People With Equal Problems Attract
For years I've held to a simple idea: we tend to pair up with people whose troubles roughly match our own. I'll own it, that held true in a marriage of mine that ended. You've probably sat through the same conversation I have, a newly separated or divorced friend going on about everything that was wrong with the soon-to-be ex. In the retelling the friend is spotless, a victim who did nothing to earn any of it.
But think it through. Somebody carrying far fewer problems than the person being described wouldn't have signed up for a long relationship, or a sort-of-long one, with somebody they'd later brand with words like lazy, useless, boozer, womanizer, or something uglier.
Most of us have had the close call, the one where you met someone, got a little tangled up, and pulled free before any real harm landed. I dated a guy once whose idea of a pickup line, delivered at the end of the first date, was "You wanna?" He hauled me from one college party to the next, knocking back doubles and triples the whole time. He was driving. He also ignored me for most of the day, and on the way home he actually pulled over and sat there waiting while his friend disappeared for a quick hookup with the girl that friend was with. I was relieved to be done with him.
People who know me know I'm a cat person the way others are dog people. There was another first date, one and only, where the man mentioned he liked driving out into the woods to shoot feral cats for the fun of it. That was the end of that. Two dates, two very wrong numbers.
Some folks congratulate themselves for landing in a new person's arms before their partner could do the dumping. Here's what gets missed, though. Whether you walked or they walked, you can both repeat the exact same error, which is moving straight from one person into another who carries the identical set of problems. I did that too. I just happened to get lucky. The first man I dated seriously after my divorce eventually dumped me, and in doing so showed me the passive-aggressive streak that had already stung me earlier on.
Give it two years, at minimum. Spend some of that time digging into what actually went wrong last time, your partner's part in it and your own part too, before you step into anything new. Skip that work and you walk back into the same trap. You've heard about the women who end up with one alcoholic after another, right? That's how it happens.