Is It Chemistry, or Is It Just Familiar?

I have left Nitin twice and gone back twice. My friends think I am mad.

Last year I went on three dates with a man from my cousin’s office. He was kind. He remembered what I told him. He texted when he said he would. I felt nothing. With Nitin I feel everything. Does that not count for something?

Swati, it counts. I am just not sure it is evidence of what you think it is.

What chemistry may be made of

In Should I Stay or Should I Go?, the psychologist Ramani Durvasula takes aim at the word chemistry. She leans on the relationship researcher Pamela Regan, who reads the research on attraction this way: much of what we call chemistry may be familiarity. We are built to prefer what we know. Known feels safe. Unknown feels like a risk.

There is some real chemistry at the start. Durvasula cites the anthropologist Helen Fisher, whose brain-imaging work links early passionate love to the dopamine system. But that surge fades in every couple. It does not explain why a person returns, years in, to someone who treats her badly.

The oldest relationship you know

Here is what Durvasula noticed in her own clients and interviews. The great majority of people who ended up with a narcissistic partner had grown up with at least one parent of the same kind. Or with a parent whose attention had to be earned.

She draws on the psychologist Alan Rappoport, who describes how a child adapts to such a parent. You learn to please. You learn that your worth lies in what you do. You learn to watch someone’s mood before you speak.

Then, at thirty, you meet a man who makes you work for it. Durvasula describes the constant feeling of being about to be shown the door. To someone raised on it, she says, that feeling is like a tune you cannot get out of your head. It is so familiar that it seems like fate.

This is her clinical observation and not a controlled study. I find it persuasive all the same.

Why the kind man felt like nothing

She has heard your sentence often. Someone meets a person who is attentive and respectful and needs no managing, and reports that there was no chemistry. Her reading is that there was no familiarity. You did not have to earn anything, and so nothing registered.

She points to Jane Austen for the long view. Marianne Dashwood burns for the dashing Willoughby and finds Colonel Brandon dull. It takes being badly hurt before she can see what steadiness is worth.

What drew you in was real

None of this means you were foolish. Durvasula is emphatic that clever, capable people fall for these partners all the time, because the partners are very good at the beginning. She lists what they bring: charm, charisma and confidence, quick intelligence, good looks, a way with words, an impressive job. A person who has put everything into the outside will have a very polished outside.

She cites two British researchers, Carrie Haslam and Tamara Montrose, who found that women who wanted to marry were more drawn to narcissistic men than women who did not. Status and success look like good marriage material. The researchers’ conclusion was that it only looks that way.

She also resists the lazy explanation that only people with low self-esteem stay. In her experience it is often the compassionate and reflective ones.

Chemistry is not always a warning

Durvasula says so directly. Some lucky people have the lightning and the kindness in the same person. The trouble starts when chemistry becomes the reason for putting up with careless, unkind treatment. “No one makes me feel like this,” people tell her. Her usual reply is that, given how bad they feel, that is a mercy.

So ask what “everything” is made of. If a large part of it is dread, it is not romance.