Why do I keep falling for the same type?

Your friend has a new boyfriend. You meet him. He’s a musician, a bit moody, very charming, hard to pin down about plans. You smile and say “he’s lovely.” Inside, you’re thinking: this is the fourth one. Different name, different haircut, same man.

Maybe it’s you. You’ve had the exact same argument with three different partners. Word for word, almost. “You never tell me what you’re feeling.” “I just need some space.” Different people, same script, like the relationship is being performed by a new cast every time.

Or it’s work. Your new manager seemed great in the interview. Six months in, she’s dismissive, never gives feedback, and makes you feel like you’re constantly failing a test nobody explained. Just like the last one. And the one before that.

You go on a date with someone who’s genuinely kind. Replies on time. Asks about your day. Makes plans and actually keeps them. And you feel… nothing. “There’s just no spark.” Meanwhile, the person who leaves you on read for two days? Fireworks.

And every single time, you say the same thing: “This time it’s different.”

So why do we do this? Why do we keep choosing the same kind of person, walking into the same kind of situation, even when we can see exactly how it’s going to end?

The romantic answer, the one on a thousand greeting cards, is that we’re looking for our “other half.” The one person who completes us.

The Freudian answer is much less romantic. Maybe we’re not looking for someone new at all. Maybe we’re trying, again and again, to fix something old.

Let’s start with where “my other half” comes from. It’s from a book by Plato called the Symposium. And first, a small shock: the word “symposium” today sounds very serious and academic. Conferences, lectures, name badges. In ancient Greek it meant a drinking party. Literally “drinking together.” So every time a university hosts a symposium, it’s technically throwing a party.

In Plato’s Symposium, a group of friends gather at a dinner party in Athens to celebrate a playwright’s big win. They’re all a bit hungover from the night before, so they agree to take it easy on the wine, and instead each give a speech praising love. Very Athenian.

One of the guests is Aristophanes, the most famous comedian in Athens. And he’s not just any comedian. Years earlier, he’d written a hit comedy that mocked Socrates, showing him as a ridiculous fraud dangling in a basket in the air. Plato later suggested that jokes like this helped turn Athens against Socrates, which ended with his trial and death. So this is the man who made fun of Plato’s beloved teacher.

When it’s Aristophanes’ turn to speak, he can’t. He has hiccups. So bad that someone else has to go first while a doctor at the party gives him tips on how to stop them. Plato is clearly having a little fun at his expense.

When Aristophanes finally speaks, he tells the most beautiful story at the party: the myth of humans split in half, searching for their other half. That’s where “my other half” comes from. It’s gorgeous. It’s lasted 2,400 years.

But it’s Aristophanes’ speech, not Plato’s view. Later in the evening, Socrates speaks, and he quietly corrects it. Love, he says, isn’t about finding your missing half. People are happy to cut off their own arm or leg if it’s causing them harm. What we really want isn’t just the thing that’s ours. It’s the thing that’s good.

So the most famous romantic idea in history comes from a joke-teller with hiccups, and the author of the book didn’t agree with it.

Now, “platonic love.” Today it means “just friends.” No romance, no attraction. But Plato never used the phrase. It was invented in the 1400s by an Italian scholar in Florence, Marsilio Ficino, about 1,800 years after Plato died. And in the Symposium, love is anything but “just friends.” Socrates describes a kind of ladder of love, and the first step on it is physical attraction to one beautiful person. From there, you slowly climb towards loving beauty itself. So Plato’s love starts in the body and ends somewhere much bigger.

“Platonic,” as in “we’re just friends”? Plato would be very confused.

So, finally free of his hiccups, Aristophanes tells the party what humans were like at the very beginning.

We were round. Picture a ball with four arms, four legs, and one head with two faces looking in opposite directions. When we wanted to move fast, we did cartwheels, rolling along on all eight limbs. Honestly, a very efficient design.

