I have a friend who talks about how every person she’s ever dated tends to circle back around later. They always come back. And it’s true. I’ve seen it.
She’s not bragging. She says it with disbelief that the people who so badly fumbled her then would think she’d still be waiting around now. She’s learned the hard way that they don’t come back changed, only chastened by life and hoping that the one who was good to them once will be good to them once more. They only come back after having wandered the wide world looking for something better and failing to find it.
I’m not opposed to a second chance love story. I love to read them. But the essential component of any second chance’s odds of success involves true change. It goes beyond a change of mind and has to also involve a change of heart. Whatever broke down the relationship has to be fundamentally altered in a way that guarantees a different outcome.
Otherwise, what happens is this: We re-invest in the relationship only to find that all the things that broke it down before are still relevant. Instead of feeling like we’ve grown and can create a new, stronger, better sense of intimacy, we realize that we put trust in someone who hadn’t yet earned it back. We think we can pick up where we left off, but we actually have to both start over AND be able to pick up and repair the pieces that were broken.
The repair work is what’s often hard to do. Oftentimes, we want the clean slate without having earned it. We don’t want to do the work of mending what’s broken or facing the ways we hurt each other. But without facing them, we can’t possibly go on with the relationship and expect it to last or to be healthy.
For a long time, I didn’t learn my lesson. While I didn’t keep recycling the same old relationships, I did seem to gravitate to the same relationship types. Most were emotionally unavailable. For a while, that seemed to work for me because it allowed me to hide behind their emotional unavailability and mask my own.
But when I found someone who seemed open when I was, the same pattern repeated. He shut down, and it brought all of my past straight back to the surface. I thought I was breaking patterns, but it seemed like I’d just repeated one. If I’d left, it would have shown that I could break my own cycles. I could acknowledge that things had changed in a way that wouldn’t work for me. But, of course, I didn’t do that. I stayed and hoped I was wrong. It was only when he walked away that I was set free.
That realization sent me down another path toward healing. Therapy, self-awareness, and self-love helped me reach a deeper understanding of myself and my relationship history. This time, when I said I learned my lesson, I meant it.
So, when I found myself infatuated with an emotionally unavailable man, I brought it up. We talked about it and agreed that we didn’t have what it would take to make a relationship work. There were no bad feelings, and although I sometimes miss him, I knew I made the right decision. Not the easy one. The right one.
If I’d been back on my same rinse-and-repeat cycle, I would have let chemistry chart the course. I would have allowed attraction and attachment to take the wheel. I would have absolved myself of the responsibility to do better and make better choices. It was so affirming that I made a different choice — one that was kinder to both parties.
I’ve spent the last year or two fairly ambivalent about relationships. I don’t object to the idea of one any more than I object to the idea, in theory, of a second chance romance. I’m just not fixated on it. I don’t see my single status as a problem that needs to be solved. I simply see it as yet another aspect of my beautiful life.
I’ve spent that time building self-trust. I know that I make better decisions now — and by better, I mean that my standards are set where only a healthy relationship appeals to me. I’ve shown that I can recognize and change my own patterns, and doing so has made me so much happier.
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How to Break the Rinse-and-Repeat Cycle
Develop Greater Self-Awareness
It’s important to develop greater self-awareness to truly break the cycle. According to Harvard Business Review, there are two types of self-awareness. There’s an internal type where we have a clear sense of ourselves and how we impact others. There’s also an external type where we understand how we are viewed by others. Not everyone has the same type of self-awareness. In fact, the article broke it down further into four self-awareness archetypes: Introspectors, Aware, Seekers, and Pleasers.
Although the article focuses on business performance, it’s possible to apply this to relationships. The goal is to become more of the Aware archetype — where we know ourselves but also seek outside feedback that might challenge how we think about ourselves. One suggestion offered to develop greater self-awareness is to ask “what” rather than “why”. Instead of asking ourselves why we keep ending up in the same toxic relationships, we can ask ourselves what felt bad about those relationships and what each of them had in common.
It can also be extended to the second chance love affair. Instead of asking ourselves why we should take them back or why we might want to, we might be better off asking what has changed and what will be different this time that might lead to another outcome. It takes the focus off reasoning and into measurable actions.
