On the face of it, not liking someone during the dating game is everyone's great prerogative.
Who could possibly question our tastes if we complained on leaving a restaurant or museum that we found them just too loud or too stupid, too weak, or too supernaturally inclined?
If we said we didn't like their chin or that there was something a bit weird around their hips.
It's surely for each one of us to decide according to the movements of our hearts and on that basis to gain appropriate sympathy for repeatedly not finding someone worthy of our time and our desire.
However, after we've cycled through a certain number of candidates, after we've returned home from our 20th or 87th fruitless date, after we've yet again discovered age 42 or 59, that the person across the table from us wasn't quite right.
We may be encouraged to ask ourselves a few pointed questions in order to judge whether the problem might truly lie with them or whether it might not, perhaps, to raise a hugely sensitive point with delicacy, have something to do with us.
Though innumerable people will clearly be objectively flawed in a variety of ways, there are cases where the wrongness we detect may primarily speak of a psychological dynamic in us, a bias towards rejecting people not because they are unsuitable per se.
But because just out of reach of our day-to-day consciousness, proximity to anyone, however accomplished and viable they might be, is associated with danger and intrusion.
Though we may say in extremely moving tones that we're really interested in finding love, it may be that the prospect of actually finding it is not, in fact, at all simple, that it may reignite a fear, probably related to disappointments or perverse loyalties formed in childhood, of what could happen if it really came along.
Way back, our attachment to our earliest caregivers may have taught us that loving people is not, in fact, either safe or advisable.
