Love is a beautiful thing, isn’t it? 

Every soul walking on Earth is eager to find the love of their lives. It’s an amazing feeling to be loved by the one we love and an equally heartbreaking and painful feeling when the opposite rings true. Not having our love reciprocated is one of the worst things we can ever experience.

If we feel unlucky in love—no matter how hard we try, none of our relationships work out—then maybe we need to take a step back and think about why this keeps on happening. 

“Why do I keep on falling in love with the wrong people when all I want is a happy relationship with someone who loves me just like I love them?” 

Here are five possible reasons we keep falling for the wrong people:

1. We are impulsive and impatient when it comes to love. 

We look around and see everyone we know in happy relationships and stable marriages. All of them seem so excited and lucky to have each other, and the love they share makes us wish that we also had that in our lives. Even though we feel happy for them, it sometimes makes us feel lonely, unloved—it makes us think that we will die alone. 

This makes us rush into the wrong relationships with the wrong people; our impulsivity stops us from seeing the truth. We become so stubborn and obsessed with looking for love that we end up falling for the wrong people—the ones who don’t quite know how to give us what we are looking for. 

Love can never be rushed, nor can it be forced. We need to be patient if we want the right kind of love in our lives. Love will come to us when we are truly ready for it. And most importantly, it will come when we least expect it. 

2. We always wait for the wrong person to change. 

Deep down inside, we know that the person we are in a relationship with is never going to change, yet we keep on convincing ourselves that all will be good in the long run “as long as we give it some time.”

Optimism is a good quality to have, but there is a difference between being optimistic and wishful thinking. When we refuse to see the truth and choose to believe what we want, we open ourselves up for more hurt and disappointment.

Love should not be about changing each other, nor should it be about making sure that our partner is exactly like us. If we cannot accept them for the way they are, then we are with them for the wrong reasons. 

On the other hand, if there are negative things that bother and hurt us about them and they don’t respect us enough to want to work on themselves and change those things, then we are simply not important enough to them. Why would we want to be with someone who refuses to do the bare minimum for us?

Are their strengths overshadowing their flaws, or is it the other way around? Can you live with that or not? 

But always remember: trying to change someone is usually not love at all. 

3. We don’t show any love and respect toward ourselves.

If we don’t love ourselves, nobody else will. Sounds harsh, but that’s the truth. Unless we love ourselves and accept ourselves for who we are, we will struggle to find the love we are hoping for. Unless we confront our demons and heal our emotional wounds, we cannot hope to love someone the right way. 

When we are emotionally wounded—afraid of confronting our pain—we are actually making it worse. Avoiding our pain or burying it is never going to make us feel better. We will keep falling in love with the wrong people because we depend on them to heal our wounds and change our lives. We hope that they will give us the love we are unable to give ourselves. But that’s not how love works, right? 

We need to love and respect ourselves first. 

4. We think being alone is a bad thing.  

Getting into a relationship because we feel lonely is probably one of the biggest mistakes we can ever make when it comes to finding love. True love can never stem out of desperation or the fear of being alone. Getting into a relationship just because everyone else is, is never the right reason. Most of the time, it will only make us feel more alone later. 

This need for attention and affection all the time, so that we feel a little better about ourselves, might help temporarily. But it’s just a matter of time before the illusion breaks, and we are forced to confront reality. 

Truth: settling for less than what we deserve always causes more heartbreak.   

Being alone is never a bad thing; rather, it can help us introspect about what kind of a person we are and who we want to be with. Solitude is a valuable treasure, which must never be treated as a curse. 

5. We are still holding onto the pain of our pasts. 

Rebound relationships might look attractive in movies and television shows, but in real life, such relationships always threaten to hurt us more. 

What will you do if you end up falling for them, but they don’t? 

It’s really not a good idea to get into a new relationship to move on from a previous one. We might be able to shut off our real feelings for some time, but after a point, all of the unresolved issues and difficult feelings are going to catch up with us. And before we know it, we are left with more heartbreak and pain in our souls. 

We will keep on falling in love with the wrong people until we work on ourselves. It’s crucial to recover from one relationship, make peace with it, move on, and then get involved in another one. It’s not just unfair to us; it’s unfair to them too. 

Love should never be forced, nor should it be rushed. Getting into a relationship just for the sake of it will only cause us more pain in the long run. It’s always better to wait for the right person to come along than be with someone just because we want to be in a relationship. 

Love will find you when you aren’t even looking for it.