Sometimes between men and women a fundamental aversion, even a feeling of hatred—not in regard to certain particulars, but the reciprocal repulsion of the total person—is the first stage of a relation whose second phase is passionate love. … One might entertain the paradoxical suspicion that when individuals are destined to the closest mutual emotional relationship, the emergence of the intimate phase is guided by an instinctive pragmatism so that the eventual feeling attains its most passionate intensification and awareness of what it has achieved by means of an opposite prelude—a step back before running, as it were.

QUESTION: Simmel's paradox of aversion preceding love is striking but under-evidenced here. Is this supported by psychology research on attachment or is it speculative?

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 316