Oops! I did it again!

So you are licking your wounds. Your relationship came to a bad end. Your fairy prince turned into a swine. The romance that started magically in your dream castle ended up in a grotty sty. As for your swain, well, he ended up smelling of a number of things; but roses was not one of them.

Naturally, your confidence has been dented. Somewhere along the line your judgement was a bit skewed on that one. But you are not going to let it put you off men for life. Besides, you are the kind of woman who needs to have a man in your life.

It is all about learning from the experience, you reflect. So you take a long, hurt look at the relationship and you decide how you want the next man to be different. Maybe you will try looking for someone who is the opposite of your previous partner, or maybe you are looking for someone to sweep you off your feet and make it all alright. Either way, things look pretty promising at the start, and then you start getting a whiff of the sty all over again.

Oops! It has happened again. Logic suggests that there is more to this than simple coincidence. Now you start to feel concerned. What do you have to do to stop falling for bad men from turning into a habit? Is there a way to avoid these pratfalls in the future?

The single most powerful thing you can do to protect yourself from further heartache and confidence-bashing failure is to acquire self-awareness. You need to start becoming aware of the patterns that you keep repeating in relationships; the patterns that keep attracting the wrong men.

You may enjoy playing the little woman, but resent being dismissed as a fluffy airhead. You may want your partner to be the masterful type, yet resent feeling controlled. The strengths you are looking for in a man, may be an attempt to compensate for your own shortcomings. You may want a man to propel you out of your dull, routine existence into a more exciting world.

One big problem women have with relationships, is that they work on their assumptions. Now, there is a vast gulf that separates intuition from assumptions. Intuition is that instantaneous, inexplicable nugget of information that lands in your lap. You can choose to act on it; or ignore it, at your peril. Assumptions are the expectations that you hold of your partner, irrespective of the evidence.

Assumptions are also curiously hardy creatures. They can be proved wrong time and time again. Yet, instead of questioning the assumption, the temptation is blame the person who has disappointed your expectation. You say: He should have known: He should have done