Benjamin Otu EffiwattOver and over again you find yourself trapped in the same painful patterns. Breakup after breakup, fighting about the same issues, growing distant over and over, crying your heart out night after heartbreaking night. You start to wonder if love is ever going to work out for you.
Here’s the secret: it’s not usually about luck.
Whenever the same types of issues keep coming up in your relationships there’s usually some kind of recurring theme; something happening beneath the surface that you’ve yet to understand. What these patterns are and how to stop them from sabotaging your next relationship is what we’re diving into today.
Before we get into the seven brutally honest reasons why your relationships keep failing, I want to explain why you keep falling into patterns in the first place.
Your brain is hardwired to seek out what it knows.
If you were raised in a household that didn’t show love in healthy ways, your nervous system grew accustomed to conditional affection, unpredictable highs and lows, emotional unavailability, or whatever happened to be your situation.
Why you attract failed relationships:
1.You’re Choosing Partners Based on Chemistry Alone
“But Jen, what if you meet someone you click with? Magic chemistry isn’t always a bad thing.”
Strong chemistry can be tricky, especially if you tend to attract narcissists. If you carry unresolved trauma from your past, instant connections can be your brain subconsciously recognizing old patterns of dysfunction.
In the beginning phases of dating someone, it can be hard to see past the euphoria of a new crush. That’s why it’s important to look at other areas of compatibility too.
Real compatibility is about having shared values, matching emotional maturity levels, and holding similar beliefs about what a healthy relationship should look like.
2.You’re Bringing Unhealed Baggage Into Every Relationship
We all carry baggage from our past. Some people have more trust issues. Some people have abandonment issues. Others struggle with commitment.
Untreated wounds from your past will always impact your future relationships.
If you haven’t healed your past trauma or heartbreak, you will project your pain onto your partner. And then you’ll find yourself doing things like:
- Expecting your new partner to cheat because your ex did.
- Scaring partners away before they can leave you.
- Pulling away and disconnecting from your partner as soon as things get serious.
You don’t have to erase your past to enter a relationship trauma-free. You simply have to find peace with it so it no longer controls your actions.
3.You Don’t Know How to Communicate When Things Get Hard
The truth is most people don’t know how to communicate their needs effectively. We all know what to do when things are going well.
It’s when we’re feeling hurt, misunderstood, or scared that our habitual reactions take over. Do you:
- Shut down?
- Yell?
- Make jokes to lighten the mood?
- Tell your partner every little thing they’ve ever done wrong all at once?
These types of bad communication habits don’t just disappear. They’ll eat away at your relationship until you either fix them or you separate.
Learning how to have a difficult conversation is essential if you want your relationships to work.
4.You Keep Choosing Emotionally Unavailable Men
If you always seem to find yourself dating guys who can’t fully show up for you — men who run hot and cold, men who shut down when things get serious — it might be time to look within and ask yourself why you keep dating emotionally unavailable people.
Emotionally unavailable men can feel exciting to some people. They can feel like a mystery you have to solve. But the truth is, you will never be enough for someone who refuses to do the internal work.
You can’t love someone into emotional availability.
And if your sense of self-worth is tied to being wanted by someone who continually withholds affection from you, you’ll never feel fully loved.
5.You’re Afraid of Real Intimacy
Okay, this one surprised me too when I first realized it. But a scary amount of people have an unconscious fear of intimacy.
Intimacy involves being seen for who you really are.
That means showing up vulnerably and allowing your partner to do the same. For some people, that level of exposure is scarier than remaining single.
Fear of intimacy looks like:
- Self-sabotage
- Creating arguments for no reason
- Shutting down when your partner tries to get close
- Staying so busy you never allow yourself to feel too comfortable
If you feel the walls closing in as soon as someone tries to see past your defenses, you may have a fear of intimacy.
6.You’re Looking for Someone to Complete You
Walking into a relationship with emptiness only invites failure.
How can you give your partner what they need when you haven’t even figured out what you need? Needing someone to complete you or make you happy sets the relationship up for disaster.
No one can love you enough to fill the void of low self-worth.
There will always be pieces of you that you need to go find yourself. A healthy relationship is made of two whole people who are choosing each other, not two broken people trying to find themselves in one another.
Focus on your relationship with YOU first. It’s not selfish, trust me.
7.You Never Clearly Defined What You Actually Wanted
This is going to sound ridiculous, but when you don’t know what you want, you attract what you don’t want.
Seriously.
If you walk into every relationship without a general idea of what you’re looking for, you’ll end up jumping into partnerships you don’t actually want out of convenience.
Not sure what you want? Here are some questions to help you get clear:
- What type of partner do you want?
- What do you value most in a relationship?
- How do you prefer to connect with your partner?
- What type of emotional dynamic do you function best in?
- What are your non-negotiable dealbreakers?
Get clear on the answers to these questions and you’ll instantly begin attracting what you want.
Final Thoughts
There’s nothing wrong with you if your relationships keep failing. There are patterns you can learn to avoid.
Relationships end because people grow apart, and sometimes that’s just a natural part of life. But if you’re finding the same types of problems cropping up, you might have some healing to do.
The bright side is, these patterns can be changed.
Healing your past wounds allows you to meet the right person without playing defense or repeating the same old story. When you stop repeating patterns, you open yourself up to finding love that’s actually worth sticking around for.
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