Michelle, I have a couple of questions myself. No rush, I have had these questions for quite some time now, they can sure wait.

1. If like attracts like (even though it is so easy to look for commonalities and find them just for the sake of proofing this statement), why would a healthy person be attracted to an anxious one and/or vice versa? I can identify perfectly good trustworthy men (although how can I know for sure?), but a) they are not attracted to me, don’t see me more than a friend b) they lack that “something” or, rather, if I can see all of these “good men” equally good for me (if they were attracted), they just aren’t the ones for me because when one is in love, the “one” is head and shoulders above all the others, is he not?

2. Do you believe that if I had been differently wired, I wouldn’t grow up like that? You see, under the circumstances, I do think that my parents gave me as much as they possibly could (let’s omit that my mother encouraged me to learn to read at 4, so that I wouldn’t bug her with requests to read fairy-tales to me, which made her fall asleep) and certainly more than a lot of other parents.

When I talked about how I perceived a few instances in my childhood, my mother would ask, “But don’t you remember how we defended you there in front of your classmate’s parent? And how supported there and your father went to talk to your friend’s father? And how encouraged you to go ahead over there and try this and that?”

I also spent a fairly long amount of time during each given year with my grandmother and she is the best grandmother one can possibly think of. When I think of an example of enduring never-ending patience and protection, I think of her.

Or is it that no matter how well the parents may have done objectively, what really matters is how the child subjectively feels or perceives his or her childhood to have been?

I have a very good friend who has a twin brother. They are in their late 60s (yes, I have cultivated some surprising friendships among others), they (obviously) were brought up under exactly the same conditions (being twins born at the same time). Yet, his brother has been happily married with kids whereas my friend was so devastated by a breakup some thirty years ago that never married and lives alone.

This and also stories from parents who point out how different their kids are even though they have been brought up under the same conditions makes me think that it is so one-sided… Maybe genes, maybe other people, maybe something else definitely are a factor, not only the influence of the primary care givers?