While this may seem wildly counterintuitive, one reason might be that you’re not open and accepting.
It seems like if you keep attracting people who mistreat you, the best thing you can do is to put up walls and barriers to protect yourself. Unfortunately, that often has the effect of perpetuating the cycle of attracting bad guys to you.
People who treat you like crap have one thing in common: they don’t respect your boundaries.
Let’s say you put up walls around yourself. You shy away from people. You don’t engage with people. You close off when people come near.
Decent people will see you do that and say “huh, I guess she doesn’t want anyone near her.” They’ll respect that and leave you alone.
So who is it who gets through your walls? People who don’t listen. People who don’t respect your boundaries. People who say “She doesn’t want anyone close to her, but I don’t care what she wants, I only care about what I want. I’ll bulldoze right through her walls anyway.”
Walls keep away people who respect boundaries, so…surprise! When you put walls around yourself, the only people who come close to you are people who don’t respect boundaries.
Completely counterintuitive, but completely understandable once you get what’s going on.
The short answer? You probably grew up with men that treated you like crap so that’s what you know. You’re not actively looking for those types of guys, but you probably don’t know how to act when guys treat you genuinely well.
Sometimes it’s in the dating patterns. The guys I know who have been married for forever? They hated dating. Every. Single. One. of. Them. It was phony and it was a game that they had no interest in learning the rules to.
Their women felt much the same way and the reason for this is because they mutually wanted the relationships without the games. Serial daters want the games without the relationships.
So do you like to be pursued? That’s not gonna help. The good guys won’t understand that at all and just think you’re not interested. They expect you to be honest with how you feel.
Do you like men to get jealous? That’s not going to help either. The good guys will assume that you’re not that into them if you’re hanging with someone else. You want them to get angry but instead all you’ve done is broken their trust.
Do you equate love with possessiveness? Not gonna help. Good men will give you your space and respect you. You think they’re not interested, but they’re actually just trusting you to know your own mind.
And finally, the really good men have a measure of self respect. They aren’t going to put up with erratic, disrespectful behavior. Good men expect you to follow ordinary rules of politeness and consideration with them.
I don’t mean to imply here that every woman who attracts guys who treat her like crap is nothing but a hot mess herself, but that’s the way to bet.
If you want to attract a good guy, you need to know their way of thinking because it isn’t the same as the low value men. They play by a different set of rules and you need to know what they are.
We don’t attract people who treat us like trash. But we set the dynamics of our relationship from day 1 in a way that sends out a message to men that they can treat us in the worst way and we will still stick around.