How to Use Your Relationship Past to Predict Your Relationship Future

Healthier relationships are ahead of you.

Photo by Chermiti Mohamed on Unsplash

The way we view the past is entirely up to us. From one point of view, my relationship history looks like a massive waste of my time. From another, it was a handful of helpful life lessons. The story I tell largely depends on the mood I’m in and how generous I’m willing to be with myself and others. The truth is that there were glimmers of beauty and romance, but most of my relational history is a what-not-to-do handbook of relationship missteps and mistakes.

But I started to wonder: Can I use my past relationships to predict the future?

Using Relationships Past as a Predictor of the Future

It might not seem like it. After all, my last relationship didn’t bear much resemblance to the ones that had come before. It was far and away healthier. At first inspection, it doesn’t look like it followed my previously established patterns.

What it did do was show that I was learning from my relational experiences. I put in the work and raised the bar, and the relationship was better as a result of it. My history had a familiar pattern, but gradually, it also showed that I began making better decisions — slowly but surely.