“Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.”
                                                                                                                                 - Albert Einstein

All romance continues with intellectual attraction, the Third Act of our love story. It is here that men and women are not only decidedly different from each other in “gender instincts” - in masculinity and femininity - but different from every other person on earth in their individual identity; for they both need privacy, personal goals, preferences, and dreams. We have invested in each other thus far, while carrying hope that the other person will share in our intimate, personal goals and dreams. Our wish is to find a teammate and partner with whom we may both give generously of our core self, but also be made more successful at these dreams and goals.
We have traveled from the reptilian brain and its focus on the body, the instincts, the unconscious, and passion, so well-explained by the Greek myths, to the mammalian brain and its focus on the emotions, the subconscious, happiness, friendship and love, so well-explained by Shakespeare. Now we enter the higher brain and its focus on all the working parts of our intellect, character, maturity and success at outer goals as a couple. With these, we also finally reach a state higher than the other animals, and species of mammals, all of which are of course capable of reproduction with multiple sex partners, and of kinship and bonding common to all other mammals... but for whom monogamy is not so common, not so sought after, as it very much can be for us.
Where passion of one’s elevated masculinity or femininity drove the sexual attraction of our reptilian brains, and where happiness drove our pursuit of friendship together and love, we will now find somthing higher that drives us, includes the others - the passion and happiness - and yet sends us to the moon with a joyous feeling that one gets through intellectual understanding, as if one’s blind eyes are opened for the first time to see the work of art that is our life together: call it ecstasy in the feelings and enlightenment in the mind.
It is here, in the final portion of Romantic Dynamics’ steps of human courtship that we find people need a set of skills with which to be more powerful together than they are alone - otherwise why would they want to be in a committed relationship?
It is here that they discover those - the Four C’s: Curiosity, Communication, Compromise, and Collaboration, without which they will have no hope of success, and without great personal boundaries to structure these four, that we find commitment to another person, or commitment to anything is just not possible.
We had left the gender instincts and the Greek myths behind after the first phase of courtship, but now we find ourselves coming back to them again in order to be complete in our partnership, the fairness of being together as an equally powerful team. While women were the ones with the power to test men for the ability to commit (and be a good match for them) in the first phase of courtship - the Act I of our love story that was The Romantic Dynamics of Sexual Attraction, it is here in Act III:  The Romantic Dynamics of Intellectual Attraction that we see men finally testing women in return. In order to commit for life to just one person, the man needs a fit to their own lives, goals and dreams, called their “mission in life.”
While women held all the power to judge in phase one, men hold the power of whether a commitment will or will not occur in this final phase of courtship. It is in perfect symmetry with women in terms of inherent skills, desires and one’s rights to be self-determining. Neither men, nor women can possibly navigate this phase without first having a mature personal boundary. This “higher-brained” psychological skill and resource is the one and only thing that makes it possible to champion one’s own personal identity, to negotiate and collaborate, to communicate accurately or to compromise for the sake of harmony. If either the man or the woman is lacking in this area, these essential skills of a mature and lasting relationship are not possible. It is also only through this feature of our maturity that we can take and retain the voluntary nature of friendship, and bring it into the committed relationship - to realize that even in the commitment, we never will “own” the other person, nor “owe” the other person. We only may invite the other person to share our lives, and then join the other person in their life, a warmly welcomed guest.
The “Higher Brain” is the area of the mind that sets people apart from animals, and even other mammals. The higher brain is the place which carries with it, our current level of maturity and the qualities of character which cause a love relationship go on for life.
It is also the place where we may solidly say that our sense of values, beliefs, preferences and identity are formed and solidified - the place where we can say that a person is a “good person” (in the Aristotelian sense) or is “strong” (character strength, or integrity) or is deserving of “respect,” or is durable or lasting in relationships.

