How Do You Pick Your Partner?

Let’s face it, finding a partner is not an easy feat to accomplish.  It can take days, months or even years upon years to find the “perfect” partner for you.  And even when you find said partner, there’s that chance that you didn’t actually find the right person for you, but let’s not jump too far ahead of ourselves here.  Let’s talk about how you pick your partner.

One day my husband and I were driving along talking about our families, which is something that we often do.  We began discussing how it’s been said that people often look for partners that are similar to the family they grew up with.  In my instance, this is actually very true.  Since I was young and started thinking about dating, I have always wanted to be with someone who has similar qualities to some of my family members.  I wanted someone who was smart, funny, protective, etc. therefore that’s exactly what I looked for and I was eventually able to find.

While my husband is a combination of traits my family has, we found that I have very few, if any, traits that his own family has.  Take his mother, for example, she’s a wonderful woman and I love her to death, but I honestly cannot think of any traits that we both share.  She’s outgoing, I’m not, she’s talkative, I’m not, she’s outdoorsy, and I’m not, just to name a couple of things.  I think the only trait we really share is that we both have big hearts and that we’re both very caring.  We’re also both very stubborn from time to time, but the point being is that I really don’t share a lot of personality traits with his family members.

So, the question we’re left with is:  how do the families we grew up with affect our choice of a significant other?  In my opinion, it greatly depends on the situation.  In some families, like my own, I had a lot of people to look up to and therefore wanted to be with someone who possessed some of the wonderful traits they did.  In other cases, people want to stay as far away from what they grew up with, so they look for people who are completely opposite of their own families.

Now I’m not saying my husband picked me because I’m the opposite of his own family because I don’t think that’s true.  I have some same qualities of members of his family, but I think I lack some that may annoy him.  What I’m saying is that there are some instances where someone may have grown up in a particular sort of family that have certain traits or have done certain things—perhaps one with people who slept around a lot, people who were on drugs, or that were abusive—that they’d rather not see in their significant other.  So it really depends on the situation you’re in and the one you grew up in.  I had a positive experience with my family, so I wanted someone who was similar to them while others may have had a negative experience with their family and they want to avoid others like them.

Now it’s time to turn it over to you, dear readers!  What do you look for in a partner?  Do the traits you seek seem similar to the ones you grew up around or are they the complete opposite?  Share your thoughts!

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Posted on April 23, 2012 by Felicia