Similarly different… or differently similar

Opposites attract! How often have you heard this? More importantly, how often have you felt this? A desire to befriend a person who is unlike you, thinks what you can’t, does what you don’t, or eats what you don’t (or vice versa). Someone who is altogether different, yet a chord binds you somewhere… and pulls a string of similarity.

For me, all my life I’ve been friendly with people who are like me, unlike me, and even to those who dislike me. Making most of them feel I’m so like them. Except few! Or one to be precise! When not similarity, but the difference pulled me in.

Leaving that and me aside, I wonder – is it all about complementing? What works best in a relationship? A friend of mine, who echoes almost all my thoughts (and fights on those he does not) once said that it’s important to complement each other in a relationship. Someone who you can appreciate for the qualities you don’t have or have lost. Something as simple as child-like innocence! That was the most apt example he could come up with for me.

But is that so? All my life, people who are like me, have same taste of music, movies, books, traveling have been my good friends. People I can call up at 3 in the morning to ask the name of a character from my long forgotten favorite book. People who wake up to a nightmare and call just like that. People who gifts songs via email, not dresses for birthday! People who gets equal high on good alcohol and music!

These seemed so obvious, until a friend pointed out that complementing is important. This was accompanied by the fact that coincidentally, I was pulled in by difference around the same time. And I had to believe his theory.

But then again, as I talk to people freaked out at the thought of marrying typical ‘good girl’, who would cook, watch daily soaps, be more interested in gossip than good theater, I wonder…

Does complementing means only those qualities that you have lost/ want to have? Doesn’t everything come with the package? If you want your partner to be sensitive, won’t s/he also be more emotionally vulnerable? And if you want him/ her to be just another nice non-interfering person off-the-block, isn’t it normal for him/ her to be oblivious of the way you feel?

Guess it’s a package! Complementing each other or too similar is a choice we make for ourselves. Either way, it requires mutual tolerance. To tolerate that which you do, or that which you don’t.

What’s your take on this?