Introduction
Have you ever come across someone who said their biggest strength was getting along with everyone, or that they were liked by everyone?
As a child, do you remember being told to be friends with everyone? That when you went to school you would make so many great friends? That everyone would love you?
It’s a fluffy, seductive image that a lot of us want to believe. But like many of our beliefs, it doesn’t align with reality very well.
Relationships are polarizing by nature — they have both strong positive and strong negative components. And as we’ll see, being universally liked or being friends with everyone are impossible feats.
Polarization
Just like how a magnet repels the same charge but attracts the opposite, relationships work in a similar way.
The polarizing nature of relationships means some people will like you, and some people will dislike you. This is unavoidable for several reasons:
In order to like something, you have to dislike something else. It is impossible to like everything.
Everyone has different values, preferences, and emotions. You cannot satisfy them all. To be one thing is to not be another.
To be anything in this world, you must restrict yourself in some way. You can’t be everything to everyone.
When you consider these constraints, you realize that being liked by someone often means being disliked by someone else. The cost of being liked by one person is to be disliked by another.
Relationships are always a gamble because you can’t control how people feel about you — and people can’t even control how they feel about things. It’s similar to dating: you can’t control how a woman feels about you. Emotions are reactionary.
The General Rule
The general rule in relationships is that people who are more similar experience more positive polarization. Similarities can be psychological or physical.
Most relationships start by identifying physical similarities because they’re easy to see. Over time, psychological similarities are discovered.
Physical Similarities
A very obvious example of physical similarity is racial background or gender. It’s no surprise that people of the same racial background get along better and are more likely to form friendships. White people tend to have more white friends, black people tend to have more black friends.
Interracial marriages are relatively uncommon, with over 80% of marriages being same-race. Of course, this also means that people of different racial backgrounds are less likely to be friends or marry each other.
Similarly, females tend to have more female friends, males tend to have more male friends. Male-female friendships are less common.
Psychological Similarities
Psychological similarities also drive relationships.
For example: maybe you’re an athlete. You were a track and field runner, a long-distance marathoner. You love the high you get from running. Naturally, you’ll attract other endurance athletes — people who do triathlons, Ironman races, and ultra-marathons.
But there are many people who hate running. Bodybuilders are repulsed by it because they believe it “ruins” muscle gains. Artists may not think about it at all. More sedentary people may even feel threatened by strenuous physical activity. As a marathon runner, your lifestyle simply wouldn’t appeal to them in any way.
Or take another example: If you are a devout Christian and the other person is a stripper, the psychological differences are too great. One has sex only after marriage, the other has sex at will. One believes sex outside of marriage is degrading, the other sees it as legitimate work. One has strong faith and moral codes, the other does not. One lives in faith-based, family-oriented environments; the other lives in transactional, entertainment-centered environments.
Conclusion
Truly authentic, sincere people will never be liked by everyone. They stand by their values and feelings, which naturally attracts some people and repels others.
The only way to be “liked” by everyone is if you constantly micromanage your personality and behavior, changing it to fit the preferences of each person you meet.
But that isn’t authentic living.
You will not be liked by everyone — and I encourage you to let that illusion go. Once you accept this, you can finally focus on building real connections instead of performing for approval.
Attract the right people to you instead of chasing everyone’s acceptance.
