By: Jazz Keyes
3,285 days, 5,760 hours, 43, 217 minutes, and 689 seconds. That’s approximately how much of my life I exhausted loving unsuitable mates. With the conclusion of each old relationship, I conditioned myself to assume the role of the victim.
Reluctant to own any fault in my relationship ending, I aggressively incriminated my ex-partners with the unlawful act of sabotaging our relationship.
Legitimately, my relationships were predestined for failure from inception. The fact is, I chose each and every one of my partners based on exactly where I was at in my life.
My first real relationship spoon fed me a large dose of drama and trained me to stomach roller coaster rides. I subconsciously ached for the theatrics and each new relationship I entered into fed my desperate need for hysteria. I pretended to hate the melodramatics, while covertly hungering for excitement.
Designed to send me darting in the opposite direction, my eyes penetrated the warning signs, and I gave them the cold shoulder.
Tipsy with the constant turmoil, chaos became the equivalent of heavy kissing and soft caressing to me. The continual uproar and commotion was a twisted version of foreplay. The worse the altercation, the better the make up sex.
There is a small percentage of the population who are born with enough wisdom to observe and learn valuable life lessons by analyzing the mistakes of others and doing the opposite. However, the rest of us enter into adulthood coated with lumps from bumping our heads along the way.
Eventually, you will land at a place in life where your priorities have to be evaluated, and the archetype of the perfect lover you try to imitate changes.
Consummating an ideal relationship requires two individuals to be full and complete before embarking on a quest together. The last thing a mature individual wants is for love to be infested with discord.
Once that shift in your perception of love occurs, you must completely rid yourself of disastrous love patterns. To become a magnet for the right lover, self-reflection and remodeling must occur.
Here is where you ask yourself, “Why do I keep attracting the wrong person?”
#1 – You’re Brainwashed
We persuade ourselves into believing that “love hurts.” By adopting this philosophy, we repress the voice in our head that tries to warn us when something isn’t right about our partners.
We tune out the screams of our second thoughts and disregard our intuition by convincing ourselves that hardships and pain are a natural element of relationships, and we accept mistreatment as a challenge. We desperately want to prove that we can withstand the conditions and still stay grounded. The issue with this mindset is that we never set clear boundaries for our partners.
Be keen in your understanding of what it means to endure “hard” times. This at no point in time means that in order to have love you must be someone’s flunky or doormat.
#2 – You Say Come As You Are
“I will accept you, issues and all.”
I swore this sign was plastered across my forehead. Burdened with low self-esteem, I perfumed myself with artificial confidence. My scent was bewitching to fractured people. I made it my personal business to shelter shattered souls and make their brokenness my mosaic art project.
I fool-heartedly wanted to be the artist to piece them back together, despite being defective myself. It was easier for me to try and fix others than to reconstruct my own heart. Be mindful, as long as you remain unhealed, you will continue to attract people who, like yourself, are looking to someone else to feel whole.
#3 – You are petrified at the idea of being alone
The overpowering fear of being alone is the driving force behind the most damaging and barren love affairs. When you are an individual who cannot be left alone with self, you will forfeit your standards and desires for the sake of companionship.
When this is your character, you unknowingly signal to love scavengers that you are an easy mark for casualty. Love scavengers are the people who arrive on the scene at what appears to be the, “perfect time.” They are overflowing with romantic language and chivalrous acts, and for a brief moment, you are sure you have finally found “the one.”
Upon realizing this person is in fact not at all what you hoped he/she to be, at this point, you are unable to severe the emotional ties. Here is where we give birth to the codependent relationship. In these relationships, one person naively enables their partner’s “addiction, poor mental health, immaturity, irresponsibility, or under-achievement.”
There is an infinite list of reasons we attract the wrong love. We are addicted to drama, we don’t believe we deserve better, we’ve never witnessed healthy love in our childhood, we have a low sense of self-worth, so on and so forth. Despite the reasons we find ourselves in bad relationships, please know that they are crafted to provide us with invaluable life lessons.
What do bad relationships teach us about ourselves?
#4 – You don’t stand guard over your dreams
Having admittedly laid many dreams to rest for the “greater good” of my past relationships, I bear witness to how imperative it is to never leave your aspirations homeless for any man or woman. Bad relationships teach you that any person who truly adores you will naturally have a deep affection for anything that you are passionate about.
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