Same here … although my experience with women has been by far the worst of it.

I do seem to have a habit of falling for pretty faces that, behind the love-bombing, mask some very ugly features indeed.

But therein lay the true problem, I think … less them and more me; I was, after all, the one who, each and every time, allowed myself to rush headlong into (yet another) romantic endeavour only to find, far too late, that … once again … I had allowed myself to be taken in by all the things I wanted to see and ignored the (in hindsight) all too clear red flags.

In retrospect, each and every time, there were early signs that I dismissed on the grounds that I was being unreasonable — that I was not justified in taking a dim view of someone for something so minor (whatever it might have been) … that I could not take things as characteristic on the basis of a single instance of something.

But it’s the ‘Chinese water torture’ that gets you in the end: one little drop here, another there … a repeat of something some time later; nothing major … no one instance that is categorically … unmistakably … a flood warning, just a steady drip, drip, drip that catches you unawares as you fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy of having invested in someone and something (including your own fantasies of the perfect love) — and although it’s all obvious in hindsight, at the time you’re too busy trying to find a way through and back out to the other side … where it will, once again, be wonderful, just like it was at the beginning (or so you allowed yourself to think as you, with carefree abandon, dismissed all the red flags as insignificant).

Add in a sense of guilt for being weak if you give up … unworthy … letting yourself and someone else down by not trying to work things out — an unhealthy dose of “I told her I loved her, so what does my word … my very love itself … mean if, I just run away because its not perfect right now (or nearly all of the time)? What kind of man am I? I couldn’t look myself in the mirror, if I just abandoned her because I’m not having fun.”

…

And as for the men, well, if you’re heterosexual … not blinded by the physical attraction … you are, instead, prey to the (perhaps ironically) even more insidious danger of believing you are soul mates because, if you can dismiss attraction then the love you feel for this person must be the real, true, unadulterated thing, right? If one of you were of the opposite sex, you’d marry them! What more could you want than a lifelong connection that can never be broken by infidelity or misunderstandings due to a different biology and socialisation? That’s true love!

Until you find out the ugly truth about them too.

…

So, to no small degree, I blame myself, really, for being so infatuated with my own fantasies of what love, friendship, relationships, etc. were that I never stopped to question whether any of the ones I pursued really were, rather than what I projected onto them.

It’s not that it’s all one-sided … I didn’t fall victim to nobody … but, I recognise that it was, each and every time, my own poor judgement that led me astray … my own narcissism, if you like, insofar as my dreams and fantasies prevailed, not my good sense.

I just can’t trust myself, more than I can’t trust others is the real issue; if you’re a flighted bird and you see a cat but don’t fly away then it’s your own fault if you get eaten — paved though it may be with good intentions, I built my own road to my own hell and have no-one but myself to blame for it.

…

So, these days, I’m less dismissive of my gut or those flashes of “that’s not right” around people … less determined to deny unpleasant conclusions about people I want to like/love … and simply warier of letting people into my life at all — friendly, yes … bosom buddies, not necessarily (not until I’ve seen who they really are).

And, despite that, I only narrowly escaped making the same mistake again recently, but, thankfully someone I cautiously thought of as a friend … but for whom I was developing more affection as time went by … behaved in such an appalling manner that it put their other behaviour into perspective and, in the intervening time, I have had pause for thought and decided not to respond to their subsequent overtures — their apologies mean nothing months later when you realise that they won’t suddenly be a different person because they’ve said ‘sorry’.

…

The biggest problem, I find, is that we allow ourselves to form beliefs about friendship in the large on the basis of the friendships we have and, if … as I am lucky enough to be able to say … you have solid ones with decent people, it’s easy to take that for granted and assume that everyone you meet to whom you take shine is similar.

But they aren’t.

…

So, likewise, good luck and I’m glad you have had luck with your romantic relationships at least — me, I’m unlucky in Love and at cards, it seems … so, I’ve stopped playing for now … and am a lot less unhappy for it.