Why relationships don’t work

Understanding Attraction, Childhood Trauma, and Emotional Baggage

We often start a relationship based on emotions and miss important red flags. When feelings cool down, we realize we don’t have much in common with this person. Many people struggle with choosing the right partner, and that can lead to failed relationships.

I would say this is because of a lack of due diligence while choosing a partner. We have pressure from society to find a partner, get married, and have kids. If we don’t have anyone for a period of time, we are afraid of many things – being alone forever, how we look in the eyes of others as single people, feeling unpopular among the opposite sex, feeling bored, and not having someone to complete us in places where we feel incomplete. We may also be afraid of not having someone to take responsibility for our lives or finance our living, along with many other reasons. We are essentially seeking someone to fill the emotional gaps we feel. So, we are very anxious to get paired as quickly as possible without understanding whether this person is the right match for us.

What is the Most Common Way of Choosing a Partner?

When we go on a date, the first thing we value in a potential partner is whether we can feel the chemistry or not – it is mostly physical and emotional, not rational. We often confuse this with love, even though it has nothing to do with actual love but sexual attraction. While attraction is important, it’s not the only factor in a lasting relationship. Once we get those butterflies in our stomach and become high on hormones, we go blind and tend not to notice all the red flags, completely different values, interests, and goals in life. We think we will figure them out over time, probably by changing and adjusting this person to our liking, without realizing that this person intends to do the same thing with us. Or, we let them change us and eventually lose ourselves in the relationship, forgetting what we like and want for ourselves, which later leads to destruction.

The Cycle of Choosing the Wrong Partner

Once the emotions cool down, we start noticing that our partner’s world is far away from ours, and we have nothing in common. When we realize that this person has nothing to do with the picture we created in our heads about them and fell in love with, we break up. The result is – we wasted precious time of our lives with the wrong person, we must deal with the emotional baggage from the failed relationship, we may share custody of our kids, we lose part of our fortune, and we have to start over. Back to square one – searching for attraction, jumping into another relationship, facing the same problems, and breaking up again. Eventually, we think that all men/women are the same and that they are bad people. Why do we keep stepping on the same rake repeatedly and expecting a different result?

Why Good People Don’t See Each Other: Childhood Wiring and Attraction

Many good people find themselves repeatedly attracted to the wrong type of partner. This happens because, during childhood, we were wired to seek out the kind of relationships that were familiar to us – whether they were emotionally unavailable, toxic, or destructive. If we grew up in an environment where unhealthy patterns of behavior were prevalent, we may have internalized those patterns as “normal.” As a result, when we meet someone who is stable, kind, and caring, we often dismiss them as “boring” or “unattractive.” This happens because we associate excitement with chaos, and familiarity with dysfunction, even though it’s not healthy for us. Coaching can help rewire these unhealthy thought patterns, allowing us to recognize and appreciate the right people. When we begin to heal our past wounds and reprogram our minds, we can learn to attract and see the people who truly align with our values and desires for a healthy, balanced relationship.

The Root Cause: Childhood Trauma and Attraction

To understand the nature of attraction, we go back to our childhood. Whatever feelings we experienced during the first five years of our lives – whether they were negative or not – is what we will be searching for throughout our lives and confuse it with love. If our parents were emotionally unavailable, abusive, toxic, manipulative, or neglectful, we will be searching for this type of behavior in our partners. This pattern will create an attraction to people who exhibit these same negative behaviors – emotionally unavailable, abusive, toxic, manipulative, and neglectful. Even though in our brains, we understand these are the bad things we don’t want in our lives, our subconscious programs will dictate otherwise.

Every time we feel incredibly drawn to someone, maybe we can pause for a moment and try to analyze where this emotion is coming from. Is this attraction based on old childhood trauma or some unhealthy attachment style? We should try to see the true value of this person objectively.

Rational Approach: Building a Relationship Through Friendship

Another way to start a relationship is when we are rational, by starting a friendship first. This is how we can see a person with sober eyes, which gives us time to learn their values, mental health, goals in life, character, habits, hobbies, interests, and grow feelings gradually. But before doing this, it is important to fix all the negative programs and become a healthy person to attract a healthy person into our lives and be attracted to a normal person. For example, if we are at work, we don’t start dating someone the first day we meet them. We get a chance to observe them in the live environment, understand them, get a feeling of their nature, and only later do we dare to go out with them.

This is a harder way, as it requires a lot of work on ourselves, and also a lot of patience. However, this may reward us with a chance for a lasting, happy relationship.

When Relationships Don’t Work Out – Letting Go With Gratitude

It often happens, though, that despite doing it the right way, people still grow apart, and this is very normal. We should still be grateful for the time during which we shared our lives together and continue our journey. Relationships don’t always have to last forever for them to be valuable.

Ask Yourself: What Do I Really Want in a Partner?

Whatever way we choose to approach relationships, it might be useful to remind ourselves what we really want. Whenever we experience behavior we don’t like or don’t understand, it is always worth asking the question – Is this how I want my partner to treat me?