I Always Ended Up in One-Sided Relationships
Every relationship I'd been in seemed to follow the same trajectory: I gave more, noticed more, adjusted more, and somewhere along the way it stopped being mutual without ever having a moment where I could point and say that's when it changed. I told myself I'd just chosen selfish people, repeatedly, by unfortunate coincidence. Why "I Chose Selfish People" Was the Easier Story It let me be the consistent, generous one in every version of the story, and it put the imbalance entirely outside my own behavior — a story about who I kept encountering, not about anything I might be doing to help produce the same shape every time. What I Didn't Examine Until Much Later I never asked what I was doing, at the very start of each relationship, that made giving more feel like the safe default — before there was any evidence the other person wouldn't reciprocate, I was already offering more than I was asking for, setting a ratio early that then just continued running on its own momentum. The Pattern Beneath the Pattern It wasn't really that I chose selfish people. It was that I trained every relationship, from its earliest days, to expect more from me than from the other person, and most people, given that setup, simply continued it rather than correcting it. What Made This Visible Looking back at how I behaved in the first few weeks of several different relationships — not how they ended, but how they started — showed the same early over-giving in every single one, well before either person's actual character had even become clear. The pattern wasn't in who I chose. It was in what I did the moment I chose them.
Meet Ori — built to help you see the early ratio you're setting, since that's usually where the imbalance actually begins.
Part of The Recognition Library →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai
This is an illustrative composite, not a real member account.