Why Do I Keep Choosing the Wrong Partners? (And How Do I Stop?)

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Your friend isn’t trying to be mean. She loves you. She’s on your side. So when she says it – “you just have a type, hey” – she’s smiling.

And you smile back. You laugh, you say “yeahhh,” you mask like crazy through the whole moment.

Then you get in the car. And you sit there for a second, and the sentence that shows up isn’t kind at all.

What’s wrong with me?

Because you can see it too. You’ve lined them up at two in the morning more times than you’d like to admit. Different names, different jobs, different hair…. and somehow the same ending. The same slow shrinking. The same you, six months in, apologizing for things that don’t need apologizing for.

So you do the math. They’re all different, which means the one thing they have in common is you. Which must mean you’re broken. That you’re just.… wired to want people who won’t be good to you, and that’s the hand you got dealt. Forever.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening. Not even a little.

You aren’t bad at choosing partners. You’ve been choosing with a blindfold on and oven mitts for hands – and both of those come off.

About this episode

“Why do I keep choosing the wrong partners” is a trap of a question because it assumes you stood in front of a full lineup, with good information and a calm nervous system, and freely picked the worst one. That’s not what happened.

So in Episode 17, I change the question. Instead of “what’s wrong with me,” we ask: what conditions was I choosing under, and what information did I actually have at the time? And when I walk through that with the women in my practice, we find the same handful of mechanisms every single time – none of them a character flaw, all of them upstream of the choosing.

I walk through the seven mechanisms behind the pattern: masking so good nobody meets the real you, being trained to be chosen instead of to choose, rejection sensitivity that reads enthusiasm as safety, intensity mistaken for compatibility, empathy that turns into a full-time job, a gut you were taught to overrule, and the quiet trap of mistaking being tolerated for being loved. Then I give you three concrete moves to recalibrate the whole system.

What you’ll learn

• Why the question “why do I keep choosing wrong?” is built on a false assumption – and the better question that actually has a way out
• The seven mechanisms driving the pattern, and why every one of them happens before you ever choose
• Why your best mask sets a relationship up on an expiry date from date one – and stops you from interviewing them back
• How rejection sensitivity turns “they chose me” into relief, and relief into something you mistake for love
• The difference between activation and safety in your body – and the three-question check to run after every date
• How to unmask earlier on purpose and treat it as screening, not confessing
• The “gut is data, not a verdict” rule – how to log what you notice instead of talking yourself out of it

Being tolerated is not being loved. It’s the absence of a certain kind of pain – but it’s not the presence of love.

Resources mentioned

• Free quiz, Is It Actually Me?: JennaDalton.com/quiz
• Send me a DM on Instagram: @neurodivergentlovelab

Ready to go deeper?

If you’re tired of the same ending and you want to figure out what’s actually driving it:

• Take the free quiz, Is It Actually Me?: JennaDalton.com/quiz – sort out whether it’s your wiring, your relationship, or the two tangled together
• Book a free 15-minute consultation: Work with me if you’re curious about working together one-on-one (available across Alberta)

Loved this episode?

Subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming, leave a rating wherever you listen, and send this one to the friend who’s whispered “what’s wrong with me?” in a parked car with the engine off. She needs to hear that nothing is.

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Episode transcript

Open

Your friend isn’t trying to be mean. She loves you. She’s on your side. So when she says:

“You just have a type, hey.”

You mask like crazy through the moment. You laugh and say “Yeahhhh.”

And then you go home and you sit in the car for a minute with the engine off, and the sentence that shows up isn’t kind at all.

What’s wrong with me?

Because you can see the pattern too. You’ve lined them up in your head at two in the morning more times than you’d like to admit. Different names, different jobs, different hair, and somehow the same ending. The same slow shrinking. The same you, six months in, apologizing for things that don’t need apologizing for.

