Why Does This Keep Happening to Me?
Elizabeth Mapes
6/20/2026
Many people find themselves asking the same question after the end of a relationship:
Why does this keep happening to me?
The faces change. The circumstances look different. Yet the underlying experience often feels familiar. We find ourselves drawn to similar personalities, facing similar disappointments, or repeating the same emotional experiences again and again.
It is easy to assume the answer lies in the other person. But what if the common thread is something we have not yet recognized within ourselves?
Most of us carry beliefs about love, worthiness, trust, rejection, and connection that were formed long ago. Often outside our awareness, these beliefs shape what we expect, tolerate, fear, and even to whom we are attracted.
What we do not see, we tend to repeat.
The Pattern I Could Not See
I have always been highly sensitive and able to see beyond a person’s defenses. Following a series of traumas during my teenage years, that sensitivity became intertwined with something else.
Beginning around age fifteen, I found myself repeatedly drawn to boys and men who never fully chose me. There was always some degree of uncertainty, distance, or unavailability.
I believed that if I loved enough, gave enough, and understood enough, they would eventually choose me.
I gave help, attention, time, emotional support, and even my body without considering what I needed in return. My focus was not on whether the relationship honored me. My focus was on becoming someone who would not be left.
Without realizing it, I began shaping myself around the needs and desires of others. The more disconnected I became from my own needs, the more I believed that being chosen by someone else would finally make me feel worthy, secure, or complete.
What I could not see was that I was acting from deeply held beliefs that love had to be earned and that my worth depended on being chosen.
The Realization
The realization, when it finally became clear, was simple:
I was not choosing myself—and the men I kept choosing were reflecting that back to me.
It was not punishment or rejection. It was a mirror.
What I had been calling love was often self-abandonment followed by the hope that someone else would make me feel whole.
That pattern did not stay confined to relationships. For years, I abused alcohol as another way of turning away from myself.
The relationships were not the source of my suffering. The alcohol was not the source of my suffering. Both were expressions of the same disconnection.
The Pattern Returns
One of the most humbling discoveries of my life was realizing that awareness alone does not dissolve a pattern.
In the decade since my divorce, I found myself deeply attached to a married pilot during the pandemic and, more recently, profoundly emotionally connected to a man who had a long-term girlfriend.
In neither case did I enter into a physical relationship. In both cases, I genuinely loved them. And in both cases, they were unavailable.
At first, I believed the pattern was simply that I kept choosing unavailable men who could not fully choose me. Eventually, I saw something deeper.
On the surface, I wanted the relationship. I wanted the connection. I wanted to be chosen.
Yet beneath those desires, I could sense the places where things did not fit. There were differences in life stage, imbalances in communication, missing layers of trust, or realities that made a healthy long-term partnership unlikely.
What I recently came to see was that I was not fully choosing them either.
Not because I didn't care or love them, but because some part of me already knew the relationship was not truly aligned.
In that way, the mirror was reflecting my own lack of alignment. I was not fully choosing myself, and therefore I was not fully choosing them.
What Changed
For much of my life, I believed happiness would come from finding the right person.
What I have discovered is something much simpler:
Happiness began when I stopped abandoning myself in the search for it.
Seeing the pattern did not erase it overnight. But I could no longer pretend I did not see it.
I began questioning the beliefs that told me I had to earn love, prove my worth, or become what I thought someone else wanted in order to be chosen.
Slowly, I realized that love does not require self-abandonment and that being chosen by another person cannot create the sense of worth that only comes from remaining connected to myself.
I spent years searching for someone who would choose me, and only recently have I begun learning to choose myself.
Perhaps this is the gift hidden within every repeating pattern: not the repetition itself, but the mirror it offers. Not showing us what is wrong with other people, but revealing what we have not yet seen in ourselves.