After the Party's Over, Part Two

Few things grab you emotionally like a new partner who insists you're nothing like the awful person they were married to before. You're the one woman unlike all the other women he's known, or the one man unlike every man she's dealt with. It flatters you. You start thinking you must be rare, some kind of exception. Along with the compliment comes a whole catalog of horror stories about the exes, all the terrible things those other people supposedly did. That catalog is the warning sign. When your own relationship ends, and it may, ask yourself who becomes the next name on that list, described in language just as ugly.

There's a second version of this that runs the opposite direction. The new girlfriend or boyfriend was flawless, treated them like gold, could not have been kinder. At least, that was the story until the commitment was locked in. Once the deal closed, the whole thing collapsed and the new partner turned cruel. Same trap, different packaging.

I'm not going to tell you to run a background search on someone before you commit, though I understand the impulse. What I will say is that the more you actually know about a person's money, their work history, their family, their friends, the safer you are. If they've told you things you've never been able to confirm, pay attention to that. And if you never get to sit down with the people who know them, when the person isn't hovering nearby and can't steer the conversation, be careful.

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