Great read. Makes me reflect on my own taste, though. I seem to be attracted to people I can't quite understand, people who take some work for me to figure out. Maybe there's a solid relational foundation between us, but we're always quite different people and I'm kept guessing a lot of the time. I find it interesting, fun, stimulating. I'm sure there are plenty like me in that respect. Any armchair hypotheses for that?
You are most likely a lover of problems and puzzles. Relationships where you don't understand the other person, is the Ultimate Problem Puzzle, but in the emotional field zone, where you can experience and interact with the problem in so much more ways than just computer code.
The same dopamine high of breaking through in solving a problem in the messy legacy code base, refactoring down those 1000s of lines into 100s, increasing the webserver's performance etc.. those same circuits are firing when trying to 'fix' or 'solve' the indecipherable person you are dating.
however, sometimes after a beginner hacker starts, maybe 3,4,5 years, and after their philosophizing-abstractionist hacker phase, they become the 'wise hacker', where writing ---no code at all--- is the best code to try and solve, or bypass problems. Maybe this is what people feel when they meet a S.O. who share mutual intrinsic emotional understanding.
I don't personally subscribe to this philosophy but I could see some other pattern-based thinkers branching off it.
I used to be that way (I went as far as dating a few borderline people). I didn't end up with someone like that though. I think partners like you describe are fun relationships but difficult partners long term. Its exciting but you probably don't want to buy a house and have kids with exciting. To each their own of course.
"Can't quite understand" in an intellectual sense (i.e. "where they're coming from" or "how they think"), or an emotional sense (i.e. "what they're feeling" or "what they want")?
I can perfectly-well understand being content with the first kind of disconnect—that's the kind of puzzle that drives you to learn more about your partner.
The second kind seems a lot more fundamental, though: if someone had completely different preferences or feelings from me, to the point where I couldn't even understand those feelings/preferences, I'd just feel like they were an alien.
And I mean, maybe I'm imagining something too far out-there; I can perfectly well understand the feelings and preferences of e.g. autistics or sociopaths or narcissists. But, say—someone who enjoys things, but then this enjoyment doesn't translate to doing those things ever again? Can't connect. Just don't get it. Bizarre alien mind architecture.
I'm the same way, and for me I believe it is a combination of being extremely intrigued and gratefully removed from my own world. Meeting an interesting person (romantic or not) is a great experience for that dual effect of mental stimulation (your "figuring it out" description) and being confronted with another person's reality which may feel much more vibrant than your own.
