Core deficits during infancy make us choose all the wrong romantic partners. The reason is, our primal needs were never adequately responded to during infancy and early childhood.
PRIMAL NEEDS OF INFANCY ALWAYS TAKE PRECIDENCE OVER OUR ADULT NEEDS, until we can heal our core with the help of a highly skilled professional. Unfortunately, these types of practitioners are extremely scarce.
PRIMAL infancy supplies involve touch, holding, caressing, verbally soothing, and receiving looks of adoration from our mother's eyes into ours. Many of us sadly missed out on these vital supplies as newborns for various reasons~ not the least of which are that our maternal object was not capable of loving us, due to her lack of emotional development, and resultant personality disorder traits.
This unresolved CORE issue is what keeps men and women in relationships that are SEXUALLY intense and satisfying, yet willing to overlook other vital needs like emotional connection, spiritual congruency and even intellectual compatibility.
Many are willing to remain with a lover who pleases or excites em in BED, while foregoing other important aspects of nourishment and connection with a lover~ to the extent of tolerating abuses from them! Again, PRIMAL needs of infancy always take precedence over adult needs (until we heal our core)~ even if we merely require financial responsibility in a partner!
Core shame is experienced by a newborn who bonded solidly with its mother in utero, and cannot get his/her adoration for Mother reciprocated in full, after the baby leaves the safety and security of her womb. The inevitable sense the newborn experiences (even tho he/she has no language skills at this juncture in its development) is, "I must not be good enough or lovable."
EVERY adult relationship this grown infant ever has, will reverberate and echo this CORE belief, learned within the first few weeks of life outside the mother's body. If a relationship is conflictual, if this emotionally starved grown infant cannot get enough time, affection and attention from his/her (adult) love object, he/she experiences a familiar and excruciating "sameness" in sensations that REPLICATE the feelings about Self that were implanted in him/her very soon after birth.
The problem with this early trauma is, a warm, responsive, loving and admiring partner cannot replicate the dramatic and painful sensations the adult infant experienced from his/her earliest life experiences, onward. The suitably loving suitor will be rejected, because he or she does not invoke the PAIN OF LONGING in his/her partner, they experienced as an infant with Mother.
Thus, any feelings of attachment to a loving and nurturing suitor are never interpreted as "real love," because no dramatic and painful sensations accompany the relationship experience. Thus, THIS lover is rejected, because he is experienced as "boring," or just not a good fit.
For the Borderline AND Narcissist, "true love" EQUATES with pain of longing/yearning, and pain of longing EQUATES with true love. We can readily see therefore, how very RARE it is for millions of people globally, to find and maintain a rich, gratifying, mutually trusting and nourishing relationship bond, can't we??