If Your Last Three Relationships Ended the Same Way, That's Not a Coincidence Sample Size. That's Data.
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
When a third relationship in a row ends the same way — the same complaint, the same slow withdrawal, the same final conversation — the common instinct is to treat each one as its own unfortunate, unrelated event: bad luck, a bad stretch, three unrelated people who happened to disappoint in similar ways. Three independent coincidences of the same specific shape is a much less likely explanation than it feels like from the inside.
Three data points is a small sample by most statistical standards, but it's not a trivial one — especially when the thing repeating isn't a vague theme but a specific, describable sequence. The more specific the repeated shape, the less plausible "coincidence" becomes as an explanation, even at a sample size of three.
What usually stops people from treating it as data is that each instance felt, at the time, like it was about the other person — a different person each time, which makes the repetition feel like proof against a pattern rather than evidence for one. But a constant across three different variables is exactly what a pattern looks like from the inside.
Three isn't proof. It's a legitimate hypothesis, generated by real data, that most people dismiss before ever testing it — usually because testing it requires suspecting the one variable that was actually constant across all three.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai