When I close my eyes, I can still see Mr. Greenstein—my silver-haired, perpetually tanned seventh-grade science teacher who once clanked together horseshoe magnets before my eyes to prove “opposites attract.” Mind you, I had a colossal crush on this man, since after all I was a very mature eleven, and he, well, my grandfather’s age. Oh, but he was so classically handsome and extremely “wise in the ways of science.” Thus, I worshipped his wealth of knowledge as though divine and simply irrefutable.
Today, it amuses me to consider how my hopeless crushes on science teachers had blinded me to ever question the reality of what they taught me. This until I married one who cajoled me to … be still and ponder this: What if everything you ever learned was actually wrong, or at best—only relatively true?
Because when you glance at life on the surface, it sure appears that opposites attract. In fact, if you compare my husband’s personality with mine, they cannot get more opposite. Nick was raised an unreservedly loving child in the freewheeling ’60s, whereas I was bred a timid kid-in-a-clamshell of the fear-infused ’80s. Nick turned out to be an All-American soccer stud and college football star who played outdoors all day and almost never studied, and I was a locally acclaimed band nerd who went straight to her bedroom and only ceased studying to sleep, apply Clearasil and watch The Golden Girls. When we met as adults, Nick’s mind was already still and he had been teaching meditation, whereas my critical-editorial mind more closely resembled a Mexican jumping bean with ADD. As for our overall stats, Nick enjoyed movies and I preferred books. I previously sought brains in lovers, while he had gravitated toward the more physical attributes.
With such diverse personalities, how could we not have spent our frisky first dates bursting with orgasmic laughter as we considered our radically polarized predispositions and charmingly opposite perspectives toward life? We were just like Mr. Greenstein’s magnets, so we clicked! Apparently, because we were so opposite in almost every way, we hit it off instantly and became inseparable. Even complete strangers commented on how well we fit together. I roused him, he calmed me. And somewhere between his always running early and my usually running late, we settled in the middle way ... right on time.
So, we entered the next stage of relationship.
You know what I mean, the one where you realize that your differences, which once seemed “oh so cute,” are now grating on your nerves, costing your precious REM sleep and challenging your sanity. Yet, for us, this was a critical period in which our polar “opposite” qualities nudged us to look deeper and ask: What is it about this person that is irritating me so much? This we wrestled with until we finally surrendered to the fact that it is not about the other person at all—but me. Because what I’m seeing in someone else is actually an area about myself I have not accepted yet.
I realize this may seem like a lot of metaphysical poppycock, but oftentimes before most people embrace their partner as their mirror, they’ve opted for a speedy divorce and in so doing lure a whole new train wreck to them, one through which they will have yet another opportunity find this same mirror staring back at them with a different frame. I have found that couples in relationship are perfectly poised for accelerating self-realization, knowing that opposites are only an appearance and that we are really all the same.
In other words, it’s not opposite charges that attract people together but the universal Law of Attraction, because “like energies attract.” Despite detailed scientific explanations on positive and negative energies attracting, magnets really stick together because they are, well … both magnets.