THE STEPS OF INTELLECTUAL ATTRACTION

   In this volume we will divide this process of committed partnership, of Intellectual Attraction, into three large “steps” that couples naturally navigate their way through. And in the end they will find themselves sure, not just of their sexual attraction or the friendship bond they share, but their ability to solve life’s problems as a team, and the reason that they conduct themselves as mature partners together not just in mutual desire or happiness, but in mutual success:
    
1. Mastery of the Personal Boundary.
2. Like Attracts Like: Universal Commitment Tests.
3. Ariadne’s Thread: Men’s Tests of Commitment.

BIOLOGY VERSUS SOCIOLOGY

In our study of human courtship you will likely recall my assertion that “biology trumps sociology, every time,” and I believe that it still does once we reach the level of the higher brain and the intellectual attraction in commitment that it facilitates. However, this is not to say that the principles of sociology or its cultural and social forces have no impact on us. It is especially here in the higher brain - where a couple becomes a couple and is more than ever a presence in their local community - that the stresses, “in vogue” public policies surrounding marriage and the relations between the genders may influence their behavior toward each other, and toward the entire opposite gender in general.
In other words, the intellectual ideas of politics and public policy likely have near zero impact on the forces which cause us to find passion for each other, and those same ideas and principles that study the trends of what forces are at work to include or exclude people from social groups likely also have minimal impact on our tendency to form personal, one on one friendships with each other, based on our personality styles and other factors such as our habits with anger and anxiety.
For example, in the past decade, one could observe a sociological phenomenon among fundamentalist Christians and some other denominations, where it became culturally condoned to take “virginity pledges,” to save one’s self for marriage before having sex. What was soon observed after this meme caught on in the Christian community was an increased amount of oral sex among those sexually attracted to one another, and an even higher incidence of unplanned pregnancy. This sociological data, shows, I believe, the strength of the passions in the face of mere ideology, and the tendency of our passions to work their way around intellectual ideas and policies that dare to try to control or squelch them, rather than working with those instincts organically to direct them to positive ends (the way our natural process of human courtship has always worked for us.)  We need to remember that sexual attraction is not at all the same as the sex act, and trying to tamp it down tends to just build up more sexual tension. Physics tells us that energy can neither be created, nor destroyed. Just transformed or redirected, and that is exactly what happened in that sociological episode.
Another example of this effect in terms of the mammalian brain and its emotions are the quickly forgotten studies in the differences in political party affiliations, and their correlation to emotional tendencies in childhood. Prepare yourself for “political incorrectness,” since this data flies in the face of our belief that we are all truly free to choose our political affiliations...  The study known to psychoanalysts, finds that those who vote conservative and associate themselves with the Conservative or Republican party in adulthood, statistically have had more experiences struggling with anxiety conditions in their youth, than Liberals or Democrats. You don’t often hear these studies cited, likely because of the firestorm it could create to even mention it. But data is data, and this suggests that the emotions of the mammalian brain also trump the sociology of our intellectual experiences, exposure to the ideas of policy and politics. We vote based on our emotions in other words, and we don’t always have total control of our emotions.
However, we now finally arrive at the higher brain, and intellectual attraction which leads to our success or failure as a couple in reaching out together as a team, toward our mutual life’s goals. Here we will for the first time encounter external blocks to our progress, and that of course includes the necessity of fitting into our culture and subcultures, community groups and neighborhoods, not just our immediate circle of friends.  As a couple, we will feel the sociological forces of media and advertising, inserting decades of memes and social policy ideas into our heads - from the celebration of Valentine’s Day to the traditions, or lack of them, surrounding the Western notions of engagement and marriage.
Again, there is perfect symmetry between men and women throughout history, since for millennia prior to recent decades, we lived in a paternalistic society, where women were subjugated, and yet witness the power of the instincts and emotions in individual women to find love and romance, within marriage, and as a couple, to wield power in a community, no matter how ancient. Today, one could easily say that men are disempowered and we are on the cusp of forming a very maternalistic society which may last for coming millenia. In that sociological situation, men will eventually find individual power in their passions and emotions, to reach balance in the power of the marital union, and from there, to impact the community they live in.  The biology of the passions and emotions will still, then, trump sociology. But sociology will impact a couple who has reached the stage of intellectual attraction more than at any other time in their courtship together, no matter what period of history we look at.
It is in this area of the mind and in the Act III of Romantic Dynamics that a man and woman share desire, happiness and can achieve success at their goals together (carrying a feeling of ecstasy and the intellectual experience of enlightenment through each other) in a way in which the relationship will last.
