Why We Keep Accepting the Same Painful Relationship Patterns

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~George Santayana

I was gone about two hours. I’d gone to see my stepbrother, who lived nearby. My girlfriend didn’t want to come, so I told her to rest, and I’d be back soon.

When I got back to my father’s property, where we lived in the camper we’d bought together, it was gone. So was she.

She’d packed my clothes into a bag and left them on my father’s porch on her way out. That told me everything I needed to know. The camper was the only place we’d been living, which meant I didn’t just lose a relationship that night. I also lost my address.

It was the second time in a year she’d disappeared like that. No calls. No warning. Just gone, until she decided to come back and be the easier version of herself again.

I called my stepbrother. I posted online asking if anyone had seen her. Then I went back to his place and slept on his couch, because there was nowhere else to go.

That’s when the crying started.

My kids weren’t really speaking to me at that point either, in the aftermath of a divorce a year earlier. The floor of my life had been pulled out from under me, and I was still standing on the spot where it used to be.

The next morning, an old friend called. He’d seen my post overnight. He was about to leave for a week at his second home near the coast, and when he heard what happened, he told me to come with him.

Take a week off from your life, he said. Come get your head together.

A few hours later, we were on the road. He gave me a room. He handed me a hundred dollars, because I genuinely had almost nothing. He bought me a pair of flip-flops because I’d left with basically the clothes on my back.

I want to sit with that detail for a second. My friend looked at a grown man with nothing, and the thing he did was make sure that man had shoes for his feet.

A few days into staying with him, wearing flip-flops he’d bought me, I felt an old, familiar sentence start forming in my head: of course this happened. You’re not somebody people stay for.

Maybe you’ve had a version of this thought yourself. It’s the conclusion a kid reaches when the people who are supposed to show up don’t, over and over, until “I’m not worth staying for” stops feeling like a feeling and starts feeling like a fact.

I caught it doing that, though. I noticed the sentence forming and asked it a question I now ask on purpose most mornings: is this actually true, or is this just the oldest story I know how to tell myself when someone leaves?

Then I looked around the actual room. My friend had come to get me. A woman had left. The evidence in the room didn’t support the sentence my head was trying to hand me.

Here’s what I didn’t understand yet, standing in those borrowed flip-flops: that porch wasn’t really the story. It was one scene in a much longer one.

(The views are personal.)

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