"Common logic would seem to indicate that mankind would find it a cruel joke of nature were we to find ourselves attracted to people very much unlike us or even the very opposite to us. It would seem a lot easier and far less messy if we tended to be drawn to those whose personalities are more like our own than those who seem like they are polar opposites to us. Especially as we humans see ourselves as the correct way to be and naturally feel more comfortable in the presence of others like ourselves. Where the tendency to persuade and influence exists, we try to make the other person like ourselves, rather than vice versa.
But consider the possibility that those differences that can seem potentially problematic may actually prove to be the very things that add passion and spice to your relationship, particularly its sexual aspects. It is unfulfilled needs and desires that essentially draw us to others, such as to experience greater connection, love, security, support, comfort and reassurance. On the other hand, however, some of these unfulfilled longings have to do with their polar opposites being absent from our lives; like a need for adventure, risk, freedom, challenge and emotional intensity. While these needs and desires may appear to be mutually exclusive, not only can they co-exist with each other, but in the process of their cohabitation, they generate a 'tension of the opposites' that produces a passion that deepens, sustains, and even enlivens relationships.
While security, safety, closeness and comfort are certain qualities that characterise the search for all fulfilling relationships; without the provision of a balance of excitement, passion, adventure, uncertainty, risk, and even a certain degree of separateness, the potential of remaining unfulfilled will most likely be present after the honeymoon phase of marriage has faded and become a little threadbare. In such circumstances, security becomes boredom, dependability becomes indifference, comfort can even transform into stagnation and unwanted intimacy starts to suffocate the partner trying to break free and breathe life anew.
Still, the vast majority of us will tend to marry people like ourselves and reinforce this paired image in their offspring that follow them, despite opposite personalities holding out the prospect of greater attraction. I know that I would prefer to be married to someone opposite in trait to me for one month rather than share the same routine life day in and day out living alongside someone that was my mirror resemblance.
Those who marry partners of identical character traits and similar taste eventually reveal their inbred tendencies by conceiving one of life's unnatural conundrums. The longer their marriage exists, the more like each other the couple grow and the shared mannerisms they gradually adopt. It is not unheard of for such couples to have a pet that displays their prominent trait or a dog that grows to look like them.
Just to strengthen my argument, I would cite the choice of lover that an unhappy married person will usually make when/if they have an extra-marital affair. Take for instance any man or woman who finds themselves in a queue of a self-service eating establishment like a motorway restaurant, selecting the food they want and getting to the end of the queue to pay for their meal. I cannot imagine most people progressing from the start to the end of the queue without having a glance at the food on another's tray along the way. If you are the type to glance at the food on another's plate, you are also the type capable of eating from it if the need ever arose resulting from your failing marriage. Such people engaging in an extra-marital affair, if they decide to take a 'second helping', not having been able to happily swallow all they have had to eat since they first wed, are most unlikely to repeat the recipe for failure 'by having an affair with someone like the person they are cheating on; the person who does not make them happy!'
Of course, if they are going to risk every bit of security they possess in their marriage, they are most unlikely to do so for someone who cannot make the ground beneath them shake with excitement, passion, adventure, the intensity of feeling and with the frisson of risk. It is these very opposites they have come to crave the taste of in making them feel alive again.
And yet, few affairs, especially where children already exist, rarely last before yearning for security and all those other characteristics return; those ones once found in one's spouse of likeness. Such dependable traits of character start to look attractive once more.
Given what I know today, I would have to say far better to marry, and far more likely to stay happily married one is when one marries someone whose diversities they can respect and whose similarities they can love. Get this combination right and one achieves the perfect recipe for a contented couple, and never again will you enter a self-service establishment and before reaching the end of the queue, look at the food on another's plate!"
Love and peace Bill xxx.