Last year I had a few clients who were dealing with some “man problems”. In a nutshell, dating men who were unavailable to them. One was having a relationship with a married man, the other was on again-off again dating someone who had made it clear to her he didn’t want to commit.

Both were in a pickle. This is what they were used to, it was their pattern. Whether the men were physically unavailable for the long term (married), or emotionally unavailable, these women just kept picking the wrong partners.

Much science has gone into why we pick certain people. My favorite book on this is “Getting the Love You Want” by Harv Hendrix. Other interesting ones are “Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment”  and really there are just too many good books on this topic to mention.

But, what I want to focus on today is not just who they were picking-- which I think for many of us is an unconscious thing that happens-- but more specifically, what they were tolerating when they were already IN the relationship and knew their partner wasn’t good for them.

Because so many of us have been there, right?

Personally, I can vividly remember sitting in my therapist's office with my ex-husband who at that time was still my boyfriend. We were in our mid-twenties and he was not ready to settle down. He would regularly stay out all night, roll home drunk at 6 am when I never knew if he was off screwing someone else or dead in a ditch somewhere (turns out he was screwing someone else throughout the majority of our relationship. Many, many someone else's). After years of this and other disrespectful behavior towards me and many months of therapy, my therapist said to me, “Andrea, I don’t think he’s ready to change. You can either learn to tolerate it or leave.” He was sitting right there and he didn’t argue with her. We all knew it was the truth.

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