Fool me once

Was it over a beer, the first time "Amanda" confessed her most recent heartache? To tell you the truth, I can't even remember. But, I can tell you almost verbatim how the conversation went.

"So, Josh and I are breaking up."

"What?" I was, honestly, shocked. Two weeks before, he sounded like the perfect guy. "You said he might be The One."

"Nah, he's a total jerk. I started paying his cell phone bill, and he got kicked out of his place so he's been crashing with me. Last night, I found out he's been cheating with this other girl."

I stared at her (over my beer?), unbelieving. How could this man, whose praises she sang for the past month, have turned out to be such a loser?

"It's okay," Amanda said. She rolled her shoulders as if shrugging him off. "There's plenty of fish in the sea."

Less than a week later, she was again beaming. "I met the nicest guy," she gushed. "He's so sweet and treats me really well."

I was thrilled for her and glad that she had bounced back from the Josh break-up so soon. A little over a month later, though, I saw her again. She had red-rimmed eyes and a sour expression.

"Kevin and I broke up."

I felt genuinely sorry for her, sad that her latest love (who seemed like such a winner) hadn't worked out.

"Come on, let me buy you a beer," I said. "You can tell me all about it."

As she ran through Kevin's list of loser-ly traits, I began to notice a pattern. Like Josh before him, he was out of work, he sponged off Amanda, and - the coup de grâce - he ended things by cheating on her. How could Amanda have such bad relationship mojo?

"I don't know," she said. "I guess I just pick the wrong guys."

When she called the next week to say she'd met someone new ("He's perfect. I think he might be The One"), I had a premonition that I'd soon be tapping into my beer fund. It took three weeks to prove my hunch correct.

I wondered if Amanda really could be cursed in the relationship department, or - more likely - if she wasn't unconsciously re-creating romantic disasters. In a lot of ways, many of us are like that. We follow the same relationship patterns, reenacting previous love trauma but never resolving the heart of the issue.

In high school, my not-quite-firstlove "Dillon" spent two years stringing me along while dating a girl from another school. I swore I'd never let a guy put me second again, but - surprise, surprise - my next boyfriend, too, had a girlfriend in absentia. Burned on playing the "other woman," I was careful with the next romance. And, again, shocked to discover that he, too, was in love with someone else.

Eventually, I understood my relationship pattern. With awareness came freedom, and I was able to step out of that cycle of second-best-love. Like Amanda, we all need to do some soul searching and determine just how we contribute to our own relationship disasters. Only then can we stop fooling ourselves.

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