Why Do I Keep Dating the Same Person?

What It Looks Like From Inside

• The beginning feels like recognition. “I felt like I’d known them for years.”
• The warning signs were visible early and did not seem to matter, or seemed like the point.
• The ending is familiar enough that you could narrate it in advance, and could not prevent it.
• People who would be good for you are, somehow, not interesting.
• Afterward you blame the type, or your luck, or yourself, and none of those explanations change anything.
• You have, perhaps, been the same person for someone else: the one who left, the one who needed rescuing.

What Might Be Going On

You are recasting a scene, not choosing a person.

Psychoanalysts describe the inner world as a set of scenes, each with a self, an other and a feeling between them: the one who waits and the one who withholds; the rescuer and the wreck; the small one and the one in charge. These are called dyads, and they were cast long ago. When someone fits the other role, it feels like recognition, because it is. The person is new. The part is not.

Familiar beats good.

Freud was puzzled by how reliably people repeat painful situations, and called it the repetition compulsion. One reading is that the mind returns to the old scene in order, this time, to make it come out right: to win over the unavailable one, to finally be enough for the critical one. Each new partner is a chance to fix the original, and each is doomed by the same thing that made them fit the role. See transference.

You have a template, and small cues trigger it.

Social psychologists have shown that when a stranger resembles a significant person in a few small ways, we “fill in” the rest and bring the old feelings with us. The cue can be a tone of voice, a way of being distracted, a job. This is why the person seemed nothing like the type: the match was somewhere you were not looking.

The ending is partly yours.

A pattern that repeats with different people has a constant, and the constant is you. That is not blame. Paul Wachtel described how an expectation draws the response that confirms it: expecting to be left, you cling or you test, and the clinging or testing produces the leaving. Expecting to be controlled, you go passive, and the other person fills the space. See vicious circles and accomplices, on how partners get drawn into the pattern without meaning to.

The type is doing a job for you.

Someone unavailable lets you want without the risk of having. Someone who needs rescuing lets you be needed without needing. Someone controlling lets you not have to decide. The question is what the type protects you from, and the answer is usually a feeling you would have to face with someone who was simply good to you. See what a defense is afraid of.

Your attachment history is in the mix.

If you know your attachment style, it is relevant and it is not the whole story. An anxious person paired with an avoidant one is one of the most recognizable painful pairings, and it is painful precisely because each confirms the other’s oldest fear. See attachment styles for how that vocabulary maps onto this one.

The Exceptions

There was probably one relationship, or one stretch of one, that did not follow the script. A person who was good to you and whom you managed, for a while, to let be. A moment with the usual type where you did something different, said the thing, left early, stayed. What was different? Often it was a state you were in, or something the other person did that broke the template, or simply that you were too tired to play the part. The exception shows that the pattern is a strong preference, not a law.

Where This Leads

• Object-relations dyads, on the scene that keeps getting recast.
• Core relational themes, on the wish, the expected response, and the response of the self.
• Transference, on recognition that isn’t.
• Accomplices, on the partner’s half of the pattern.
• Object constancy, on the swing from idealized to disappointing that often marks the type.