For What It's Worth

(Photo by Guy Basabose on Unsplash)

Meaningful Attachments

(12 minute read)

Key Takeaways:

• Our past experiences and expectations shape how we interpret relationships.
• Strong emotions can distort what we notice and make us overlook warning signs.
• Better relationships begin when we question our assumptions and communicate with curiosity.

Sometimes, missing someone from the past has less to do with missing the person and more to do with missing who you were when you were with them.

The Matrix of Relationships

Has this ever happened to you?

Someone you’ve known for a very long time says or does something so out of character that you wonder, Do I really know this person? Maybe you then ask, Is this the person I thought they were? Did they change, or did I miss something that was there all along?

The matrix of a relationship is the personal filter through which we experience another person. Our memories, expectations, fears, and brain chemistry all influence what we notice and how we interpret it. This doesn’t mean that relationships exist only in our minds, or that other people’s behavior is irrelevant. It means our experience of a relationship is shaped both by what happens between two people and by the meaning each person gives those events.

We are constantly trying to make sense of the world around us—the physical world, in which complex relationships exist, and our relationship to institutions such as politics, economics, religion, and education. Finding meaning in them is our attempt to simplify and define the complex.

Yet for many, the most complex and puzzling part of being human is trying to understand other human beings. At times it can be exhilarating and affirming as in romantic relationships; other times it can be grueling and a nightmare as when politics divide family members.

The reality of our relationships is less about the people in front of us and more about the hidden but profound mind games we have with ourselves, where our perceptions heavily shape and influence those very connections.

We often treat human relationships as objective facts of the physical world, but philosophy and psychology show that our brains actively interpret social reality, combining other people’s behavior with our memories, expectations, and emotions.

From Immanuel Kant’s philosophical concept of the phenomenal world—the idea that we can never truly perceive things exactly as they are, only as our minds interpret them—to the psychological reality of transference and confirmation bias, we are constantly filtering interactions with others through our own private history and mental bank.

In this essay, we’ll explore how we don’t experience people as they are, but rather as we think they are, and how recognizing our mind’s role as the ultimate architect of our relationships can reshape our worldview.

From an evolutionary standpoint, natural selection wired our brains so that, through the senses, we could collect data in the form of patterns and experiences, creating narratives about them.

Our human brains are meaning-making machines.

How Evolution Shaped Human Perception

Evolution gave humans powerful systems for detecting patterns, threats, intentions, and social cues. Human pattern recognition evolved as a vital survival mechanism to identify predators, locate food, and spot poisonous plants.

These abilities helped our ancestors navigate a dangerous and highly social world, but they are not perfect truth-detection mechanisms. The same systems that help us recognize meaningful patterns can also lead us to misread others, see patterns that are not there, or mistake expectations for reality.

From an evolutionary perspective, our ancestors were shaped by overlapping pressures over long periods of time. Surviving long enough to have children and successfully raising those children both mattered. Developing strong social bonds was instrumental in ensuring a better chance at survival; cooperation, care for one another, forming stable social bonds, learning from experience, and passing knowledge and culture down the generations.

Evolution helped shape these broad capacities and inclinations, but how any one person thinks and behaves is also shaped by development, learning, culture, and individual experience. Remove any of these forces for long enough, and our branch of the human story might never have made it this far.

Across human evolution, survival tended to favor individuals whose brains could find meaning in both simple and complex situations of everyday life. Over many generations, evolutionary pressures supported heightened awareness, quick pattern detection, and rapid judgments—abilities that could literally make the difference between life and death, but that can also make us see patterns or threats that aren’t there. Many of those tendencies are still part of how our minds work today.

One reason humans have remained evolutionarily successful is our ability to notice complex patterns, figure out which responses work, and then pass those responses along. Today we benefit from that history, drawing on many of these habits without much conscious thought. Everyday examples—the handshake, cravings for sugar or fat, our tendency to focus on negativity, tribal loyalties, fear of the dark, and rich traditions of myth and story-telling—likely arise from different mixes of biology, learning, culture, and social experience, but all reflect this deep capacity for pattern recognition and meaning-making.

Because we cannot read minds, we are left to decipher intentions through others’ words, actions, and behaviors i.e, interpreting patterns. The more experience we gain recognizing habitual patterns, the better we become at predicting successful relationships and connections.

According to cognitive neuroscientists, the human mind is a function of different parts of the brain working together in mental processes. One of those processes is explained with the theory of the mind model, which helps support what Daniel Dennett coined intentional stance; the capacity to attribute purpose and the agency of another individual—in other words, to interpret their words and actions and infer what their objectives might be.

An early step in that evolutionary process was the interpretation of eye movement. Evolutionary and neuroscience researchers propose that, before we fully developed cognitive minds as a species, we relied heavily on brain systems that learned to interpret eye movement, and in particular eye direction.

At a distance this doesn’t necessarily work. But at close range, we can often tell whether someone’s eyes are focused on us or on something else and—together with facial cues—use this information to infer where their attention might be and what their next set of actions might also be. These signals can be powerful clues when assessing threats or aggression, but they are never certain and can be misread or interpreted differently depending on the situation and the culture.

The eyes are sometimes referred to as the window to the soul, but eye contact is better understood as one kind of social cue whose meaning depends heavily on context. For example, unlike encounters with potential foes, parents and infants are more likely to intentionally engage in eye contact, trading gazes in ways that can support early bonding.

