"Toxic People Keep Finding Me" Misdiagnoses a Selection Problem as a Bad-Luck Problem
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
"I don't know how I keep ending up with toxic people — they just keep finding me" is a common, sympathetic-sounding explanation for a repeated relationship pattern, and it locates the cause entirely outside the person saying it: bad luck, a hostile dating pool, statistical misfortune. It's comforting. It's also, in the large majority of cases, not what's actually happening.
What usually is happening is a selection pattern — a set of specific, consistent cues a person is drawn to or tolerates, operating below conscious awareness, that reliably filters the dating pool toward a particular type of partner. This isn't a moral failing or evidence of low self-worth; it's a mechanism, as specific and traceable as any other behavioral pattern, just one that happens to look, from the inside, exactly like a string of coincidences.
The tell is in the specificity. Random bad luck should, statistically, produce variety. A genuine selection mechanism produces a narrow, recognizable type, over and over, which is precisely what "toxic people keep finding me" usually describes when examined closely — not a random draw, but a consistent draw.
Reframing "they find me" as "I select for this, for reasons I haven't examined" is not self-blame. It's the only version of the explanation that actually points toward something a person can change, because luck can't be intervened on, and a selection pattern can.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai