I've spent a lot of time trying to understand why we fall for who we fall for.

Not the surface reasons. Not the height, the humour, the timing. The deeper pull. The one that doesn't make sense on paper but feels inevitable.

Maybe that's why we're drawn to certain people.

Not because they're good for us.

Not because they're meant for us.

But because they reveal a version of us we hadn't met yet.

I think we like to believe attraction is about the other person. Their face, their energy, the way they make us laugh. But most of the time, it's not about them at all. It's about who we become around them. The version of us that gets to come out and play, or the version that finally feels safe enough to speak, or the version we've been trying to suppress since childhood.

Some people arrive and we mistake the intensity for meaning. We think, this must be it, because it feels like nothing I've felt before. But feeling something for the first time isn't the same as feeling something right. Sometimes it's just the first time we've been shown that part of ourselves.

Some people arrive to stay.

Others arrive to introduce us to ourselves.

Either way, they change the story.

I don't think that makes the ones who leave any less significant. If anything, they might be the more honest teachers. The ones who stay can make us comfortable, and comfort has a way of letting things go unexamined. But the ones who leave, they leave a question behind. And we spend months, sometimes years, working out the answer.

Why did I let that happen. Why did that hurt so much. Why couldn't I walk away sooner. Why did some part of me already know.

I used to think those questions meant something had gone wrong. Now I think they mean something was finally being shown to me. A pattern I'd been repeating without knowing its name. A wound I'd dressed up as a preference. A version of love I inherited before I ever chose it for myself.

We don't choose people at random. We choose the ones who are fluent in whatever language we're still trying to translate about ourselves.

So maybe the question isn't why did I choose them. But it's what did they already know about me that I hadn't found yet.

Ready?

DX