((golden_eye)), you look for the good in others and you have a kind heart. When it comes to relationships, a lot of people genuinely struggle and a lot of this stems from the unhealthy relationship they witnessed happen with their parents as well as the lack of having their own needs met when they were children.

As a parent, the one thing I wanted for my own child was to help her develop her "own" identity. I really wanted her to feel loved and I also wanted her to feel she could talk to me about anything too. I had also made it a point to learn about child development instead of just doing what my own parents did with me. However, even when you make such an effort to do as much as you can to genuinely "love and nurture" your child, your child can STILL get hurt simply because they have been loved and nurtured and end up experiencing other children and human beings that don't have the same kind of love, respect, and nurturing. When I was raising my own child and also spent a lot of time around a lot of children in general, I saw a lot of things that really upset me in how my daughter's piers were raised and often "emotionally neglected".

When you meet someone and you are considering that person as possibly becoming "a life partner", you are meeting a person who has a whole history of experiencing all kinds of behaviors, including how their parents interacted around them that will also be "part of" the relationship you have with this person.

What have you learned from this? Truth is that what you ended up getting trapped in was being treated badly and then you got to hear things you were literally "starving" to hear. This is how "toxic" relationships typically run. YES, you were being manipulated, and in the past relationship you were dealing with an individual who had an addiction problem and you have learned how THAT COMES FIRST. Then you talked about meeting a guy that stood in front of a mirror for a very long time (admiring himself, all of himself) while you sat there "waiting" , well, what you were seeing in that experience was also "what came first" for that individual.

There are times when a person fails to see "red flags" simply because when they were growing up they were sent messages from their parents where the parent's needs came first and their needs and seeing them only happened "sometimes". Often, attention was given when the child did something that "pleased" and noticed the parent's needs and that became what that child grew to see as "normal". This is something that happens to a lot of "children" and because of that these children end up having a difficult time when it comes to relationships. You are really "not" the only person that stayed in a bad relationship much longer than you should have. At least you did not have a lot of baggage to deal with when you finally got to a point where you said ENOUGH.