My friend has a ton of amazing qualities — she’s a well-read, ambitious, talented and lovely lady, but it seems that all logic flies out the window when it comes to romance. She repeatedly gets involved with terrible people and doesn’t listen to anyone who tries to warn her or help her. She has an obsessive need to find and keep a boyfriend and she doesn’t really care about how much she has to hurt herself to reach that goal. When she dates awful guys, she does a lot of things that scare me.
- She’s completely oblivious to character flaws. If she was dating someone who came home covered in blood every night, she would smile at him sweetly and offer to wash the stains out of his clothes. To be in denial to such a tremendous extent is alarming, to say the least. It’s like her brain re-wired itself at some point to make her blind to monsters so she can find some semblance of happiness with the latest idiot she’s dating.
- She never learns from past mistakes. It’s as if her memory gets wiped clean every time a new douchebag enters her field of vision. While strangely fascinating to watch, it’s also baffling. How can you simply forget all the misery and heartbreak you’ve endured the second a new, equally terrible jerk enters the picture? You’d think she’d be more aware of bad signs due to her experiences, but she isn’t. That’s scary.
- She refuses to leave bad partners. My friend holds on to irreparably broken people until her desperate fingers are worn down to the bone. She doesn’t care how much trouble these people cause because to her, there is always hope that she can change them and then everything will be what she considers “perfect”. This type of thinking is delusional, not optimistic. It’s genuinely disturbing to me that her mind works that way.
- She doesn’t realize that she’s scaring the good ones away. The men that would treat my friend well want nothing to do with her, understandably so. If you walk around saying, “All of my exes are psycho jerks” you’re going to look like a crazy person because you’re the one who chose to date every single one of those psycho jerks. A lengthy and sordid dating history is a massive red flag to men who have their act together, not a signal for them to come save a girl from herself. Being a hero to someone who voluntarily makes her own life difficult is going to be a massive headache, not a charming romantic endeavor.
- She seeks the wrong things from the wrong people. My friend has an image of the “ideal” relationship in her head, but she tries to force it to come together with guys who have little or nothing to offer. I fear that she’ll end up getting trapped in a destructive marriage at some point and she’ll lose herself. I don’t want that kind of future for her, but it seems that there’s nothing I can do or say to convince her that it’s impossible to get into a healthy relationship with someone who was a bad match in the first place.
- She doesn’t see herself as someone worthy of respect. I hear my friend complain about being treated badly by boyfriends pretty often, but she treats herself badly too. She is truly a beautiful person, but she’s stuck in a state of mind that won’t let her see that. She deserves better treatment from herself. I know she’s strong enough to snap herself out of this funk and I hope she does it before she gets seriously hurt.
