Laws of Attraction

I was reading my sister’s blog about how she built her marriage, and now her family, on a love of cool cars. I know that their marriage has a lot more going for it than just cars but it illustrates the intricacies of attraction. I met my husband when I was still a dumb kid. Oh, I thought I was an adult and had everything worked out in my life, but that didn’t stop me from falling for him without consulting any sort of “good mate” checklist before saying “I do.” I had met his parents once and I hadn’t run a credit or background check. My parents couldn’t see the attraction—we had nothing in common as far as they could see, but I loved his smell (the animal part of attraction) and I loved him. Case closed. We got married. We’re just a few weeks away from our twentieth anniversary and a lot has happened during those years. We discovered that we have loads in common. My husband lives for the home-improvement project. There is nothing he would love to do more than remodel an old house top to bottom and he’s practically done that with the home we live in today. As it turns out, I love those projects just as much as he does. I plan, he builds. But that’s not the only thing we have in common—actually the list is extensive. We both like boating, and we’re both ridiculously ambitious, we love our kids—but we’re not really baby people, we like our alone time and we love to cultivate friendships.


My question for today is this: How did a dumb kid like me fall for my perfect match without even knowing I was doing it? And how did it take a bunch of analysis for you to fall for your perfect match, or did it just happen?

I read an interesting book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell where he explains that we make a lot of lightning fast calculations in our subconscious before making a decision and that generally, when we try to rationalize that decision we fail miserably. We can’t explain why we know something is right—we just do. Our failure to make a good decision often comes after the fact, when we’ve already made a speedy decision, and we begin to analyze and question that decision in an effort to make sure that we’re making the right one. So maybe that’s the secret to attraction--instantaneous evaluations being made in a part of our brain we hardly know exists. We don’t know why a guy gets us firing on all cylinders—he just does, and as we spend years building a life together we slowly uncover the reasons why our subconscious was so mesmerized with him in the first place. Makes sense to me—what about you?