Trouble chases sinners, while blessings reward the righteous.
—Proverbs 13:21 NLT

“I don’t understand it. I can be in a coliseum of fifty thousand people, and I am going to somehow fall in love with the only alcoholic in the crowd. It is uncanny. I just draw them in like moths to a light.”

“If there is a control freak in the entire state, I will find him and think I can’t live without him.”

“I keep going to work for jerks. It seems that if I get offered a job by a jerk, I automatically think it is the best company in the world . . . until I have been there for six months.”

“I keep finding losers. What is it about me that attracts these guys?”

“Why do all of the women I am attracted to turn out to be so needy?”

“I keep finding myself in the same relationship over and over; the only thing that changes is the names.”

You know what I love about these statements? Whenever I hear them, whether it is about dating, friendship, business, or choosing a community, I know the people who make them are on the road to finding better relationships. Why? Because they are finally noticing that the people they are finding are not the problem after all. Instead, they are seeing that they are the problem, or at least a big part of it: They are realizing that the real problem is that their own “people picker” is broken.

They keep choosing the ones who are either going to hurt them or let them down or not be good for them in some way. And they are beginning to realize that it is no accident that these people show up in their lives: they themselves have something to do with finding—and attracting—them. When I hear that insight, I know it’s only a matter of time until the pattern ends. Once they notice it, they can get to the reasons for it and change them. And you can too.

Like Attracts Like

But it is so, so hard to get people to realize that they have a part in attracting these people into their lives, and for being attracted to them too. They often do not see that what is so attractive to them about the person in the beginning has something to do with their own dysfunction and that they deny obvious warning signs. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard, “I saw little signs that, looking back, I ignored. I guess I just wanted it to be right so much that I ignored some things that really were red flags.” They did not listen to “that little voice inside.”

There is a law of attraction in this area of life for sure. Dysfunctional people attract dysfunctional people, and healthy people attract healthy people. It’s uncanny how consistent it is. There is just no such thing, for example, as someone who is in a long-term relationship with an addict who is not in some way codependent. Those two are always able to find each other. The question is, why?