After the Party's Over, Part One
Most of us will have more than one serious partner over a lifetime. What happens in the gap between those relationships tends to decide how the next one goes, so I want to flag a couple of traps that catch people right after a split.
The first trap: you end up drawn to the exact kind of person you just left. You've probably met someone who keeps winding up with alcoholics, one after another. Part of what drives that pattern is timing. A lot of breakups happen precisely because there's already a new relationship waiting to be escaped into, and that escape hatch becomes the whole reason to leave.
So give yourself an actual break before you start anything new. Clear your head first. A year after my divorce I met someone and fell hard, almost on the spot. Two months in we broke up, and only then did it hit me that he was passive aggressive in the same way my ex-husband had been. I'd come within an inch of repeating the whole thing.
There are really two mistakes tangled up in that. One is lining up the next relationship before you've even finished the current one. When you do that, you tend to pick someone who looks a lot like the partner you're walking away from, because you never left yourself any quiet time to work out what went sideways the first time. The other mistake sits underneath it: grabbing any relationship at all, just so you don't have to be by yourself and face the work of meeting your own needs.