I Chose The Wrong Partner, Again.

You ask why the wrong men return. Not the same men, of course, but versions of the same, new faces, new gestures, yet the familiar undertow remains. It feels like choosing, but it is not quite choosing. It is recognition. The body remembers what it first learned: that love is unpredictable, rationed, tied to pain.

Children survive by inventing bargains. If I am good enough, quiet enough, pleasing enough, the withholding parent will relent. The belief keeps you alive. But later, when you meet someone who withholds, the old bargain stirs. This time, perhaps, I will win. And so you repeat. Not because you want the pain, but because you want the redemption that never arrived.

There is another truth here: others treat us as we have learned to treat ourselves. Cruelty lands because we recognize its tone. Neglect feels familiar because we practice it inwardly. Until you can offer yourself a steadier kind of care, you will not quite know what to do with someone who offers it freely.

You wonder if solitude is safer. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it allows you to breathe, to mother, to pray. But solitude can also conceal the bruise rather than heal it. Relationships have a way of drawing wounds to the surface, sometimes brutally, sometimes necessarily. Healing is not always gentle; it rarely arrives on schedule.

Still, you are not condemned to repeat. To begin is simple, though not easy: to turn toward yourself with the tenderness you once begged from others. To treat your body, your mind, your life as if they were worthy of care because they are. When you value yourself, others follow your example.

And you need not do this alone. No one raised in harshness learns love fluently. It must be taught, shown, practiced. Sometimes with help. Sometimes, with patience, you do not think you have. But each act of care for yourself widens the possibility of different choices.

The cycle breaks not when the right man finally appears, but when you are no longer willing to abandon yourself in order to be chosen. That is the beginning of love that does not wound.

Practice: Breaking the Old Contract

The patterns we repeat are not just psychological; they live in the body, in the memory of the nervous system, in the unseen places where love and pain first braided together.

Words alone cannot always reach what was written so deeply. Sometimes we need the language of the elements, of symbol and ritual, to help us dissolve what thought cannot. This is why I offer you a practice to take the invisible contract you’ve been living under and release it so that you no longer carry its weight.