Love relationships can last many years. As time goes by, relationships grow and change, and love grows and changes. Trying to maintain a sense of stability and continuity while still allowing for change and growth is probably the single greatest challenge of longterm love relationships.
Attaining intimacy is different from loving. We can love from afar, and we can love anonymously; we can love our cat, our favorite musician, or a great leader. Intimacy requires reciprocity: it takes two. Intimacy is a dance of two souls, each of whom must reveal a little, risk a little, and try a lot. In some ways, therefore, true intimacy is more dif-
ficult to achieve than true love because the emotion of love may be effortless, whereas the establishment of intimacy always requires effort.
Does fate determine whom you will fall in love with, or are there other factors at work? We will now talk about physical attraction, proximity, common interests, and other factors that contribute to adult love and intimacy.
Attraction
Imagine that you are in a public place, such as a bar, a museum, or a sports event. Suddenly you see someone and feel an immediate attraction. As you approach him or her with your favorite opening line, you muse to yourself, “I wonder why I am so attracted to this person and not to someone else?” What might be going on?
“Haven’t I Seen You Here Before?”
One of the most reliable predictors of whom a person will date is proximity: people are most likely to find lovers among the people they know or see around them. The vast majority of people have sex with, love, and marry people who are very much like them in ethnic, racial, and religious background (Michael et al., 1994). This is, in part, because we tend to meet many more such people as we go through our normal lives. We have a cultural myth about seeing a stranger across a crowded room, falling in love, and finding out that the stranger is from an exotic place and has lived a much different life. In fact, such a scenario is rare. We are much more likely to meet our mates at a party, religious institution, or friend’s house, where the other guests are likely to come from backgrounds very similar to our own.
“You Know, We Really Have a Lot in Common”
Folklore tells us both that “birds of a feather flock together” and that “opposites attract.” Yet only the first saying is supported by the evidence; people tend to be attracted to those who think like they do (Byrne & Murnen, 1988). The majority of people who fall in love share similar educational levels, social class, religion and degree of religiousness, desired family size, attitudes toward gender roles, physique and physical attractiveness, family histories, and political opinions (Rubin, 1973).