Four relationships. Four different men, different jobs, different cities. The same ending every time: she'd give steadily more, they'd take it as a baseline rather than a gift, and by the end she'd feel invisible in a relationship she'd poured everything into. "I must just have terrible luck with men," she said in the first session.
What the pattern actually was
Not luck. Attachment style — specifically, a strategy that equated giving with safety, formed early in a household where love felt conditional on usefulness. She wasn't choosing bad partners by accident. She was, unconsciously, selecting for people who would let the pattern run uninterrupted, because a partner who pushed back on it would have felt unfamiliar, even threatening.
How the work moved
We didn't start with her current relationship prospects. We started with the pattern itself — mapping the exact shape of it across all four relationships, until she could see the repetition clearly instead of experiencing each one as an isolated unlucky event.
Then came the harder part: practicing receiving, not just giving. Letting a friend do something for her without immediately reciprocating. Sitting with the discomfort of being cared for without earning it first.
What's different now
She's dating again, more slowly than before. The biggest change isn't in how she gives — it's in how quickly she now notices when a dynamic is rebuilding the old shape, early enough to name it instead of pouring another year into it first.
A pattern that repeats across different people was never about the people. It was about the role you kept walking into.