So you decide that — since they’re all different in some way — that means the common denominator is you. That there’s something wrong with you. That you are, at some fundamental level, attracted to people who won’t be good to you, and that this is simply what you’re stuck with. Forever. Because you can’t even fathom how to get out of this cycle. You don’t have a clue where to start.

I want you to know that I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

I think you’ve been choosing with a specific set of tools, under a specific set of conditions, that were basically guaranteed to produce this result. And that’s a completely different situation, because that one has a way out.

Yes. You’re not stuck with this forever. Let me show you how.

Intro

This is the Neurodivergent Love Lab. I’m Jenna Dalton, a psychologist who’s AuDHD. I help ADHD, autistic, and AuDHD women feel truly understood and deeply loved. And this is Episode 17: Why Do I Keep Choosing the Wrong Partners? (And How Do I Stop?)

Now, I want to say something before we start, because the title of this episode could land badly if I don’t.

This is not an episode about how you’re responsible for how other people treated you. You’re not. If someone was unkind to you, that’s on them, period, and no amount of understanding your own patterns changes that.

This is an episode about the machinery underneath the choosing. Because once you can see the machinery, you get some say in it. And I want you to have a lot of say in it.

The Setup: Let’s Change the Question

First thing. Let’s change the question, because the one in the title is a trap.

“Why do I keep choosing the wrong partners” contains a hidden assumption. It assumes you were standing in front of a full lineup of potential partners, with good information, in a calm nervous system, and freely picked the worst one.

That’s not what happened. Not once.

So here’s the better question. What conditions was I choosing under? And what information did I have at the time?

Because when I walk through this with women in my practice, we find the same six things over and over. Not character flaws. Six perfectly logical mechanisms, each one doing exactly what it was built to do.

Let’s go through them.

The Education: The Six Mechanisms

Part one. Why this keeps happening.

Mechanism one. You were pretty darn good at masking, so they never got to meet the real you.

Now before you stop listening because you think I’m blaming you for this, I’m not. Women are conditioned to be likeable while dating — whether they’re neurodivergent or not — and I’m going to show you exactly how that shows up in those first few glorious moments of a relationship. Not to blame you. To help you understand.

Think about who you are on a first date. Or the first three months of a relationship.

You’re on. You’re funny, you’re easy, you’re low-maintenance, you’re up for anything. You laughed at the right moment. You mirrored their energy without even deciding to, because that’s what your nervous system does under social pressure. You liked the things they liked and did the things they liked to do.

And they fell for that person. Of course they did. She’s delightful.

But here’s the problem, and it’s structural. That woman is a performance you cannot sustain. So the relationship is built, from date one, on a version of you with an expiry date. And when the real you starts showing up around month six, the tired one, the one who needs the lights off and a day to recover, it doesn’t read as “here’s more of her.” It reads as a bait and switch. To them, and worse, to you.

And there’s a second cost that’s even bigger. You can’t assess someone while you’re performing for them. All your processing is going into the performance. There’s nothing left over to run the question that actually matters, which is: do I even like this person? Are they kind? How do they treat the waiter? How do I feel in my own body sitting here?

You weren’t choosing badly. You were too busy auditioning to interview them back.

If this feels close to home, definitely check out Episode 13: What Masking Costs Your Relationship (and What Unmasking Actually Looks Like).

And let me be clear: I’m not suggesting masking is always bad or that you have a tendency to aggressively mask in the first stages of a relationship. However, putting your most shiny self forward in those first few months is something a lot of women do — whether they’re neurodivergent or not — and it’s worth pointing out that it can lead you to spend so much energy on keeping the mask in place that you’re not noticing oddities or red flags that signal this person isn’t for you.

Mechanism two. You were trained to be chosen, not to choose.

Here’s the good girl layer, and it goes deep.

Girls get raised on a story where the central romantic event is being selected. Being wanted. Being picked. You get taught to be pickable, to be pleasant, to be the kind of person somebody would want, and almost nobody sits a girl down and says “and what do you want? What are your actual conditions? What’s a dealbreaker for you? What would feel like the ideal match for you?”