Passion can be a wildly positive feeling of being alive, and of being in love, but it also can pertain to death and destruction, as in the phrase, “crime of passion.” Ecstasy is something far more, as it is always positive, never negative, and carries happiness within it, as well as intellectual understanding and enlightenment. It is not just the feeling of being alive, but of having all of one’s faculties as a living human being, on, full power, and reaching one’s potential.
To this end, we will need to explore the way in which people come together and stay together (and have done so through all human history.) We will learn why it is that monogamy is indeed natural for humans, and actually sets us apart from lower mammals and other animals, but how it is a mountain to climb, a high goal to reach, and that without the right factors and circumstances we fail and fail but find ourselves trying again.
It is in this way that love relationships can even be said to be “successful” or “lifelong” or are “strong” or are satisfying in the way that both the man and the woman will last as a team against the elements of nature - as well as the stresses and social circles and families around them.
We’ve journeyed all the way through the reptilian brain and mammalian brain of courtship, through desire and passion, to love and friendship, and the likely potential of becoming great partners with teamwork and commitment in this, the third and final act of our love story.  As we have done so, we’ve gone from an unconscious place where we have little say over what happens between men and women – the universal, unconscious, automatic experience of masculinity and femininity - to having more diversity, decision-making power and unique individuality that comes from one’s life experiences and the character built from that.
We’ve gone from a place where “all women are alike” (in the femininity of the reptilian brain) and “men are all the same” (in the masculinity of the reptilian brain) to a place where we begin to see that it is in the specific differences in individuals that we can find more in life than just desire or the kind of love we may feel toward friends and many others. Still, it is here in the higher brain that we are tempted to look back fondly at our single years, and like Lot’s wife, may succumb to the temptation, and turn to a pillar of salt, or else like Orpheus, the only human ever allowed to go into the afterlife and return alive, who only did so by not “looking back.” When we choose to finally commit to another for life, there can be no looking back, ever.
Which is sad in a way that we live in the culture we now do, with the sociology we now have - gender battling gender for dominance. The sexual attraction phase is as a result, the most controversial of subjects to discuss, where it shouldn’t be. It should be a chance to understand the other gender, and to build curiosity about those not like ourselves in that area called the instincts. That there are differences between us there and only there does not at all make the genders unequal. It just makes them different, and gives them a different language of the unconscious, illustrated beautifully by the Greek myths among many other myths of the world traditions.
When we try to reconcile this area of the mind with the sociology of political correctness, we fail, and just as much, when we try to find ourselves actually making a commitment to an equal partner, the Greek myths can’t help but come back to life in an even more controversial way - for where women held all power of decision-making in the sexual arena, it appears in parallel and in harmony, that males “hold all the power” (I hesitate to admit) in the arena of making that final commitment for life. To “propose marriage” as is not only the tradition, but the natural thing for the gender instincts, in which the man goes against his more adolescent motives - to stay single for as long as possible - surrendering to something greater - the marital union. It is in parallel to how a woman will someday surrender to sex, going against her reptilian nature to protect her precious eggs, as the evolutionary psychologists discuss, in favor of obtaining the greater status and role as a mother to a child, the end result of sex, and the creation of a new life.
Saying all this is in no way religiously related, or moralizing, but is me, with you, merely following the logic of what we see in the dynamics before us, the balance and harmony of this dance that takes place between men and women. It is easy to see why one might infer that there are “moral arguments” to be made though. After all, we are now in the higher brain, where one’s sense of morality, ethics, right and wrong actually exist.  No wonder both sex and commitment get us all stirred up with righteous indignation. They are the two places, the first, where morality does not exist - the reptilian brain - and the latter, where it does exist - the higher brain.
It is then interesting that the “Rosetta Stone” between men and women is the mammalian brain, where we are entirely the same, feel the same emotions, the same self-esteem or lack of it, happiness or unhappiness with each other, and value or its lack. This is the place where we can truly meet and understand each other when it comes to love. It may be our only hope in finding lasting harmony in our sociology too. That when we strive to make each other happy, only then may we even care to understand the other, or hold curiosity about them.
