Why Does This Keep Happening to Me?
Elizabeth Mapes
6/13/2026
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 last year, profoundly emotionally/psychically connected to an older man who had a long-term girlfriend. In both cases, I genuinely loved them. In both cases, they were unavailable.
At first, I believed the pattern was simply that I kept choosing men who could not fully choose me.
But 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 something did not fit. There were differences in life stage, imbalances in communication, missing layers of trust, or realities that made a 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. Not because I didn’t love them. But because some part of me already knew the relationship was not truly aligned with what I wanted or needed.
The mirror was not simply their inability to choose me.
The mirror was also reflecting where I was not fully choosing myself, and therefore 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 twenty-five years searching for someone who would choose me, and only recently began learning to choose myself.
Perhaps this is the gift hidden inside every repeating pattern: not the repetition itself, but the mirror it offers. Not what is wrong with other people, but what life has been reflecting back to us all along.