Another key component to improving self-awareness is to seek feedback from others. Friends. Exes. Therapists. People in our lives who might be able to see us more clearly than we see ourselves. We all have our blind spots. We have to be willing to see our faults and the impact of our actions if we ever truly want to change.
It’s equally necessary to know ourselves well enough to know what it is we want. When we fall into people pleasing, we’re likely not being authentic to who we are. Instead, we’re trying to be liked and valued. Building stronger internal validation can help us become more self-aware.
Become More Accountable
Another way to change our relationship patterns is to become more accountable. Accountability means that we’re willing to take responsibility for our role in outcomes in our lives. An article in Forbes explores developing personal accountability in the realm of career goals and management, but I find that these principles can also be applied in the relationship realm. The author offers the following questions for self-accountability:
Why do you think you have had trouble accepting accountability for outcomes?
What is the worst consequence you recall experiencing when you did accept responsibility for a negative outcome?
What was the worst consequence when you did not accept responsibility?
For what past error or failure have you not accepted responsibility? Can you take action to correct that neglect or intentional rejection of acknowledging your accountability?
The article goes on to talk about 12 steps to greater accountability, and I’d like to apply each of them to our relationship patterns:
Review and determine personal relationship goals. We need to decide what it is we want — not what we think we should want or what someone else wants for us. Then, we need to determine a way to measure achievement of these goals. What would a healthy, happy relationship look like? What qualities would it involve? We want to create smaller, more realistic goals. Instead of immediately looking for the love of our lives, we might want to start with healthy conversations or learning to stop communicating with people who have numerous red flags.
We can also learn to be accountable in how we speak. Are we blaming others when things go wrong, or do we own up to our own involvement in our patterns? We can spend time researching our patterns and learning more about how to change them. We can invest in books that will help us improve and be accountable in our relationships. It can also help talk to someone who is good at accountability and seek out their advice.
We can learn to speak up any time that we have concerns about the direction a relationship is going — or when we uncover a potential red flag and need to learn more. We need to stay aware as we move through the accountability process so that we don’t fall back into old habits. Finding a friend who can be our accountability buddy for relationships could help. It should be a person who will tell us the truth even if it’s not what we want to hear. It also needs to be someone who is already good at accountability or is working on it.
Performing a relationship moratorium on past relationships can help us identify the important patterns in order to make a plan to change them. Remember, it it might be challenging in the short-term to be accountable, but there are plenty of long-term rewards that make it worthwhile — like breaking our patterns and cultivating healthier relationships.
Find New Perspective to Rinse and Repeat
Interestingly enough, repeating our experiences doesn’t have to be a bad thing if we’re learning along the way. Sometimes, we have to go out and make some mistakes to figure out what we want and what we don’t. We can all be good at relationships in theory, but we have to learn to be good at them in practice.
It’s not easy. I remember the massive anxiety I would have every time I brought up a potential conflict to my then-boyfriend. It was painful to talk about problems. I was nervous to discuss them and afraid of his reaction. I had to learn to improve my communication and conflict resolution skills in practice. It wasn’t enough just to know the right way to talk about things. I had to try them out with an actual person. It wasn’t comfortable, but every time I successfully practiced what I was learning, it affirmed that I was learning and growing. It also built true intimacy within that relationship.
The relationship itself didn’t work out, but I spent those years practicing what I had been learning. I made new mistakes and sometimes repeated old ones. But overall, I showed myself that I can be healthy in relationships. I just have to try — and keep trying even when it’s hard.
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Whether we’re considering giving someone a second chance or simply trying to stop dating the same type over and over, it’s good to take a pause. To know who we are and what we want. To think about how we’ve changed and to ask ourselves if the change has extended into action.
My pause extended into a long break from dating. I didn’t swear it off. I just shifted my focus to the life I have — and the relationships I have in it. I spent more time with friends. I cultivated a wild and wonderful garden. I stopped feeling like something was missing and started loving my life again.
But what I didn’t do was stop learning. I’ve reflected on my past, and I sometimes think about the future. I’m more accountable and aware than I’ve ever been, and even though I know it’s inevitable I’ll make mistakes, I also trust myself enough to learn and grow from them.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean? | My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me | The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex | The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence |
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