This kind of shared attention can give rise to triadic representations: you, me, and a third focus of attention, whether a physical object or a thought. If I notice you looking at something, I might infer that it is important or relevant to me as well, yet we also learn that gaze can be used strategically—to mislead, distract, or conceal by drawing attention away from something else.

These abilities help us notice meaningful patterns and respond quickly, but they are not always reliable truth-detection systems. The same tendencies that help us recognize danger, read social cues, and find meaning can also produce false alarms or lead us to interpret ambiguous behavior according to our expectations. He spoke to me, so he really must be into me, is one possible misreading.

Understanding these tensions is essential when we apply evolutionary ideas to modern relationships.

All of these evolutionary capacities became second nature and, through trial and error, developed over time: using biologically inherited traits while adopting and adding to environmental and cultural behaviors.

Models and Frameworks

Over time, many interpretive models and frameworks have been developed to help us make sense of relationships. Yet, as Carl Jung observed, while such frameworks …open up a promising and useful field of inquiry …(however, they) do not assert that something is so; (they) simply illustrate a particular mode of observation.

In other words, any models give us a shared language and a way to interpret our experiences, but they do not deliver final answers. We should be willing to revise or abandon them when they prove outdated or when another approach better explains what we observe. Models can help us see patterns, yet they can also harden our assumptions and strengthen confirmation bias if we treat them as unquestionable truths.

These models are not direct measurements of a relationship, nor guarantees that we understand another person correctly. They are tools for organizing and interpreting experience—helpful when they guide us to notice and test patterns, but risky when we confuse the model with reality or use it to label people too quickly.

Not one to die on a philosophical hill, Jung rejected rigid dogmas, fixed categories, and black‑and‑white certainties. Instead, he viewed human life as a complex, evolving set of processes that can be approached from many angles, but never fully captured by a single framework. We would be wise to do likewise.

When we say we want to get to know someone, we bring a mix of intentions, expectations, and prior experiences. From a neurological standpoint, personal relationships—whether romantic, familial, or rooted in close friendship—involve both what people do and say and how those events are filtered, processed, and maintained in the brain through complex neural networks and chemical ebbs and flows.

This means relationships are shaped not only by the person in front of us, but also by the meanings our minds give to what happens between us. At times, it can feel like mind over matter, where our interpretations strongly color our experience of a bond. That helps explain the questions we started out with—How much do I really know this person? Is the relationship truly as I see it, or is my reality clouded by mistaken judgments?

Our experience with other people always involves both their behavior and our interpretation of it. We never relate from a completely neutral standpoint; we relate through the lens of our mind’s representations, expectations, and stories. Noticing how much meaning‑making our minds are doing does not reduce relationships to just mental constructions, but it does invite a more humble, curious, and flexible way of understanding the connections that matter most to us.

The Philosophy of Human Connection

We often think of a relationship as an entity; two objects (you and me) magically creating a third (us). From a materialist, neurobiological point there is no separate organism that is us. Us exists as patterned interaction, shared history, ongoing communication, expectations, commitments, and mutual influence emerging from two brains and bodies continually shaping one another.

When psychologists refer to a relationship as a third entity, they are describing the shared experience and connections between people and the mental patterns and systems that govern how that relationship works.

Every emotion, narrative, and cognitive focus associated with us, we, or the relationship is experienced through brain activity—engaging synapses, neurotransmitters, and neural networks—while being shaped by our interactions, communication, and shared history.

As two people form a bond, each brings personal thoughts, feelings, expectations, and needs. Compatibility may help create shared intentions, but it does not guarantee that both will want the same things or commit at the same pace. One person may feel more invested, more certain, or more committed than the other.

Every connection we have is partly shaped inside our own minds. Our brains don’t just record what happens; they draw on past memories, assumptions, and brain chemistry to interpret the words and behavior of others.

Our minds help us interpret relationships, but they do not create them in isolation. A relationship develops through ongoing interaction between two people—their behavior, communication, shared experiences, and the meanings they make from them.

From the dopamine rush of early romance that can make us ignore warning signs, to the mental images that lead us to see ourselves reflected, our relationships are less a clear view of another person and more a reflection of our inner world. Realizing this can shift us from feeling like passive bystanders to active creators in how we experience them.

Seeing relationships this way doesn’t make them unreal—it makes them more human. Every connection is filtered through memory, expectation, emotion, and biology, so none of us encounters another person with perfect objectivity. Recognizing that filter gives us a choice: we can question our assumptions, communicate more honestly, and meet the people we love with greater curiosity. Real connection begins not when we see others exactly as they are, but when we become willing to look beyond our own projections.

Sources:

• Dennett, Daniel C., Breaking The Spell, Viking, 2006.
• See Bakewell, Sarah, “To The Things Themselves,” At The Existentialist Cafe, Other Press, 2016, where she discusses phenomenology, an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience; specifically intentionality and reality, pgs. 44-48.
• See Ellis, Thomas B., Natural Gazes, “Non-natural Agents: The Biology of Religion’s Ocular Behaviors,” The Biology of Religious Behavior, Firman, Jay R., editor, Praugar, 2009, where the above section on interpreting eye contact drew heavily from.