You are most likely a lover of problems and puzzles. Relationships where you don't understand the other person, is the Ultimate Problem Puzzle, but in the emotional field zone, where you can experience and interact with the problem in so much more ways than just computer code.

The same dopamine high of breaking through in solving a problem in the messy legacy code base, refactoring down those 1000s of lines into 100s, increasing the webserver's performance etc.. those same circuits are firing when trying to 'fix' or 'solve' the indecipherable person you are dating.

however, sometimes after a beginner hacker starts, maybe 3,4,5 years, and after their philosophizing-abstractionist hacker phase, they become the 'wise hacker', where writing ---no code at all--- is the best code to try and solve, or bypass problems. Maybe this is what people feel when they meet a S.O. who share mutual intrinsic emotional understanding.

I don't personally subscribe to this philosophy but I could see some other pattern-based thinkers branching off it.

I can perfectly-well understand being content with the first kind of disconnect—that's the kind of puzzle that drives you to learn more about your partner.

The second kind seems a lot more fundamental, though: if someone had completely different preferences or feelings from me, to the point where I couldn't even understand those feelings/preferences, I'd just feel like they were an alien.

And I mean, maybe I'm imagining something too far out-there; I can perfectly well understand the feelings and preferences of e.g. autistics or sociopaths or narcissists. But, say—someone who enjoys things, but then this enjoyment doesn't translate to doing those things ever again? Can't connect. Just don't get it. Bizarre alien mind architecture.