And there weren’t two sexes but three. Some round humans were male-male, some were female-female, and some were male-female.

These round humans were strong. Very strong. And very full of themselves. So full of themselves that they decided to climb up to heaven and attack the gods.

Zeus was furious, but he had a problem. If he destroyed the humans, there’d be nobody left to make sacrifices to the gods. So he came up with a plan: he’d make them weaker without wiping them out. He cut every human in half, like slicing a boiled egg with a hair. Then he had Apollo turn each face around to look at the cut side, so they’d always be reminded of what they’d done, and pull the skin together over the stomach, tying it up in a knot. That knot? Your belly button. Every time you look at it, Aristophanes says, you’re looking at the scar of that punishment.

And Zeus added a warning: if you misbehave again, I’ll cut you in half again, and you’ll have to hop around on one leg.

But each half missed the other so much that when they found each other, they just held on. They didn’t eat, they didn’t work, they didn’t do anything but cling together, until they died. Zeus had to rearrange their bodies a second time so that when halves came together, they could actually be satisfied and then get on with their lives.

And that, says Aristophanes, is what love is: the desire to be whole again. Every one of us is half of something, looking for the other half. He even uses a special Greek word for it, symbolon: a token that two people would break in half, each keeping one piece, so that one day they could match them up and prove who they were. That word is where we get our word “symbol.”

And the three original types explain why some people are drawn to men, some to women, some to both. Which, for a story told 2,400 years ago, is remarkably relaxed about the whole thing.

But the most haunting part of his speech is this. He says that when two halves find each other, they spend their lives together, and yet they can’t explain what they actually want from each other. It’s not just sex. Something in the soul wants something it can’t put into words. So he imagines the god of blacksmiths, Hephaestus, turning up and asking the lovers: would you like me to weld you together, so you’re never apart again, in life or in death? And every couple, Aristophanes says, would immediately say yes. That’s what they’d wanted all along. They just couldn’t say it.

A longing so deep you can’t put it into words. A desire to go back to how things were before, to something you once had and lost.

Hold on to that. Because a certain Viennese doctor is about to say something very similar, but much darker.

Freud noticed something frustrating about his patients. He expected them to remember their painful past, talk about it, and feel better. Instead, a lot of them didn’t remember it at all. They repeated it. They acted it out, again and again, in their relationships, at work, and even with Freud himself, without realising what they were doing. As he put it, what you can’t remember, you repeat.

He saw people whose lives seemed to follow the same script over and over. Someone whose every friendship ended in betrayal. Someone who helped people, only to be abandoned by each one in turn. Someone whose love affairs all went through exactly the same stages and ended the same way. It looked like bad luck, or fate. Freud thought it was something coming from inside them.

He had an image for this. He said each of us has a kind of printing plate for love, made in childhood, based on how we were loved (or not loved) by the people who raised us. And we keep reprinting it. New person, new city, new decade, same print. That’s your “type.”

So why can’t we just stop?

Freud got a clue from a very small person: his eighteen-month-old grandson. The little boy had a game. He’d take a wooden reel on a string, throw it over the side of his cot so it disappeared, and say “o-o-o-o,” which Freud and the boy’s mother took to mean fort, German for “gone.” Then he’d pull it back, and happily say da: “there!” Gone, there. Gone, there. Over and over.

Freud realised the game appeared at a time when the boy’s mother was often going out. Her leaving was something that happened to him, and he couldn’t control it. But in the game, he made things disappear, and he brought them back. He was replaying the painful thing, but this time, he was in charge of how it ended.

That’s the hope hidden inside the repetition. When we choose the same type of person again, part of us isn’t just being stupid. Part of us is trying to rewrite the ending. If I can make this distant, moody person finally love me properly, then maybe the old wound will heal. “This time it’s different” isn’t just denial. It’s a wish: that this time, the reel comes back.

The problem is, it usually doesn’t. Because you’ve chosen someone who’s very good at leaving.

