Then there’s Wade. His family is loving, but they have also experienced very little stress on their family system. Water people were the first to arrive in Element City, and their primacy is never questioned. He falls in love with Ember with a gentle naïveté. He keeps insisting that it could work, that fire and water could mix, that everything is going to be okay. There is a moment when he says to Ember—in front of a full crowd of Fire people, nonetheless: “I love you, Ember Lumen. And I’m pretty sure you love me, too.” Only someone with secure attachment—like really secure attachment—could say such a thing.

When we are attracted to unhealed people, it’s often because of unhealed wounds within ourselves. Learn more about working with intuition to unravel conditioning in relationships.

What, exactly, is attraction? We often think of it in terms of a romantic draw towards someone with particular looks, or a type, but as many of us have experienced, our romantic interest in someone has so much more to do with things like the way they talk, what they are interested in, their mannerisms, and other mysterious factors. What if one of those mysterious factors is our own deeply held attachment wounds? What if attraction actually is our wounds trying to heal?