You are not the first person to notice this. You end one relationship and, a few years later, find yourself in what looks like a slightly different version of it. Different name, different face, but the same dynamic reassembles itself. The same imbalances. The same specific arguments. The same moment where you look up and realize you have been here before.
The easy explanation is that you are attracted to a type. But that does not explain why the type keeps producing the same outcome, or why you keep finding it despite knowing better. Three thinkers on the Consilium roster would approach this very differently, and none of them would let you off with a simple answer.
Murdoch: you are not seeing them
Iris Murdoch would say the problem is not who you are choosing but how you are looking. She argued that the ego continuously builds pictures of other people, replacing the actual human in front of you with a convenient projection. You are not falling for the same kind of person. You are projecting the same kind of story onto whoever is available, and the story keeps running until reality forces it to stop.
Her angle: you keep finding the same person because your ego keeps casting its preferred role. The other person is almost incidental.
"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."
She would point out that real attention, genuine attention to the person in front of you rather than the role you need them to play, is far rarer than we think. Most of what passes for interest in another person is really interest in how that person confirms what we already believe about ourselves.
Follett: you have not tried integration yet
Mary Parker Follett spent her career arguing that most conflicts are not between two competing positions but between two positions that have not found the third option. She called it integration: not compromise, where each side gives something up, but a creative solution where the underlying interests of both parties are genuinely met.
In relationships, the pattern may persist because you keep oscillating between two modes: pursuing closeness until it feels smothering, or pulling back until it feels cold. You have not found the third thing.
"We should never allow ourselves to be bullied by an either-or."
Follett would not ask why you keep choosing the same person. She would ask whether you have ever changed the structure of what you offer, or just changed who you offer it to.
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Skinner: this is what your history trained you to want
B.F. Skinner would resist the entire framing of personal choice here. The preferences you call your own are a record of what your environment reinforced. What you call your type is a pattern your nervous system learned to seek out because something in that dynamic was once, in some context, rewarded or at least familiar enough to feel like home.
"A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies."
He would say that understanding this intellectually changes nothing by itself. The only thing that actually rewires a reinforcement pattern is changing the contingencies: the environment, the signals, the rewards. Insight is not enough. Redesigning the conditions is the work.
Where they disagree
Murdoch would say: look harder. The pattern lives in your perception, not in the people you are choosing. You are not a victim of a type. You are the one constructing the type.
Follett would say: the pattern lives in the structure of your relationships, not just your perception. You have been choosing between domination and submission, closeness and distance. Find the integration.
Skinner would say: the pattern was installed long before you had any say in it. You cannot think your way out of a conditioned response. Change the environment, or the pattern continues.
None of them would tell you the other two are wrong. They are all pointing at something real. The disagreement is about where to begin.
The question you came here to avoid
You have identified the pattern. You have probably identified it more than once. The question is not whether you see it. The question is what you are still getting from it.
Is there something the pattern provides, something that feels like intensity or familiarity or proof of something, that you have not been willing to give up? Because if the pattern persists through multiple people, across years and cities and fresh starts, the constant in the equation is you.