Why you keep choosing bad partners (even though you know they’re bad)

Do you keep choosing the same relationships — even though you know there’s disaster ahead? Here’s why.

by: E.B. Johnson

Do you keep settling for toxic and dangerous partners? Do you invest in bad relationships even though you know they’re a bad idea? This is a pattern that we set ourselves up for, and it takes conscious acknowledgement in order for us to overcome. Rather than accepting warped and toxic love into your life, you have to make space for the right partner to come in. This only happens when you accept where you’re selling yourself short and take action to correct it.

Making bad choices worse.

Romantic love is an important component of happiness for many of us, and that’s okay. We love to be loved, yet many of us find ourselves stumbling time and time again into toxic partnerships that leave us drained, battered, and bruised. Why do we keep selecting relationships that we know are going to fail? Why do we invest in our time into people we know are going to hurt us? For many it comes down to a pattern of bad decisions, and a core of root causes that have to be confronted in order to be overcome.

Committing to a toxic relationship is a bad choice made worse.

Are you someone who keeps falling for toxic partners? Do you keep committing your time and energy to people who can’t return that same love to you? When you have no self-respect, no self-esteem, and no idea about what matters to you — you’re going to end up making decisions that aren’t aligned to your needs. Want to break past these poisonous cycles? Then you have to stand up, figure out who you are, and take the initiative to believe in yourself and everything you ever wanted from a romantic relationship.

Why you keep choosing bad partners to invest in.

It’s no accident that you keep choosing toxic people to invest in. These are patterns that we learn and reinforce through our negative experiences and negative self-belief. Do lack in self-respect? Is your self-confidence bottomed out, or your sabotaging behavior at an all-time high? This is why you keep floundering in love. In order to learn better ways to connect, you have to first accept what’s holding you back.

No self-respect

Perhaps the most common reason we settle for bad partners and bad relationships is a lack of self-respect. When we don’t respect ourselves, we teach others not to respect us either. This attracts vultures of every nature, who realize that we are someone who will be easy to push around and take advantage of. Respecting ourselves is how we teach others (especially our partners) to respect us.

Lacking self-esteem

Like self-respect, self-esteem allows us to build better relationships with people who love and value us. To have self-esteem means to respect yourself, but it also means to believe in yourself and the things you want. When you have self-esteem, you can stand up for yourself and draw the line around the things that matter to you. A partner with no self-esteem is one who is easily talked into hating themselves, or taking responsibility for problems they didn’t create.

Bad role models

What role models did you have growing up as a child? Did your parent demonstrate healthy relationships with one another? What about their relationship with you? The connection we share with our caretakers is the one on which we model many of our future relationships. When we spend a childhood watching our parents chase toxic partners — we often end up doing the same. If we spend our childhood chasing abusive or absentee parents, that’s the kind of intimacy we tend to manifest in adulthood.

Serious self-sabotage

Are you someone with a deep and undeniable love of self? Or are you someone tends to be more critical and hateful of who they are? When we engage in this self-loathing, it often leads us right down the road to self-sabotage. This is a way of punishing ourselves for our perceived wrongs. Instead of building relationships that bring us love and peace, we pursue partnerships that are guaranteed to burn us. This way we can reaffirm all the bad things we believe (erroneously) about ourselves.

Need to settle

Sometimes, our biological clock (or even the pressure from society) gets us, and we find ourselves scrambling with a frantic need to settle. It’s understandable. Western society emphasizes the importance of romantic love and tends to exclude those that don’t play by the rules. Desperate to fit in, we open up the door on anyone who’s willing to come in. This desperation, unfortunately, is especially tempting to predators and abusers.

Misunderstanding self

Not all of our determination to settle for bad partners comes down to negative events in our past. It’s not uncommon for us to simply misunderstand our needs or the things that we want from a relationship. Confused, we reach out for the type of person we think will bring us happiness, only to have it thrown back into our faces. We have to know who we truly are in order to create a vision of a partner that fulfills our needs and expectations in all the best ways.

How to stop the pattern once and for all.

Are you tired of investing in toxic partners and failed relationships? Rather than setting yourself up for heartbreak over-and-over again, you have to take the initiative to stop the pattern once and for all. To that, though, you need to zero in on honesty and work through the root causes of your need to attach to toxicity. Then you can build up your self-esteem and focus on a future that makes sense.

1. Identify your patterns honestly

Before you can fix the type of people that come into your life, you need to first fix the way you see yourself. Our patterns aren’t caused by other people. They’re caused the by decisions we make over-and-over. You have to identify your patterns, and you have to be brutally honest about the effect they’re having on your life. Are you settling for abusers? Manipulators? Perpetual children? Once you spot what you’re getting wrong, you can focus on getting it right.

Take some time to really dig into your patterns. Look back over your past relationships. What arguments came up time-and-time again? What issues or conflicts always seemed to blow things up or destroy them entirely?

Getting to the root of our bad relationship choices requires that we first figure out what’s going wrong. Get out your journal and spend 10–15 minutes each day writing a little about your experiences. How did your past partners make you feel? How did they treat you when things were good? What about when things went wrong? Compare these things to your current relationship. What mistakes do you keep making over again? What traits keep popping up in your toxic partners?