It is why emotional attraction must come second in courtship, without which we cannot move on to the final, harrowing mountain climb to higher levels of psychology that set us apart from other animals, and even from other people who aren’t equipped to make commitment work.
We can find that rare kind of person that one only encounters a few times in life, the “good person” of Aristotle and his “perfect friendship.”  We’ve also gone from a place that is distinctly adolescent, (since the reptilian brain is the least mature of the three brains) and traversed a place approaching maturity (the mammalian brain is the center of the friendship and emotional skills of young adulthood).
When we arrive in the higher brain, though – the place of intellectual attraction and commitment – we come to the center of full adult maturity in behavior.  It is here in the most mature brain that we see the greatest individuality and personal identity in a soulmate and ourselves.  Here we begin to see uniqueness, rooted in an individual’s personal tastes and preferences, his or her education, vast array of experiences, memories and the emotions within them, and the ability to make sophisticated terms, conditions and agreements with others.

WHAT TO EXPECT
IN COMMITTED PARTNERSHIP
While all men are essentially the same in their reptilian brains (and all women are in theirs), people have some opposite emotional energies in their mammalian brains, but the complexity, sheer size, and variation in the “data” of our lives of the higher brain makes us all unique from every other person on the planet.  The higher brain is the only area of the brain in which we reach true and full partnership with a mate.  There is no permanent commitment for you and your partner without these last three steps of human courtship. There is just a very satisfying friendship (with sexual desire) at best, or a lackluster friendship, propped up by desire, at worst.
Have you ever felt as if the person you’re with did not respect you?  Here we arrive at another difference between terms. It is possible that you may be valued, but what if you can be valued yet not respected? It’s possible - for example, your boss may value you (working for them, a utility to them) but not respect you (they disregard your requests for certain, optional changes in the desk layout at work.)
Have you ever felt like the person you’re with was wasting your time, your energy, your money, or your attention? Have you ever felt as if they were overly entitled to boss you around, or tended to say “no” to most of your suggestions?  This means that they have a certain kind of personal boundary that we are going to learn about - one where they are safe and protected inside theirs, but don’t share much intimacy with others, including you: a wall for a boundary.
Have you ever felt as if the one you were with had a tendency to be overly agreeable to everything you suggest, while having none of their own preferences, to the point of making you feel as if you don’t even really have a sense of what they’re all about?  This is because they have an opposite kind of personal boundary: one composed of holes, not walls, in which they say, “Yes” to everything, but don’t really mean it. Which is a kind of lie, actually.
Have you ever had something about your relationship that troubled you, yet was ill-defined, vaguely annoying, overwhelming, dramatic, lacking “something,” or otherwise leaving you confused as to what to do to understand it better?  Someone - them, or you - has a boundary problem.
If any of these questions are true, these and dozens of other mysteries about your relationship are explained in Step One of the Commitment Phase: Personal Boundaries. Any problem in a relationship that is confusing or ill-defined speaks to there being a “boundary problem” of some kind, and we are going to learn to solve those in Volume III: The Romantic Dynamics of Intellectual Attraction.
We enter the higher brain of your true love now, on a rich adventure full of complexity and discovery.  If we have chosen well in our relationship so far, we feel desire, love and friendship, and are now ready to discover the ecstasy and enlightenment that comes with being aligned with just the right person.
We ask questions of of our romance story with a bold spirit of individuality rather than sameness.  It is because of that very individuality that there are so many choices of a mate in the world, regardless of your personality type.  If human beings were nothing more than animals that have sex, cheat and get cheated on, fight each other for resources, and move through sexual encounter after sexual encounter, there would be no point in solving the mystery of love at all, and some people today prefer it that way. They want everything in life to be predictable and expectable. But they cannot possibly be happy with this, because love begs us to live a story together, and the only good stories have unrevealed events that are yet to unfold and be discovered.
If we were meant to be only polygamous or serially monogamous, people would be equally suited to mate with any other attractive person who comes along, then move on in a short time, or a longer time. Sadly, some people believe this to be the way it is meant to be for us at best, and don’t dare to dream that something more magical can happen to your life.
If you’d only had the eyes, and the science, to recognize the real possibilities.