Layer that onto a nervous system that already runs fawn, appease and accommodate and keep everyone comfortable, and choosing barely even happens. Someone selects you, and you feel grateful, and gratitude is a lovely feeling and it is not the same thing as compatibility.

You can be choosy, not just chosen. In fact, I insist on it.

Mechanism three. Rejection sensitivity makes interest feel like relief, and relief feel like love.

If you live with RSD, and something like three quarters of adults with ADHD report that they do, then rejection isn’t a disappointment. It’s an emergency. It hits you like a freight train.

So when somebody chooses you, decisively, enthusiastically, early, the feeling you get isn’t just flattery. It’s relief. It’s the alarm switching off. And that is an extremely powerful feeling. Way more powerful than “hmm, they seem nice and stable.”

Two things fall out of that.

One. Whoever moves fastest and hardest gets a head start with your nervous system, and the person who comes on strongest is not always the person who’s best for you.

Two. Leaving becomes almost impossible, because leaving means voluntarily walking into the exact thing your body treats as a catastrophe. So you stay, and you call it commitment, and some of it is commitment, and some of it is your nervous system refusing to press the button marked pain — even when it’s for self-preservation reasons.

Mechanism four. Intensity got mistaken for compatibility.

I did a whole episode on the hyperfocus to withdrawal cycle back in Episode 3: The Neuroscience Of Why You Fall Hard and Then Pull Away, so you may remember this one.

Early relationships can involve real hyperfocus on a new person, with a dopamine rush that feels like something out of a rom-com. It’s love at first sight. Insane chemistry. Soulmate-level good.

Here’s the trouble. That feeling is so loud that it drowns out the quieter signals. The little “hmm” about how they talked about their ex. The tiny flinch when they made that joke. The heavy feeling in your stomach when they brushed off your question. You can’t hear them over the noise, and by the time the noise dies down, you’re eight months in and attached.

Intensity is not information about fit. It’s information about chemistry. They’re not the same, and — unless you’re aware this can happen — it’s tough to tell the difference.

Mechanism five. You saw who they could be, and you said “sign me up!”

This one comes up almost every time, and it comes from one of your best qualities, which is why it’s so painful.

Many neurodivergent women describe hyper-empathy. Not missing other people’s feelings, the exact opposite. Feeling them at full volume, sometimes before they’re spoken. Walking into a room and catching the tension nobody’s named. Feeling someone else’s sadness in your own body. Knowing someone is mad the instant it happens.

So you meet someone, and you don’t just see who they are. You see the hurt underneath. You see the potential. You feel, physically, how much better they could be.

And then a very old piece of programming kicks in, the one that says your job is to manage other people’s feelings, and you sign up. Not consciously. You just start doing it. Adjusting, absorbing, explaining away, taking the temperature, keeping things smooth.

You didn’t fall in love with a person. You fell in love with a project, and a project can absorb an unlimited amount of you. It’s self-abandonment at its finest.

Mechanism six. You did see the red flags. You’d just been trained to overrule yourself.

This is the one I most want to get you to remember, so listen closely.

The stereotype says neurodivergent women miss the warning signs because they can’t read people. That is almost always backwards. You read people extremely well. You caught it. You noticed the thing on the second date. You noticed the way they talked about their last partner. You noticed the flatness in their voice. You saw the tendency to brush things aside in them.

The problem wasn’t the reading. The problem was what you did with it.

Because you’ve spent your whole life being told your read was wrong. You’re too sensitive. You overthink too much. You read into things. You make a big deal out of nothing. Do that to a girl for twenty, thirty, forty years and she doesn’t stop noticing. She just stops trusting what she notices, and gets very, very good at generating an explanation for it.

They’re probably just stressed. They didn’t mean it like that. They’ve had a hard time. Everyone has bad days.

That’s not blindness. That’s a woman who’s been trained to argue with her own intuition.

