It is in our human nature to have a preference. Whether it is ice cream flavors or our favorite album to play at 2 a.m., we tend to have an inclination toward certain things. We like to stick with the things that we know, the people we know the best. We look for qualities, styles, looks and other things that we get to know during our romantic experiences. There is a level of comfort that comes with identifying the things we are attracted to.
We put into everything into columns, organize and arrange everything we know into boxes, checklists and pros-and-cons paragraphs as if to analyze every feature, every quality. Out of all of this organization and calculation, there emerges a “type” of person we are attracted to. Only sticking to one type, however, can be a very dangerous thing.
I used to be attracted to one specific type of person — or at least, I told myself that I was. I believed that if I stuck with the type of person I was used to, I would know what to expect and I would know how they could hurt me. Because I only liked certain qualities in a person, I would only go for people that were like that one person. This one type that I liked turned out to just be a fantasy, as people are much more multidimensional than singular tropes and characteristics.
This led me to being hurt in similar ways every time something did not work out. When each experience with my “type” ended the same way — usually with me getting hurt — I had to re-examine what price I was willing to pay by sticking true to my type. Was I willing to continue getting hurt at the expense of sticking to what I know? After being hurt in similar ways by similar people, I wanted to branch outside of the tropes I had been sticking to. What else was out there waiting for me? I am now willing to find out. I am stepping away from my type.
Only going for a specific type can hinder our experiences and limit our choices to keep with the familiar, to keep with what we know. When we stick to the “type” we know, we never fully experience what is out there for us. When we limit ourselves to one type of person, we limit ourselves to very singular experiences. This also means that when we meet someone, we attribute to them the qualities that fit our type and choose to ignore the other facets of their character: their quirks, their discrepancies, what makes them a unique person.
We like to ignore the qualities in others that do not fit the mental picture of a person we have created. We characterize them as we would tropes in a television show — the athlete, the poet, the businessman, the partier, the dorky best friend and so on. When we characterize them into these tropes, we refuse to look past the qualities that don’t fit the trope.
This is not to say that people should not have standards or preferences. One should go for the qualities they find attractive in others, ones that are compatible with their quirks and qualities. This is also not to say that it is wrong to go for a specific type of person. This is to say that we too soon pigeonhole people into types and decide our feelings based off of whether or not they fit with what we usually go for. We cancel out what we don’t find familiar because we can be scared of the new and the unexpected.
Maybe there is some truth to when Rae Sremmurd rapped, “I ain’t got no type,” in spite of the fact that the clause that followed negated it. They do, in fact, have a type. It’s bad girls.
Antithesis in rap songs aside, I believe that it is good to take a step back from chasing our types and exploring the different options present. Breaking from the familiar can be scary and unexpected, but it can also be rewarding and surprising. We should save having a type for our computers.
Meredith loves telling stories and pretending to be Carrie Bradshaw, minus the man and comfy NYC apartment. She, however, eats enough brunch to cover all six seasons. When she's not drowning in 16th-century literature, she can be found lamenting over the bad grammar and bad boys in her middle school diary.
Find her on twitter @merewilsh or email her mwilsher@bu.edu with all your love musings or questions.
