When we meet someone new, our desire for connection and companionship can be very powerful, to the point of our overlooking potential red flags and plowing forward, full steam ahead.
It’s a form of denial. Because everything feels so good at the moment, and the hope for a successful relationship is so strong, we don’t want any reality raining on our parade. We don’t want to face the possibility that the person isn’t really right for us and that we’d be better off, in the long run, not getting involved.
And so we dive into the relationship without doing our “due diligence,” only to appreciate some time later that it would have been wiser had we chosen to pay attention at the beginning, to look more closely at the person we were getting involved with, and to not go down that road.
Oftentimes, a similar problem occurs when, because we are dissatisfied with our life, we look back nostalgically at a relationship that failed us in the past, and we start wishfully thinking that maybe it wasn’t so bad and that maybe it was a mistake that we moved on.
Out of the same longing for love and connection, we conveniently forget much of the emotional pain we endured in our efforts to make the relationship work. We deny all the resentments, the judgments, the lack of respect, compassion and consideration we experienced.
We put on our rose-colored glasses and see the past a whole lot better than it really was. Rather than accept the fact that the relationship wasn’t good for us and never will be, and that it’s best that we keep looking for love in all the right places, despite how difficult that effort might be, we make excuses for why things didn’t work out and we re-engage in the relationship, only to painfully discover at some point that we’ve wasted more of our time and energy, and are no better off than we were before.
What it comes down to is this: We can’t predict that our future will be rosy and happy. But we can predict that the past will not change and that returning to a relationship that was abusive, co-dependent, destructive and/or unsatisfying will not deliver us the life we want.
In summary: Just as it is a mistake to leap into relationships impulsively, without paying attention to red flags and warning signs, without contemplating the pros and cons, it is also a mistake to not look before we leap backwards into past relationships.
If we don’t like where we find ourselves in our lives, it behooves us to be proactive, not retroactive, and to not re-engage in something that was a proven failure unless there is evidence that things will truly be different which could realistically predict the possibility of success the second time around.
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Tags: relationship problems
