How's Your Romantic Intuition?

 

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"Maybe it's intuition, Something you just don't question...I knew I loved you before I met you, I think I dreamed you into life, I knew I loved you before I met you, I have been waiting all my life, There's just no rhyme or reason, Only a sense of completion, And in your eyes, I see the missing pieces, I'm searching for, I think I've found my way home" -- Savage Garden
Can we love someone before meeting them? I believe we can, in the same way that we might "know" that we will not love someone even before we've met her or him. Our love is often based upon our romantic intuitions, which have developed before we meet someone.
Is such intuition helpful?

Romantic intuition is not a mysterious sixth sense. It is based on previously-formed evaluative structures, schemata that have been set during evolution and our own personal development. Our individual and evolutionary history is embedded in these structures. Hence, we may be predisposed to love a certain type of person even before getting to know a specific individual. Thus, someone may tend to love wise, caring men with an ironic sense of humor and preferably a British accent. Meeting an individual who matches (to a great extent) this pattern activates our inbuilt schemata and enables us to benefit from this implicit knowledge.

As Steve Jobs said: "As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it."

The romantic intuition that is activated in loving someone before meeting them is somewhat similar to love at first sight. However, while love at first sight mainly involves an activation of an aesthetic schema, the intuition in loving before actually knowing is broader and is a response to perceived admirable character traits.
The initial fit to our preferences does not guarantee the growth of profound love, which depends on developing joint activities that promote the lovers' flourishing. It also does not guarantee the long-term duration of this love; with better knowledge of the person, gaps between our ideal image and the individual's reality might become apparent, or the schemata may change as we grow older. However, the initial fit is a considerable boost to the establishment of long-term profound love.

We should not waste our lives searching for a certain ideal that may not exist; instead, we should invest more effort in making our actual relationship as close as possible to the ideal and be prepared to make some compromises and revisions to our ideal while not giving up the essential aspects of romantic love. As Tom Robbins said: "We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
Finding true love often involves a rocky road, and the destination is not always known. Not everyone is lucky enough to "find" a person they love before they even meet, or wise enough to stick to a good enough partner when they find him or her.

To sum up: We should not mistrust our romantic intuition, but we should also not base our relationship decisions on such feelings alone. But just as Intuition by itself can be wrong, so can intellectual thinking. So listen to your heart, take into account other perspectives—your own and others'—and then make your decision. Intuition is an excellent starting point. It cannot replace thinking. It can, however, be of great value in the romantic decision-making process.

                                                                                         Aaron Ben-Zeév, Ph.D. in In the Name of Love