Prove me wrong, I dare you… hello?

UNFORTUNATELY, I don’t always make the best choices when it comes to men.

You name a type of unavailable guy and I’ve been there.

The One who did not want a girlfriend … the One who decides to go for round two with their ex … and worst of all, the One who already has a girlfriend.

With each and every one of these rather questionable choices, and others, I prided myself on my ability to forgive and give them a second chance.

“So I came to the conclusion that while I still believe forgiveness is a good quality, having endless forgiveness for someone who has already hurt you once, twice, maybe more is just foolish.”

I always believed that this ability was one of my strong points.

However, I was chatting to my sister recently about a guy I had been seeing let’s call him Rupert, just because who just kept hurting me and treating me badly.

She said that Rupert had notched up so many bad points, she wondered why I was still on speaking terms with him, let alone being intimate with him.

As far as she was concerned, her dear sister seemed to have a dangerous affinity with life’s RESET button.

In other words, I appeared to always want to hit RESET, and in doing so forgiving them for their wrongdoings and allowing them to start from scratch.

Annoyingly, though, this only seemed to result in them upsetting me all over again.

Why do I do this?

Is it because I want to justify to myself why I was interested in them in the first place, he’s a nice guy, I only go for nice guys right?

Perhaps it is because I don’t want to admit that I’ve misjudged them so badly. I want them to prove my fears about them are wrong, so I give them another chance.

Or is it because I am making excuses for them because I can’t face up to the fact that he’s just not that into me?

If he hasn’t called, it’s for the myriad other reasons I can conjure up.

He’s tired. He’s busy. He’s dead.

Yes, I have clearly reached a new level of denial where being dead is preferable to him not being into me.

So I came to the conclusion that while I still believe forgiveness is a good quality, having endless forgiveness for someone who has already hurt you once, twice, maybe more is just foolish.

As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Maybe it’s time to press the RESET buttons on my own dating patterns.

Last 5 posts by Jay Dee

• Seduced by the sound of it - January 13th, 2010
• There's no skirting the art of flirting - October 6th, 2009
• Kissing in public is ok - isn't it? - September 30th, 2009
• Does bad dress sense make you a slut? - September 7th, 2009
• When to tell a friend she's on a dead end street - August 17th, 2009

What is it really like being single in the suburbs? In true Sex and the City form, this new column will attempt to unravel the mysteries of the modern dating game.
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