And that explains the “spark,” too. When you meet someone who fits your old printing plate, you feel an instant, powerful connection. It feels like destiny. But it might just be recognition. Your unconscious looking at them and thinking: oh, I know this one. Meanwhile, the kind person who replies on time? No plate for that. No spark. Just unfamiliar.

Freud wrote a line about love that could have come from Aristophanes’ speech. He said that finding a person to love is really a re-finding. We’re not looking for someone new. We’re looking for someone we lost a long time ago.

So what’s the way out? For Freud, it’s to turn repeating back into remembering. To notice the pattern, trace it back to where it started, and slowly work through the feelings that are driving it. Not in one dramatic moment of insight, but bit by bit. He called this working through. It’s slow. It’s frustrating. And it’s the only way he knew to get a new print.

Tonight: the most famous comedian in ancient Athens versus the least romantic man in Vienna.

So who wins?

No winner, but put them together and you get something surprisingly useful.

Aristophanes explains why love feels like destiny. Freud explains why that feeling can lead you straight back into the same painful pattern. And Socrates offers a way out: the question isn’t “does this feel familiar?” It’s “is this actually good for me?”

So next time you feel fireworks for the person who leaves you on read for two days, you’ve got three voices at the party. Aristophanes says: maybe it’s your other half! Freud says: or maybe it’s your childhood, in a new jacket. And Socrates asks the question neither of them wants to answer: but is it good?

“Symposium”: In ancient Greek, a symposion was a drinking party. Plato’s Symposium (c. 385–370 BC) is set at such a party in Athens in 416 BC, where guests give speeches in praise of Eros, love.

“My other half”: This idea comes from the speech Plato gives to Aristophanes, a comic playwright who had mocked Socrates in The Clouds (423 BC). It is not Plato’s own position. Later in the dialogue, Socrates, speaking through the priestess Diotima, argues that love seeks not what is one’s own but what is good.

“Platonic love”: The phrase does not appear in Plato. It was coined as amor platonicus by the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino in 15th-century Florence. In the Symposium, love begins with physical attraction to a beautiful person and ascends, step by step, towards love of beauty itself; it is not a synonym for non-romantic friendship.

Aristophanes’ myth: Humans were once round, with four arms, four legs and two faces, and came in three kinds (male-male, female-female and male-female). After they attacked the gods, Zeus split them in half; the navel marks the wound. Each half longs for its other half, and love is “the desire and pursuit of the whole.” He calls each person a symbolon, half of a broken token, the origin of the word “symbol.” The myth also offers an early explanation of both same-sex and opposite-sex attraction.

Freud’s repetition compulsion: In “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914), Freud observed that patients often repeat repressed experiences in action instead of remembering them. In “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912), he described each person as having a “stereotype plate” for love, formed in childhood and repeatedly reprinted in later relationships. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he described people whose lives follow the same painful patterns, and interpreted his grandson’s fort-da game as an attempt to master a painful experience by actively repeating it. He wrote that “the finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905).

Working through: Freud’s term for the slow process by which repeated patterns are recognised, linked to their origins and gradually loosened, as opposed to a single moment of insight.

Where they meet: Aristophanes and Freud both describe love as a longing to recover something lost, experienced as powerful and hard to put into words.

Where they differ: For Aristophanes, what we seek is our original wholeness, and finding it is the greatest happiness. For Freud, what we seek is the pattern of our earliest relationships, which may repeat old pain as easily as old comfort. Plato’s Socrates adds a third view: love should aim at the good, not merely at what feels like our own.

Where to go next:

• Plato’s Symposium. Short, funny and one of the most readable works of ancient philosophy. Jowett’s translation is public domain.
• Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914). A short essay.
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), chapters 2 and 3, for the fort-da game.
• Plato: A Very Short Introduction by Julia Annas.

• “Love feels like…”
• “When someone really loves me, they…”
• “In the end, people who love me usually…”