You Think You're Choosing Your Relationships. Something Else Has Been Co-Writing Them.
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
People experience partner selection as a series of deliberate choices — meeting someone, deciding they're interesting, choosing to pursue it. From the inside, each step feels like conscious decision-making. And yet, across a whole history of these supposedly independent choices, a persistent, specific type keeps recurring — which is very hard to explain if each choice really was made fresh, by conscious deliberation alone.
The more coherent explanation is that conscious choice is real but partial: it operates on top of a filtering layer that has already narrowed the field before deliberation even begins, based on cues and familiarity signals operating below awareness. You're choosing. Something else already decided which options would feel choosable.
This is uncomfortable because it complicates the story of romantic agency, but it's also, properly understood, liberating: if a hidden filter is doing part of the selecting, the filter itself can eventually be identified and adjusted, rather than treated as an immovable fact about who a person simply "is drawn to."
Choice was never fully in question. What was in question, and remains mostly unexamined for most people, is who — or what — was co-writing the shortlist before choice ever got involved.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai