You raise good points, because it is mostly animal stuff that does not come with thinking at all. But for contentment: You can be perfectly content with yourself but you cannot spoon yourself. I suppose the more content you are, the more compatible a partner you will seek, not some desperate? bid for contrast.
True, our expectations change as we change.
Just as people tend to listen to different kinds of music depending on the mood, I think it's fair to say that our judgement of other people is also directly linked to how we are feeling inside at the moment of judgement.
And just to clarify my saying that people connect by simply being who they are, I think it's important to make a distinction here between connecting with the people we can connect with, and people with whom we
could connect. For the former we merely need to re-think our thinking. For the latter, we may need to change who we are as a person.
We share the same thought processes in this regard. Years ago if asked who I want to be I would have probably made some sort of semi concrete description of that person. Now there's absolutely no figure or form in mind. I feel discomfort regularly regarding my inability to attract a mate (and friends pretty much), yet I often find myself wondering if it is of any real value to myself to desire such a thing in the first place.
And it is an excellent question to ask ourselves.
How come I feel happy when I see a person I admire smile because of something I said to them? What is truly the source of this feeling? Is it the person I was speaking to? No. The source is the mind, which thought of this feeling all by itself based on the sensory information when you looked at the other person.
So if everything that is required to generate the happy feeling is in mind, how come we can't do it on a whim? How come our brain, which seemingly should be our best friend, is saying "you may not feel happy until you adapt to the behaviour of this group of people"? Perhaps those are evolutionary filters, designed for your survival and procreation. Perhaps what your mind is now is just a mere potential of what it could be, and so we begin to wonder how much potential there really is?
What if we could rewire the very core of how we react to everyday sensory information? What if I could learn to think of the same happiness when I look at a flowing river just as when I look at a person I trust and admire? How much can we truly achieve just by thinking, and, should we try to achieve it all?