And I do need to name something here, carefully, because it’s in the research and it’s protective. Autistic women can be more vulnerable to being taken advantage of in relationships, partly because we’ve been socialized so thoroughly to accommodate, and partly because we’ve been taught to doubt our own perception.

If that feels true for you, it was not because you were foolish. It was because someone exploited a trained response. And the thing that protects you going forward isn’t becoming more suspicious. It’s trusting your own internal instincts again.

And here’s a seventh mechanism that gets so many of us.

Mechanism seven. Being tolerated felt like being loved.

When you’ve spent your life being told you’re too much, someone who simply tolerates you can feel like winning the lottery. They don’t complain when I info-dump. They don’t mind that I need a day to recover. They let me openly stim. And that feels like being loved.

Being tolerated is not being loved. It’s the absence of a certain kind of pain, but it’s not necessarily the presence of love.

Part two. So what does this actually mean?

Okay. Take a breath, because that was a lot.

Here’s what I want you to notice about all seven of those.

Not one of them is “you’re bad at picking people.” Not one.

They’re all upstream. They all happen before the choosing. Masking, fawn conditioning, an alarm system that reads interest as safety, dopamine drowning out the subtle signals, empathy that turns into employment, and a lifetime of being taught to overrule your own gut instinct.

Which means the pattern isn’t about you being bad at picking. It’s about the system being miscalibrated. And systems can be adjusted.

That’s genuinely good news, and I want you to feel hopeful, because “I’m broken and I’ll always pick the wrong person” has no next step. “I’ve been choosing under conditions that were stacked against me” has about three next steps, and I’m giving them to you now.

The Tool: Three Moves

Move one. Unmask earlier, on purpose. Treat it as screening.

This is the big one, and I know it’s probably a scary one.

Right now you probably unmask late. You hold the performance as long as you physically can, and then it collapses somewhere around month six, and it feels like a reveal, and everyone’s destabilized.

Flip it. Start letting small true things out early. Not everything. Not a “this is me, take or leave it” monologue on date two. One true thing at a time.

“I’m going to be honest, loud restaurants are hard for me. Can we go somewhere quieter?”

“I’m going to need a quiet day after this. That’s not about you, that’s just how I recharge.”

“I could talk about this for an hour, stop me whenever your eyes glaze over.”

“I have particular tastes and I’m pretty rigid about them so please let me know if you’re feeling like I’m not considering your own tastes.”

And here’s the reframe that makes this bearable, because I know your stomach dropped a bit just then when I said “it’s time to unmask right from the get go.” Remember this:

You’re not confessing. You’re screening.

Every small true thing you put on the table is a test, and they’re the one being tested. How did they respond? Did they adjust easily? Did they get curious? Did they make it weird? Did they file it away and bring it up later as a joke at your expense?

That’s the information you never used to get, because you never gave them the chance to be their honest selves in relation to you. You were too busy making sure you were what they wanted to even consider whether they were what you wanted.

Yes, some people will leave. Let them leave now, at week three, instead of at year four when you’ve built a literal house on the performance entitled “I’ll be whoever you want me to be just tell me who I should be.”

Move two. Learn the difference between activation and safety.

Your body has two different responses to a new person and they can feel deceptively similar, especially at the start.

Activation is fast heart, buzzing, obsessive checking of your phone, sleeplessness, appetite gone, and a kind of glorious dread. That’s dopamine plus an alarm system. It feels like love because it’s so intense. So it must be love. Right?!

Safety is different, and it’s quieter, which is exactly why we discount it. Safety is your shoulders coming down. Breathing that goes lower into your body. Sentences that come out whole without having to be aggressively filtered. The absence of that background hum of monitoring every facial expression, tone, shift in body language to stay ahead of whatever they could possibly be feeling so you can manage it.

So here’s the check I want you to run, and you can run it after every single date. Three questions.

Was I performing, or was I authentically there (at least most of the time)?

What did my body do? Did I notice any shifts or signals that I may have pushed aside or ignored?

