Different people, same shape. Six good months, then I start finding them irritating over small things, then I go quiet and busy until they end it, and I feel relieved for a fortnight and awful after. I am 33 and I would like to stop running this loop. For anyone who broke a pattern like this, what actually changed it - therapy, one specific realisation, or just picking different people?
Gentle disagreement with the assumption in your question. Four relationships is not a large sample and month eight is roughly when the pleasant part of any mismatch runs out, so it is possible you keep choosing people you like rather than people you suit. Before you conclude the problem is your character, write down what the four had in common at the point you met them, not at the point it ended.
The relief afterwards is the tell. If ending it felt like putting down a weight, you were carrying something you never mentioned to them. Work out what that was in each of the four and you will have your answer without needing a fifth.
Boring method that helped me: I kept a note on my phone for six months, one line a day, whether I felt closer or further away and what happened that day. Reading it back was uncomfortable because the pattern was obvious - the bad weeks lined up with weeks I was overloaded at work, not with anything they did. I was outsourcing stress into the relationship and calling it incompatibility.
Did the same thing with a calendar and got the same result, except mine lined up with my sleep. Not the insight I was hoping for and probably the correct one.
Therapy was what did it for me and it took about eight months, mostly spent on things that had nothing to do with dating. Worth saying plainly: a decent therapist will tell you in the first couple of sessions whether this is the sort of thing they work on, and if the fit is wrong you are allowed to go to someone else.
@two_calendars · 3mo ago · 2 replies
I ran your loop until 36. What broke it was noticing that the irritation always arrived within about two weeks of something getting more permanent - a key, a holiday booked, meeting a parent. It was never about the chewing or the texting habit, it was that the exits were closing and going quiet was how I reopened one. Once I could name the trigger I could say it out loud to the person instead of acting it out, which is unglamorous and worked.
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@hot_heap_hana · 3mo ago
The timing detail is the useful part of this. I went back through my last three and the cooling started within a month of moving in, every time, and I had told myself a different story about each one.
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