If human beings were nothing but “advanced mammals” who are only able to cry and fret, start wars, get addicted, get depressed or otherwise use each other emotionally, then there would also be no point in caring about your unique story in life.  Any Sanguine Magician would be suitable for any Phlegmatic  Queen, and any Melancholic Lover would be suitable for any Choleric Warrior.  People would simply pair up as they do on the online dating services, take a test that says who “The One” is, “buy” them as one does a product off a shelf, and marry them without any deep thought or interesting, surprising, heartfelt story together.
We are more than this though, aren’t we?  We have personal stories and personal choice in those stories.  There is a magical serendipity to encounters where two people’s stories cross briefly, and it is our Observing Ego – a skill resting in the higher brain, which we will finally explore in detail now that we have arrived there. It allows us to recognize those moments, the plot points of romance, and become the main characters in a personal love story of choices, challenges, and victories.
The higher brain and Cerebral Cortex in which it is likely, largely housed, carries a whole host of abilities for our love lives.  There, lives, what psychiatrists call our “executive function”: containing our intellect, our decisions, and all the classes of things we value.  The higher brain contains our language, our art, our memory, education, life’s experiences, and our sense of identity, itself.  The higher brain is the center of our Observing Ego, and houses the crucial skill without which no relationship can last in commitment – the personal boundary.  The higher brain is ultimately what separates us in sophistication from animals – our logic, abstract thinking, emotional intelligence, social savvy and even our experience of the imagination and the spiritual.  It is the only part of us capable of making a man a gentleman, a woman a lady, or any of us full, mature adults. Through the collaboration of such men and women, the higher brain is the sole factor responsible for the existence of what we call, civilization.
If the two axes of the Social Personality System are the emotional axis and the intellectual axis, and if the emotions are “mammalian” while the intellect is “of the higher brain,” then that left-brain/right-brain collaboration between men and women is one bridge that traverses the span between being exclusively dating boyfriends and girlfriends, to something more - a couple which can team up to pursue joint goals together. The rewards and successes of a Queen with her Magician or a Warrior with her Lover carry a duty that binds the couple after those goals are achieved.
These rewards and accomplishments of the couple may be buying a house, starting a business as entrepreneurs, traveling to and eventually living in Europe together, having been born and met in some other, far away place. And their joint accomplishment, as with so many billions of people who climbed this spiritual route before them have achieved: that of having children together. All these accomplishments as a couple bind us externally together, and give us reasons to continue to look inside, to our story together to keep guiding us in love.

CLIMBING THE MOUNTAIN
OF MARRIAGE AND COMMITMENT
Commitment and partnership is like climbing a mountain with one other person on your climbing team. After all, the stakes are harrowing in part because you have both already invested quite a bit of time and energy on just one person. In addition, some of the most basic but profound life’s goals are at stake - the possibility of having children, career success, and financial independence are all typical, basic lifelong dreams that many people have, and your choice of a partner who is going to stick with, through this mountainous terrain can mean the success of you both reaching the ummit of life, or else one or the other of you tumbling to the death of your dreams. Sometimes you don’t get a second chance at your dreams, and that can certainly be the case with having children during the childbearing years, or reaching the career rank that must be reached in many professions by a certain age.
Some people erroneously think that if you have gotten so far as walking down the aisle of matrimony, then everything else must certainly take care of itself.
Not so, as most married people will inform you. There is constant work to do on the relationship itself, trying to understand the other person, with their own personal story, background, “baggage,” beliefs and values, not to mention that in heterosexual relationships there is the whole issue of a massive gender divide in understanding today. Those instincts which used to be called masculinity and femininity have been diluted and obfuscated by all kinds of sociological agendas and policies, usually for the purpose of some person or group gaining more social power, not you, individually.
I have loved living in the mountains for much of my life, and I think that it is a fitting metaphor to use a mountain climbing experience to describe commitment.
For example, there is a certain equality between climbers in terms of their importance to the expedition, and none are of lesser worth than the others. However they all have their strengths and weaknesses, as well as both natural talents alongside skills they have built that were hard-won and not so easy for them to learn. You might consider masculinity and femininity to be akin to “natural talents” - something that you can become aware of through exposure to a stress that demands the talent to come out. However, like masculinity and femininity, one’s natural talents at climbing mountains will declare themselves when under stress, and one need not “practice at the talent” in order to use it effectively. It is inborn.
