Your Relationship Feels Unprecedented. Statistically, It Almost Certainly Isn't.
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
Every relationship, while it's happening, feels singular — unlike anything either person has been through before, governed by its own unrepeatable logic. This feeling is nearly universal and almost never accurate as a claim about the actual mechanics underneath it.
What feels unprecedented is usually the specific combination of two people's histories, which genuinely is unique — no one else has dated exactly this person with exactly this background. But the pattern running underneath that unique combination is drawn from a much smaller, much more common set: the handful of relational dynamics that show up, in slightly different costumes, across enormous numbers of relationships that have nothing else in common.
This is why advice, research, and other people's stories keep turning out to be more applicable than they seem like they should be — not because your relationship isn't specific, but because the specificity lives mostly in the surface details, while the underlying pattern is far less rare than the feeling suggests.
"This has never happened to anyone like this before" is almost always true about the details and almost always false about the mechanism. Confusing the two is what keeps people from recognizing help that was, in fact, written for exactly their situation.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai