We all tend to make the same mistakes over and over and over again. When I started 12 Step, I was amazed at how many beautiful, intelligent women I met who had been married 2, 3, 4 times, each time to an addict. The first marriage had broken up due to drug addiction, the second due alcoholism, the third due to gambling, and finally there they were in S-Anon or COSA 12 Step with me, married to a sex addict.

I started to look back over my own relationships, hoping that I would not find the pattern, and terrified of what it meant if I did. Surely, for example, the person I dated before my husband could not have been a more different person, surely we could not have had a more different dynamic, and yet... And yet it was not a healthy relationship and he was not a healthy person.

As a woman at one of my meetings once said, "We are with our partners for a reason." I did not accidentally wind up with a man who cheated and lied, I was drawn to him like iron to a magnet, not in spite of his secrets, but because of them. Part of the attraction in all of my relationships has been to a certain vulnerability, a sense that some part of my partner needs healing, and that I can be the salve on that deep inner wound. I saw that if I left now, to find someone "better," I would only wind up in the same place again, attracted to a new mystery, a new wound, that hid in secrets and in lies. And the cycle will go on until I find and heal my own inner wound, the part of me that calls out to others in pain.

A friend of mine is getting married for the second time this summer. "I think it will work out this time," she told me cheerfully, "After all, lightning doesn't strike twice." "Well," I thought, "not unless you're a lightning rod."