One’s temperament has some similarities to this concept of a talent, except that it is more of a “raw talent” or “fulfilling the potential of your talent” that one needs to refine in order to reach its full potential. We have already called that, personality - something grown to become more mature over the lifetime, through effort and practice at what one lacks.
These, together - your gender instinct of masculinity or femininity, and your temperament of Phlegmatic King or Queen, Choleric Warrior, Sanguine Magician, or Melancholic Lover - will be brought to bear in skills demanded, as you climb the mountain that is intellectual attraction and commitment as partners.  Along the way, you will find that there is a switching back and forth of “power” or “advantage” over the other person, one person in a temporarily stronger position, then the other, one person in a temporarily more dangerous position, then the other, just like on a climbing expedition. There is far too much time spent today, however, viewing this power-trading through the lens of narcissism - where certain, difficult people think that a man in advantage for a moment is somehow harmful to the welfare of the woman, or certain other, disgruntled people who think that a woman with a brief advantage over a man is somehow going to demolish her relationship for being strong, or successful, or in being the clear leader for the time being. Instead of this erroneous gender conflict, we need to remember that we are in love, and are climbers together, just as in an expedition up Mt Everest - where the one five feet higher in altitude does indeed “have advantage over their partner.” But what a ridiculous error of understanding. How terrible a way to look at love. The one higher up the mountain (in advantage) is only there to secure both of their progress toward success, and to prevent them both from toppling off the mountain, to their deaths.
The woman takes her turn, then the man, then the woman, until they are on their way upward. There is some momentary personal glory in the ascent for whomever is the momentary leader - the striking of the ice axe into the mountainside, the heaving upward, lifting both of them on the strength of the one at just slightly higher altitude. Woman or man, should they climb twenty feet, thirty yards, or half the mountain face ahead of their partner, it may be easy for the narcissist to forget there is another person tethered to them, gripping for dear life, and should they cut the rope in the midst of their glory, they will be alone.  Should they fail to support the partner below them, if that person were to go rolling down the mountain face to their death, the rope will surely rip the glorious partner “in advantage” right off the mountain as well. Too many couples realize this too late in their narcissistic reveries.
The rules of mountaineering make sense to examine  as we begin our ascent into this higher-brained level of the mind, as it pertains to love, and we will need skills of maturity in order to overcome these problems as a team bent on success:

“It's always further than it looks.” The things you need in a relationship are not always going to happen with the timing you want.
This is the “shopping list error,” where a couple finds themselves committing because the other person satisfies a long list of desirable social traits that more please their families, friends, or their narcissistic view of themselves. They figure that if they find a person who makes a lot of money, or who is physically attractive, or is “from a good family,” that this list of desirable traits will somehow make them compatible, and that things will just naturally flow and be easy. After all, the person satisfies your checklist of traits that you have set as your “standard” for your love life.  Wrong. It will not work, and is inside-out thinking. Rather than going through the natural steps of courtship to find the right person, you would be thinking that finding the “right features” of a person, if present, make the person, themselves, “right for you.”
The whole thrust of a human courtship process is to find this person for you, so that you don’t have to follow a contrived list of desirable traits that aren’t likely to work out well. This process is an accurate one, but can take many twists and turns that lead you in other directions before correcting your course back to the ascent you are destined for. You have to be patient, and this is a mature, learned skill - patience - and something that can’t be learned anywhere else but life’s experience itself. There is no shortcut to genuine love.
You have likely heard of stories where an expedition up a mountain was ready to reach the summit, but because of bad weather, had to turn back, perhaps until a future season or even a future year until the next attempt. Ultimate patience is necessary for mountain-climbing success.
The same is true of commitment and partnership. It is sad and tragic when we have to leave a relationship in order to look for a new one, but even if we don’t there will be times that we will need to back off the relationship for a time, or suffer a “relationship winter” where for weeks, months or longer, we don’t get along very well. Until the time that we learn to understand the other person in a way that was necessary all along. This too, will take patience.
