Of all the people in the world, how come I picked you... and vice versa? How do we learn from our past relationships, so that we don't keep making the same choices?
She loves me, she loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not...and you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them… and it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about the opposite sex, the same sex, or whatever sexual orientation. Humans are social creatures. We are constantly moving in and out of relationships with other humans. Some of these are casual and fleeting; others are deeply intimate and last a lifetime .The most meaningful are about mothering, fathering, being a son, daughter or other relation, and finally, being a partner- a girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, or lover.

We do not have schooling in relationships. No one teaches us the ABCs of getting a partner…and, there is no such thing as a normal relationship. The truth is that most of us invent or rewrite the book on how to form a friendship, how to become lovers or partners, how to deal with conflict, how to break up, how to figure out whether someone might be a good husband/wife, how much to care for, how much to be cared for, and all the other aspects of loving and being loved.

How do two people get into a romantic relationship? Age makes a difference, but there are some remarkable commonalities that hold whether we are talking about teenagers or folks in their later years who are finding one another.

You meet, by accident or on purpose. You check each other out and decide if the other is suitable. You show your intention or you receive the other’s intention to become a couple. You mutually agree that you are a couple of some sort…and then, the dance continues.

In counseling couples, I often ask each person, “Of all the people in the world, how did you pick this person?” Most people do not have ready answers, and some are really thrown by the question. Counseling individuals, I encounter many people who have never had a lasting and happy relationship. It seems that each attempt begins well, but something always happens, and the girlfriend or boyfriend turns out to be a jerk. How we choose our partners is a bit of a mystery, and often we repeat poor choices.

Why do we often make poor choices? To best address this question, I will use a story from my own adolescence, the years when many of us choose mates. Even if we are in our twenties and beyond, most of us act like adolescents when we enter the dating arena.

My first serious girlfriend asked me out. I had never had a conversation with her before that time. She was a majorette and I was in the school band. I accepted because she was attractive, friendly, and mostly because I was amazed that anyone would be truly attracted to me. She told me later on that she asked me out because she thought I would be a safe boyfriend. Earlier she had gone out with a guy a few years older, who was intent on having sex. She thought and was quite right in her perception that I would be satisfied with the preliminaries. I liked that she liked me. I was not sure for quite a while what she liked about me, and I am not sure if she ever knew what I liked about her, but we spent most of our time engaged in nonverbal exploration. I asked her to go steady with me a week after I got my high school ring. She decided to go to college rather than become a secretary, because I was interested in going to college. She dropped out shortly after we broke up half way through her freshman year. As I look back on that time, I realize how little we actually knew about one another. We did know that we liked each other and wanted to spend every spare moment together. I think both of us were quite in love with the idea of being special. Being special carried us until we were separated by distance for long enough to allow someone else to enter my field of vision, someone else who thought I was quite special, and then I moved on, caught in the desire to be special anew.

Many people travel from one relationship to another in search of that special feeling. Some call it being in love, though I would say that true love goes far beyond the chemistry of attraction and the euphoria of feeling wanted.

Here is an exercise that may help you decide if you are choosing a partner for the right reasons. Make a list of the 10 qualities or characteristics that you value most in a friend. Write this list from one to ten vertically on a piece of paper. Horizontally across the top of the paper list your potential partner along with your friends, your relatives, and yourself. Make a grid by drawing horizontal and vertical lines. Now you can put check marks in the boxes if the people on the list possess or demonstrate the qualities that you value most.

I welcome your questions, feedback, and observations, anonymously or not. .

About the Author

Ken Edelston MS is a life and business coach. He has extensive experience in counseling teens, adults, and couples. For over 20 years, Ken has specialized in treating the effects of addictions, parenting adolescent issues, and conflict resolution. His coaching practice focuses on helping individuals, families, business persons, and couples identify ineffective patterns of behavior and then exploring and implementing real change.