Dear Coleen
Over the past few years I’ve had a bad time with relationships. I was in a long-term partnership that turned very toxic, so I ended it 18 months ago.
I met someone else quite quickly and threw myself into that relationship, but it ended six months ago after he cheated on me, and I was left heartbroken.
I’ve now met someone else – a really great guy who’s smart, caring and everything I’ve ever wanted in a partner.
However, when I’m not with him, I find myself worrying a lot about things going wrong and ending up back where I started. It feels too good to be true.
I’m sure my past two relationships have scarred me and I’m frightened of trusting anyone.
I’ve started to question him a lot – where he’s been, who he’s been with and so on, which is obviously annoying and confusing for him when things seem so good between us.
Sometimes I just think “why bother?” if I’m going to end up getting my heart broken again.
Have you any ideas about how I can get past this?
Coleen says
You’ve had some bad luck in recent years and of course that’s going to affect your attitude in future relationships, but you have to keep it in perspective.
Your current boyfriend a different person and you have the chance to start with a clean slate.
It sounds like you went into your last relationship on the rebound and didn’t give yourself enough time to think about whether he was right for you – and it turned out he wasn’t.
But you just have to learn from it and move on.
When you’ve been hurt by someone, you can either decide to be very closed off and cynical, or you can think “I’m going to give it my best shot and if it doesn’t work out, I know I’ll survive because I’ve survived before”.
My own relationship history hasn’t been a bed of roses and I’ve always been dumped (I’ve never been the dumper!), yet I’ve always gone into the next relationship positively, determined to give it a chance and not allow previous bad experiences to sabotage things before they have had a chance to develop.
Stop expecting things to go wrong because it’ll undermine the relationship.
None of us know how a partnership will play out when we get into it – we just have to embrace it and see how things go.