Patience itself needs a skill of maturity that we have covered before, called Observing Ego - the ability to be present-minded, to not get wrapped into either the past or the future, and to be our own best, competent, wise advisor in real-time. Such as the advice, “Be thine own best counsel,” as said by novelist Henry James, or “To thine own self be true,” said by Shakespeare’s Polonius in Hamlet.

“It's always taller than it looks.” The things you want to happen in a relationship are not always going to happen the way you want or to the degree you want.
The shopping list for a mate will fail you, but not only that, the individual whom you thought was your ideal mate will fail you over and over again, repeatedly. They will leave you resentful for a day or a week, when you don’t understand each other. They will lack empathy at a moment you truly needed it. They will embarrass you at times, and will for a moment or a day, be embarrassed by you. In fact, there will be times that you wonder how you possibly could have ever found them attractive, or thought of them as a best friend, or incomprehensibly, ever imagined being together for life.
But the next moment will come, and you will find yourself forgiving them if they are the truly the right person for you. This will confuse you if you had always grown up thinking that love is like a Disney film, where by chance, just the right prince and princess meet, the relationship progresses in a straight up line of ascent to success and love together, and ends happily and efficiently.
Not so, obviously. The skill you will both need to master is that of the personal boundary, the topic really, of the whole first step of intellectual attraction, and our seventh major step of all human courtship.
The personal boundary will allow you to tolerate  a meandering course to successful life’s goals together, and to both tolerate and even empathize with the partner. Even when they have temporarily hurt your feelings, or let you down, or left you confused for a time, the strength of your boundary will allow you to forgive them, and yourself, for what seemed like such a bad choice in a partner.
The mountain is taller than it looked. The hardships that you never would have guessed would come your way, do. The “best laid plans” will fail you, and your ability and confidence in predicting your own future fails you.
You will have to spot your own suffering, your own wishes to control the uncontrollable in life and love. Then you will have to actively seek to stop suffering to stop struggling with your natural skills and needs, and in some cases, that the constitution of the other person is not, and will never be, exactly what you thought it would be.
Yet, somewhere along this climbing expedition, as angry or resentful as you may have been a day, a week, or a month before, life will present you the unexpected, and you will discover your partner in the way that Psyche did of Eros, when little known to you when you first met, in times of crisis, your partner comes through for you will skills and experience that you didn’t even know they had.

“It's always harder than it looks.” The things you wish would happen in a relationship are only made real by choosing well at the beginning, or working hard with what you’ve got.
Many people are shocked at how difficult their own relationships become, but still others who see this experience as being inevitable in love, and while they may have no solutions imediately as a relationship stress arises, they can sit back and watch, observe the events going on in the relationship with their Observing Ego, and can block the discomfort that comes from others, by using their personal boundary.
People get caught up in magical thinking, where they think that just because they are a good person, or work hard, that others will find them attractive and reward them for their honorable efforts. They won’t. Life can be hard, and it is definitely not fair, but it falls on us to make life fair (for us, and those we love.) There is yet another skill of psychological maturity - which counters pathological narcissism - called free will. It is your decision-making, and it is what causes us to get through any obstacles or hardships, and persist in our dreams anyway.
I saw the Ancient Greek display recently at the Field Museum in Chicago, and took notes of two pieces of advice in it - one from Epicurus, and the other from Alexander the Great:

“There is nothing impossible to him who will try.”
- Alexander the Great

“It is folly for man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain for himself.”
- Epicurus (341-270 BCE)

It is precisely because of that last major part of our mature decision-making - our free will to make decisions - that these two observations are true. When we strive for what we set as a major goal, the trying and trying, with enough patience, can lead us to discover at a later time, that conditions change and improve. If we watch for opportunity with mindfulness (Observing Ego), and if we don’t fritter away our resources or make unreasonable demands on our partner (good boundaries), the time will come when we can decide to act successfully in our own best interest, and the interest of the partner.
Our ability to make constructive decisions over destructive ones is what will make everything possible in reaching our goals, if we wait and look, and jump on opportunity when it arises.