2. Work through the root causes

Patterns to hand, you next have to start working through the root causes that led to them. We didn’t decide to commit ourselves to such suffering overnight. It stems from the beliefs that we built up over time, alongside our experiences. We have to look back at our past and question what led us to idolize such toxic and harmful people when it comes to love. Working through these root causes is empowering and provides us with a new perspective.

In order for us to realistically resolve our patterns, we have to understand where they come from. Doing that asks us to dig into our pasts. It requires that we look at all the beliefs that we hold dear, and that we question the pain that forces us to make self-sabotaging decisions.

Using your journal, question the very root cause of your patterns. Look back to those experiences in childhood which taught you to love broken people. Look at the relationships you shared with your parents and the lessons that they taught you. Did you spend your youth chasing a parent who was absent emotionally? Is that same behavior manifesting in your current relationships? The chaos of our past becomes comfortable, and when it does we seek that comfort in our futures subconsciously.

3. Build up your self-esteem

Self-esteem is everything when it comes to building relationships of any sort. It’s especially important, though, when we’re talking about intimate relationships. You need to have a strong foundation of self-esteem in order to select partners who are self-aware and compassionate. Belief in self enables to stop settling and empowers you to go after what you want (especially when it comes to love).

You will get nowhere in your search for better relationships until you rebuild your self-esteem. Absolute belief in self and the things you want are key in finding a person who checks all the boxes for you. Until you are confident in yourself, and in love with who you are, you will struggle to find someone who appreciates you.

Stop chasing the love and validation of others and look within. You are worthy and deserving, just as you are. The world doesn’t need to tell you that you’re valid. You don’t need the love of someone else to feel seen and worthwhile. All of that comes from the inside. When you fall in love with yourself, the world sees that and puts a higher value on your presence. That means attracting a higher caliber partner who’s better aligned to your needs and plans for the future.

4. Focus on what you really want

Belief in self is powerful Not only does it make us feel better, but it also helps us to focus in on what we really want from our intimate partnerships. This is an exercise that takes place over time. We have to imagine what our perfect relationship looks like, then spend some time weeding out those things which are more superficial than anything else. From here we can prioritize our needs and expectations in a more realistic way. That’s powerful when it comes to rethinking the way we approach connection.

Focus on what you really want and create a vivid vision of the future that you can lean into. Before you invest in someone who isn’t worthwhile, get clear on what your definition of “worthwhile” is. What kind of relationships make you feel valued? What kind of relationships provide you with a sense of quiet fulfillment?

Be brutally honest with yourself and don’t hold back. What is it that you really want from your partner? What do you want your connection with them to look like? How do you want them to support you or be there for you? When we visualize what we want, we can then better prioritize our needs and expectations. Don’t listen to the expectations that society forces on you. Listen only to your authentic self. Know what you really want from a romantic relationship and be unwilling to settle.

5. Elevate your environments

Most of our relationships are fostered in our immediate environments, with someone we meet through mutual friends and family (or with someone we know already). That’s why it’s so important to make sure that we are surrounding ourselves with people who see the world like we do. When we align ourselves to good people, we often find ourselves with good partners too. After all, our environments are a reflection of who we truly are.

Like it or not, it’s going to be difficult to elevate your love life when you’re still scrounging around in your environments. We can’t settle for subpar friends and subpar existences and still hope for happy relationships. The higher we elevate ourselves, the greater chance we have of meeting someone that meets our standards.

Be more selective in the friendships that you build and the connections that you foster. Stop chasing people who tear you down, or people who don’t want to see you thrive. Surround yourself with people who are selfless; people who want to see you do well no matter what. This is a part of self-esteem. Pursue that dream career. Pursue friendships with people who are determined to lift themselves up. As we elevate our environments and align ourselves with those who mean the most to us, we elevate our intimate relationships too.

Putting it all together…

Are you someone who keeps falling into the same toxic relationships? Do you invest in troublesome partners even though you know your time with them is going to end in heartbreak? When we adopt patterns of self-loathing and self-sabotage, we use our relationships to further destroy ourselves. Rather than settling for this misery in love, though, we have to take action and find ways to embrace what we really deserve in our intimate relationships.

First, take some time to identify your patterns. Admit honestly what you’re doing wrong and admit too what you keep getting wrong in the people you attach to and invest in. Then peel back the curtain to find the root causes behind these issues. What causes you to hate yourself? What experiences in your past taught you to self-sabotage? Work through that pain, resolve it, and find a way to love yourself authentically for all that you are. Once you have a handle on loving and appreciating yourself, you can look to the future and focus on what you really want out of love. Elevate your environments and surround yourself with people who want to watch you thrive. Then, you’ll be able to upgrade your relationships and find partners who better align with your vision of happiness.

• Peel, R., & Caltabiano, N. (2020). Why Do we Sabotage Love? A Thematic Analysis of Lived Experiences of Relationship Breakdown and Maintenance. Journal Of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 1–33. doi: 10.1080/15332691.2020.1795039

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