With the Descendant in an earth sign you are pulled toward the steady, the competent, the ones with a plan and a bank balance. Reliability reads as love to you. The unclaimed piece is your own capacity to build, provide, and hold ground — so you keep recruiting someone to be the foundation instead of pouring one. Watch for the version where security quietly becomes the only reason you are still there, and the relationship starts running on logistics instead of feeling.
In cardinal mode, you attract initiators. Your partners tend to be the ones who start things — the relationship, the argument, the move across the country. You experience this as being chosen, which is flattering until you notice how rarely you are the one who decides. The lesson is authorship: the first person to name what this is gets to shape it, and it does not have to be them.
You attract builders and authorities — older energy, whether or not the person is older. Competent, self-contained, hard to impress, and slow to give warmth freely. You experience earning their approval as intimacy. What you gave away is your own authority, which is why you keep partnering with people who have it and then chafe at being managed. The relationship equalizes the day you stop auditioning.