Our faith is important too - our faith in ourselves, or in a God, or both, or in something greater than ourselves. But if we live on faith only, and dreams, we soon discover, such as in the words of Poor Richard’s Almanac and author Benjamin Franklin, that “God helps those who help themselves.”  This is also the best depiction of how courage operates in a committed relationship. That in courage, we are truly alone for a moment, and we must act on the fear, doing the right thing by ourselves and our partner.  When we do, there is always, always a reward of  confidence. This decision of courage is an ultimate power, and the trait we must grab onto and  cling to and use with vigor. When we do, we realize that we do have all the power we need to ascend in our personal growth and in the love relationship.
Hopefully, we have chosen a partner well, one with whom, because of the Social Personality System, things do go relatively smoothly and with ease. Still we can never be perfect, but finding a partner who understands your gender, and is of opposite personality and temperamental style will drastically reduce the overall amount of heavy labor and losses on the path to finding that lasting, ecstatic love with the other.
There was much to overcome in getting here, and much more to overcome if you are to last a lifetime together. Along the way you have likely had that painful experience of finding “ninety percent of what I want,” in people you have dated and befriended, but that “last ten percent sunk it.” Then you had to grieve and move on.
As we begin our ascent into this brain responsible for all social politics, rights, agreements, honesty, virtue, and civilization itself, we come to one other thing it contains: yet another bridge from the mammalian brain.  This bridge is known as our belief system. This will be a new feature of being human to learn about, and one which expands upon the concept of “value” in a love relationship that we have already mastered.
Your beliefs which have guided you all your life so far will need to be reconciled with those of another, so that they never mutually impede the path in life you are destined to take. They will augment a joint goal in life, if you choose the right person in this last phase of courtship, someone whose beliefs may be very similar to your own in ways that strengthen you both, but diverse in others that continue to feed your curiosity, promote your grow, and keep you on a path always returning to truth and happiness, not merely striving to be “right” for right’s sake.
With sexual attraction, you are grabbed by the throat with the intensity and power of love. With emotional attraction, you are filled with the happiness of knowing beyond a doubt, that it is better to be together than alone in this world. But only with intellectual attraction, will you learn what is possible to actually change about that world around you, to make it a better one for you and for others, not just be finding the right person to accept you as you are, but to literally evolve before your own eyes into a different kind of person that you were before - someone better, more powerful, happier, more loving, brighter, and more effective at success than you ever thought possible.
Sociology rises and falls, with its fads and its fashions, ever changing like the direction of the wind, or the currents of the sea. Like the stock market, it has peaks and valleys of social power and the influence of various factions of people. In this sense, if I may crudely observe, it is divisive in its conclusions.
Biology, and the evolutionary processes that change it, may be slow to exercise its power. But that power is lasting and reliable, while slow as a glacier, it is as powerful, able to move mountains and carve rock with its force. Yet this force is applied toward bringing us together. Its prime directive is keeping us alive, and passing on our nature, our genes, not just promoting the top political party, or brand of jeans, or latest “craze” that will be here today and gone tomorrow.
My hope is that what you will discover about our nature, that what makes us blissfully polygamous in our youth, our once upon a time, crosses to serial monogamy in a young adulthood that dares us to ask, what is love? The answers to which, eventually lead to a just-as-blissful and natural monogamy that will last until death do us part.
You will find that in our very first major step of intellectual attraction, of commitment to a partner, that nothing lasting can possibly occur without both partners being well-versed in the use of personal boundaries. These are the only feature of our psychology that allows durability in our relationship, or the common sense traits of maturity that foster it: honesty, reliability, strength and persistence, resilience, accurate communication, respect, privacy, fairness, and ultimately, integrity.
A Magician, a Warrior, A King or Queen and a Lover are just descriptions of a certain style of relating to others and socializing with them. Yet just being one of these four does not address how mature or immature one is. Which means that one may be of a certain temperament of personality, and have good, solid boundaries, or poor ones.
And so one of the biggest heartbreaks of all would be where we have found someone the opposite in style to ourselves - a soulmate-level match - and yet we find that they have such poor boundaries that we couldn’t imagine how we could ever get along without drama, or pain, frustration or uncertainty about our future together.