If you keep wondering why Prince Charming hasn’t come and swept you off your feet yet, you may need to reassess your dating behaviour.

Love is the force that nurtures us as human beings. It provides protection, touch and emotional support that allows us grow as children and thrive as adults.

In each phase of lives there are essential emotional, psychological and sexual development stages we need to go through, in order for us to be ourselves and be fully functional in loving relationships as adults.

However, it is not uncommon to miss out on some of the nurturing we need while growing up, which causes us we choose different relationships along the way to help to fill in the gaps of what we think we require in terms of love and emotional support. Unfortunately, this is an easy way to get stuck in a pattern of dating the wrong people and continually block our relationship success.

Love and relationship expert, Jo Warwick shares her 10 reasons why we keep dating the wrong people, instead finding the right relationship for ourselves:

1. GUILT

If we don’t get each of the essential gestures of love, affection and nurturing we needed while growing up, or perhaps don’t recieve enough of it, we will often be left with feelings of unfulfilment and a deep desire for contentment. These feelings can translate into feeling guilty or blaming ourselves for how we were treated in the past, and so we choose partners who mirror the emotional detachment or cold-heartedness that we have become accustomed to. For example, children who have experiened abuse from their parents may grow up to choose partners who are abusive, as they feel it was what they deserve and the only form of ‘love’ that they know.

2. COMPETITION

When there isn’t enough of the good stuff (love, attention, material things) to go around in the family while growing up, we learn to believe that we must compete to get noticed and for people to want to invest in us. As adults, we internlize this in a way that makes believe that love is lacking and only the worthy get it – so we are likely to enter into relationships with peope who are emotionally unavailable and distant or put up with cheating in a relationship.

3. PUNISHMENT

When we don’t recieve the proper nurturing and love we require, it creates a belief based on shame. We think, ‘I am bad for wanting more love’, so we believe we are not good enough to recieve love and therefore choose relationships that punish us for having desire and for needing more.

4. PROTECTION

If we don’t yet feel strong and capable enough as individuals, we will seek someone else to play out the parent role. This creates the impression that we are safe and protected and rely on our partners to fulfill emotional voids that are supposed that have been left by our parents or own lack of confidence in ourselves. Soon enough, this relationship becomes suffocating, as the other person may be domineering and we start to lose our sense of self.

5. AVOIDANCE

We choose partners who don’t challenge or support our growth to avoid maturing into an adult and taking ownership for our minds, bodies, energy, desires, dreams, actions and choices in life and hunt and provide for ourselves.

6. TESTING POWER

All dramatic relationships including those in #4 and #5 are based on taking or surrendering power – this can be emotional, physical or sexual. These relationship games are played, because we are reliving the teenage separation process and youthful rebelious phase in order to gain what we are missing so that we can fully mature in all ways.

7. ENDURE

Sticking it out and enduring a tough relationship is actually about suffering and self-sacrifice for redemption, as we think it is what we deserve. However, this is not what a loving relationship with the right person, which is founded on mutual respect, equality, enjoyment and sharing is supposed to look like!

8. DUTY

Duty in a relationships is also about self-sacrifice and may be based on fear. We feel we owe it to the person to stay with them because we either feel guilty for leaving, think it is what we deserve or fear being alone and having to stand on our own two feet.

9. ADDICTION

It is easy to become addicted to pain and addicted to the ‘game’ and up-and-down nature of volatile relationships. We feel that if we endure and sacrifice long enough, we will receive the ‘reward’ of the love we so deeply crave and desire. This can become the ‘high’ that we constantly chase, causing us to become trapped in a vicious cycle of unhealthy relationships.

10. PROBLEM SOLVING

Often when we choose to date the ‘wrong’ people, it’s because we are trying to rectify problems of the past and seek to change it; instead of changing our attitude and responses towards it.

Once we learn to change our actions in the present and focus on finding a solution for getting what we need, instead of trying to understand and rectify the past, we can break the cycle of dating the wrong people and truly find that one person who makes up happy in every way.

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AUTHOR: IOL/Female First