How did I feel about myself in that room? Did I feel like I was taking up space in the best way possible? Or shrinking to accommodate the space they demanded?

That last one is a biggie. Not how you felt about them. How you felt about yourself when you were with them.

Because the pattern you’re trying to break isn’t really about which people you like. It’s about which people you shrink around. And you can measure shrinking. It’s honestly easier to measure than chemistry.

Move three. Write your list while you’re calm, and treat your gut as data.

Okay, there are two parts to this one.

First. Sit down and write your actual list. Not the one you’d say out loud at brunch. The real one.

Non-negotiable green flags. What does someone have to do for you to feel safe? Give me specifics. “They don’t get weird when I need to leave a party early.” “They tell me directly when something’s bothering them instead of going quiet.” “They don’t tease me about the things I love.”

And your red flags. Specific and behavioural, not vague. Not “controlling.” What does controlling actually look like on a Tuesday morning? What has it looked like before?

Is it them not wanting you to spend time with specific friends? Stopping you from doing the things you love? Dictating the meal plan for the week to fit their likes and dislikes?

Get specific. Let yourself be brutally honest.

Second part. New rule for your gut. Your gut is data, not a verdict.

Old rule was: I noticed something, then I talked myself out of it. New rule is: I noticed something, so I write it down and I watch.

Get it out of your head and into a note on your phone. Date it. Don’t judge it, don’t resolve it, don’t explain it away, and equally don’t panic about it. Just log it. One flag might be nothing, honestly. Three flags in six weeks is a pattern, and a pattern is much harder to argue yourself out of than a feeling, especially when it’s written down in your own handwriting with a date and specific details attached.

And here’s the extra piece, and it’s important for us specifically. Pick one person you trust who gets a vote. One friend who knows you, who you tell the truth to, and who is allowed to say “hey, I’ve noticed you’ve apologized about them four times this month.” You’re not outsourcing your decision. You’re just adding a second set of hands to Operation: find you a more ideal partner, because you truly do not have to do this alone and I imagine at least one person in your life would love to help you find someone who won’t make you cry on their couch.

The Quiz

Now. I want to say the thing that this whole episode has been circling.

Sometimes the answer isn’t that you chose badly. Sometimes you chose a decent person and the two of you are stuck in something neither of you knows how to get out of. And you can’t tell which one you’re in, because your default setting is that it must be you.

That’s exactly why I built my free quiz. It’s called Is It Actually Me? It’s twelve questions and it takes a few minutes.

What it does is help you sort out what’s actually driving the same fight, the same feeling, the same stuck place, over and over. Whether it’s your wiring, your relationship, or the two of them tangled up together.

And I made it because “it’s me” and “it’s us” are not the same thing, and not knowing the difference will keep you in exactly the same loop for years.

Take it free at JennaDalton.com/quiz. That’s JennaDalton.com/quiz.

The Close

Here’s what I want you to take with you.

You do not have a broken picker.

You had a nervous system that read enthusiasm as safety. You had thirty years of training that said your job was to be chosen and to be easy. You had a mask so good that nobody got to meet you until you were already attached. You had empathy so strong it turned into a full-time job. And you had a gut that was working perfectly the whole time, being overruled by a woman who’d been taught, over and over, that she couldn’t trust herself.

Every single one of those is upstream of the choosing. Which means the fix is upstream too.

Show up as yourself sooner. Notice what your body does. Write the list while you’re calm. Keep the log. And when your gut says something, stop arguing with it and start writing it down.

You’re not choosing wrong. You’ve been choosing with a blindfold on and oven mitts for hands. Let’s take those off, shall we?

Go take the quiz at JennaDalton.com/quiz, and see what it tells you.

Thanks for being here with me today. Remember, you deserve to feel truly understood and deeply loved. I’ll talk to you soon.

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This podcast is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for therapy or mental health care. If you’re in crisis, please reach out to a local crisis line or emergency service.