We all know someone who always has a bad time in love. Couple after couple, they are always entangled with toxic people who seem cut by the same pattern and who clearly do not suit them, their relationships are failing one after another without remedy, and it seems that they have terrible luck meeting people. But … does luck really influence when entering into a relationship that has the potential to last, or does it not work because we choose our partner poorly? In this article we will tell you about it.
The main reason we choose our partner poorly
Although there may be certain social pressure at times, in theory we are completely free when it comes to choosing a partner, since nothing and no one forces us to fall in love with a specific person, and we could have chosen anyone else instead. But, if our decision is as free as we think … Why do we choose our partner badly? The truth is that our freedom of choice when it comes to love is quite relative, and that there are a series of subconscious restrictions regarding who we are attracted to. These limitations come from the place where all our insecurities and maturity problems are born: childhood. Our psychological and emotional history strongly predisposes us to fall in love with a certain type of people because we seek to recreate the feelings of love that we knew at that time.
Thus, we will not necessarily be attracted to those who are good to us or to us, but to those whose affection is familiar to us and whose way of showing “love” is what we are used to. Therefore, we are unconsciously forced to turn away from candidates who would objectively be good for us, but who do not satisfy the complexities that each of us associates with love. We can describe someone as ” not my type”, “is boring … ” when what really happens is that it is unlikely that that person is going to make us suffer in the way that each of us needs to suffer in order to feel that love is real.
How do childhood patterns affect our adult relationships?
The love we experience in childhood is seldom composed solely of generosity, tenderness, and kindness . Due to the way society, families and the world work, the love we received in the past was necessarily intertwined with painful aspects: the feeling of not being good enough, the fact of having a parent with a fragile personality or depressive that created the feeling that one could not be completely vulnerable, etc. It predisposes us to unconsciously looking for those romantic partners who repeat these patterns in maturity.
The problem usually occurs when we continue to respond to these complicated people to whom we are attracted as we behaved when we were children to the same type of stimulus, which prevents us from having a healthy , balanced and mature relationship. For example, if we had an angry father who often used to speak harshly and yell at us, we understood that it was because we had done something wrong. In this way, we became shy, submissive, and quiet.
Can we change the fact that we choose our partner badly?
It is very normal to advise those people who tend to always associate with “difficult” (toxic) partners to leave and find someone healthier, which is an attractive and impossible prospect for the person involved. We cannot magically redirect our natural sources of attraction, it is very difficult to change our attraction schemes because they are so ingrained. But instead of trying to radically modify our instincts, what we can do is try to learn to react to the candidates that attract us in a rational, mature and constructive way , and not like when we were children.
If in adult life our partner (to whom we are magnetically attracted because it is familiar to us) gets angry and yells at us in an argument like our angry father did, we feel like children again: scared, humiliated, guilty and deserving of that tone, reproach and criticism. Or if we had a fragile and vulnerable parent, it is likely that we end up with a partner who is also a little weak and in a way demands that we care about them, even if that prevents us from being vulnerable. What we must do in these cases is to make ourselves strong and try to respond with maturity and that it does not affect us.
