 My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisit. Women caught up in relationships with narcissists and psychopaths often ask themselves, what have I done wrong? What am I doing wrong? What should I have done differently? Why is this happening to me? Well, to understand the answers to these questions, we need to discuss romantic relationships in general. romantic relationships with intimate partners, significant others, are comprised of three important components. There is the issue of mate selection, or mate choice, there is the issue of relationship model, or hypothesis, and there is the issue of termination triggers. Mate selection, how you choose your partner, is critical of course, but even more important is to ensure compatibility between the mate or the partner selected and the model of relationship one has in mind. There are as many types of relationships as there are couples, and one would do well to define precisely how one would like to live her life with her spouse. Consider an open marriage. Open marriage cause for one kind of partner, and then a traditional marriage cause for an entirely different sort of person. Mismatches between the personality, character and temperament of the members of the couple, and the relationship model that they have adopted, these mismatches are often the main found of trouble knowing the foundations and leading to the disintegration of the pair. Yet even when one's mate, spouse, partner has been selected with care, and perfectly fits the relationship one has in mind, some relationships still do crumble. This is because the members of the couple have disparate, different termination triggers and abandonment anxiety thresholds. We all have insecurities, fears and co-dependence, and these often rise to the surface and lead to self-defeating behaviors such as pre-emptive abandonment. I will walk away before he does this to me, before he abandons me. Romantic intimate relationships are comprised of various dimensions, functions and axis. You should deconstruct, you should understand your past relationships in order to avoid mistakes in future ones. So start by asking yourself, how do you perceive the role of relationships in your life? Is it something that fosters personal growth? Does it help you attain your life's bones? Write down your personal narrative. And then ask yourself the following, which of the external and internal functions of relationships matter to you most in your romantic liaisons? Give your answers to the following list to construct a prioritized list. So I'm going to read now a list of external and internal functions of relationships, and you should consider which of these matter to you most, and then you should prioritize it. The first thing we expect of a relationship is to experience love. There is this romantic love, infatuation, excitement, heart, palpitations, sweating and so on, and there is mature love as distinct from mere and fleeting infatuation. Which type of love matters to you most? Second thing, do you wish to be desire, chosen, focus of attention and adulation? Do you insist on your relationship being monogamous and exclusive? Do you expect your relationships to provide you with excitement and thrill to counter boredom? Do you want your relationship to be stable, safe, predictable and reliable to counter anxiety? Do you expect mirroring? Do you expect your partner to emphasize and share similarities with you? