen spotlessly clean and tidy after every meal. They might prefer to leave the dishes for a big once-a-week cleanup. Committed partners sometimes make big requests of their partner: to give up drinking or smoking or living a life of crime, for instance! Our partners may change, or they may not. We are all aiming to get more of what we like, and less of what we don’t.

A trap with liking, especially when we are starting out in a relationship, is that we will tend to like people just because they like us. Especially if we are inexperienced or, let’s face it, a bit desperate. In fact, it might be their liking us that is the main attraction. If their enthusiasm for our wonderful qualities fades, as well it might, then we might discover we do not like them after all.

In courtship and dating behaviour there is usually a huge amount of talking going on, hours on the phone and late into the night. But it isn’t just small talk; it carries all kinds of hidden meanings. ‘Do they like me?’ ‘Do they want to know me better?’ ‘She yawned – what did she mean by that?’ It’s a beautiful if rather anxious time, and one which we will remember all our life. Spoken words seem to acquire a powerful magic.

The jokes, repartee, questions and proclamations of what we believe in and what we like and dislike, are part of a natural screening process. We are ‘interviewing’ for the job of lifetime lover. It’s important to find out if this person, who looks great on the surface, is really a horrible psychopath, or hopelessly screwed up, or is exactly your kind of person!