What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult

Romantic choices can be troublingly mechanical and impulsive for those who haven’t studied themselves. Here’s the impulse that’s going to kick off our discussion: people tend to find partners who soothe their deepest insecurities.

This seeming paradox is acknowledged by Harville Hendrix in his Imago approach to relationship therapy. For example, a woman could marry a man who has some of the negative characteristics of her father, after having sworn that she would never do that. In turn, the man has chosen a woman who has some of the worst characteristics of his mother. Being