I'm a big believer that your first bad relationship should be considered a mulligan. It shouldn't be held against you, because we're all entitled to a relationship mistake. When we're starting out in life, we don't have a lot of direct experience that tells us whether this friend, girlfriend, boyfriend, is actually a horrible person who we need to keep the hell away from. Sometimes we don't even realize that we're in a bad relationship until we get out of it, or when we catch a glimpse of someone else's good relationship and see what we're missing. It can be an eye-opening experience and might make us more cautious or wary about future relationships.
That's why this first bad relationship shouldn't be held against us. We had no idea what was going on. However, when we have a second, third, or a long string of bad relationships, that's another matter entirely. Then, I hate to say it, we don't get off the hook so easily. We bear a lot of responsibility for these bad relationships for one simple reason: we are the common denominator in all our bad relationships.
Today, I'm going to address this history of bad relationships. We're going to explore what we need to understand about what's going on and how we can right the course of our relationship history.
