You meet someone, and suddenly there is electricity in the air. A conversation lasts until the middle of the night. Messages keep coming. Butterflies, excitement, anticipation. After months or years of disappointments, you finally feel something.
The time you spend together flies by. When you part, you count the minutes until the next time you meet. The physical connection feels perfect. You feel desired, seen and understood. Maybe for the first time in a long while, you feel at home.
“This is it,” you think.
But this is exactly where one of the most common mistakes in the search for love begins. The intensity of the attraction we feel at the start of a relationship is not necessarily a sign of compatibility. Sometimes, it points in the opposite direction.
Desire is a wonderful human experience, but as a compass for choosing a partner, it can mislead us. Often, it pulls us precisely toward people who are less suitable for building a stable, safe and nourishing relationship over time. Why does this happen? Why do intelligent, experienced and clear-eyed people repeatedly get fooled by desire?
The answer is that behind every powerful attraction and intense desire lies something from your past that did not work properly. Let me explain.
Consciously, we all search for happiness in love. But unconsciously, we also search for exciting familiarity: the chance to recreate, in the presence of another person, emotional experiences from our past. This repetition gives us a sense of security and control in the field of love, a field that exposes us to deep vulnerability around the fear of not being loved, being rejected or being abandoned.
But our past experiences do not include only nourishing moments. They may also remind us of low-functioning, hurtful or painful relationships with the significant figures who raised us. That is why our romantic relationships sometimes awaken our most familiar emotional wounds, with an unconscious hope of being released from them.
If you had an emotionally immature parent, or one with narcissistic traits, you may be powerfully drawn to someone emotionally immature or self-centered, and try to receive from that person the attention you did not receive in childhood. If you had an aggressive parent, or one who could not control their anger, you may be drawn to someone dramatic and become a people-pleasing partner who avoids expressing anger.
The stronger the emotional arousal you feel toward someone you have just met, the more likely it is that you are reacting not only to the person in front of you, but also to your own past. And if your past was traumatic, you may be intensely drawn precisely to someone who keeps you on edge the way you once were, and activates old emotional mechanisms: caring for the other, silencing your feelings, compulsively making jokes, chasing scraps of love or trying finally to win the gaze you were never given.
But if desire awakens old pain, why does it feel so pleasurable?
This is where a sophisticated psychological mechanism comes in, one that knows how to turn pain into pleasure. Perversion, or deviation in the psychoanalytic sense, is one of the ways the psyche converts pain from the past into sexual or emotional pleasure. For example, a person who felt controlled or humiliated by an authority figure in the past may develop an attraction to situations in which control, submission or humiliation take on a new erotic meaning.
Desire sometimes operates in a similar way, which is why it can be so powerful. The attempt to turn pain into happiness releases enormous romantic and erotic energy. Turning a reserved woman who reminds you of your mother into a warm and devoted woman is one such reversal. Causing a man with narcissistic tendencies, who reminds you of your father, to reveal vulnerability, softness and weakness specifically with you is a similar attempt to rewrite an old story.
That is why we can feel intense attraction precisely toward people who activate old emotional patterns. Not because they suit us better, but because they awaken in us an unconscious hope that this time, the story will end differently.
This is why desire sometimes leads us astray and makes us confuse it with romantic compatibility.
Compatibility passes through questions such as: Do we see life in a similar way? Is there trust between us? Do we feel safe with one another? Are we able to talk, fight, repair and remain in the relationship?
Compatibility gives us a feeling of safety and pleasant calm, but it does not necessarily create the same intense emotional experience of mystery, vitality and that first spark.
The intensity of desire feels like love, but it is not love. Feeling desired is wonderful, but it is different from feeling truly valued, safe and wanted. Desire is necessary, because it expresses a certain potential between two people, but it is still not proof of compatibility, commitment or the ability to build a future relationship together.
So the question is not whether there is desire, but how much weight you give it as a criterion for choosing a partner.
Remember: the stronger the desire, the weaker your judgment may become. The more powerful the chemistry, the greater the tendency to forget your standards, values and boundaries. You may neglect yourself, ignore important needs and overlook warning signs, all because of the emotional promise that desire carries.
The other half
“The one” who awakens intense desire in us is not only a person. They become a kind of metaphor. They embody for us a hope for change, renewal and healing. We imagine that they will make us feel whole, loved and safe, and therefore our desire for them becomes so great.
But in many cases, we are not truly longing for the person themselves, but for what they represent to us. We long to feel wanted, significant and chosen. We seek to escape loneliness, repair the past and believe that we have finally found what has been missing all these years.
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'The one' who awakens intense desire in us is not just a person. They become a kind of metaphor
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The psychoanalyst Carl Jung argued that every person carries within them complementary psychological qualities that they tend to seek in others. According to him, both men and women contain masculine and feminine aspects. Jung called the feminine aspect in the man’s psyche the “anima,” and the masculine aspect in the woman’s psyche the “animus.”
The more disconnected a person is from these parts within themselves, or the more conflicted they are about them, the greater the temptation to project them onto another person and believe that person will complete them.
That is why the more someone needs the approval of a particular person, the more likely they are to attribute to that person qualities and abilities that actually belong to their own inner world. Instead of developing within themselves the confidence, self-worth or validation they are seeking, they become increasingly dependent on the gaze of the other.
In that sense, they are not falling in love only with the person in front of them, but also with parts of themselves that they find difficult to recognize, accept or develop on their own.
Desire, in this sense, is the tendency to see in another person our ideal fantasy of ourselves. We project onto them what we lack, what we wish to be, what we hope will save us. This projection makes it harder to see the person in front of us as they really are.
By contrast, when we are more whole within ourselves, desire becomes more moderate and freer. We chase less, cling less and are more capable of seeing the person in front of us as they truly are, not only as we wish they would redeem us from ourselves.
Losing our bearings
Desire makes us confuse it with emotional intimacy. We feel far closer to the other person than we really are. We take the relationship from zero to 100 within days or weeks. Instead of slowing down, truly getting to know each other and examining compatibility, we begin behaving like a couple long before we have become one.
We travel together for several days, commit quickly, make long-term plans and merge our daily lives before laying real foundations for the relationship. It is a bit like signing up for the Tour de France a week after learning to ride a bicycle. We try to force an exciting romantic encounter into the structure of a full relationship.
Desire makes us believe we know the other person, when in fact we mainly know the feelings they awaken in us.
And who among us has not lost their bearings after falling hard? Who has not fantasized about a happy life together before having even one meaningful conversation about wants, needs, values, money, children or lifestyle?
The fact that we behave like a couple does not make us a couple. The fact that the chemistry between us is strong does not mean there is a relationship between us.
Do not try to build the first floor before building the foundations of the house. Do not let desire lead you by the nose before the things needed to sustain a stable relationship have been built between you.
In the end, the initial intensity fades, and what remains are two imperfect people, with a past, wounds, fears, needs and sometimes conflicting desires.
So learn to regulate your emotions. Slow down. Ask the right questions. Let time do what it does better than any of us: gradually reveal the person in front of you.
Desire can open the door to love, but it can never replace the slow, clear-eyed work required to build it.
Roi Tzur is the founder of “Derech Hakesher,” a center for individual, couples and online therapy focused on relationships.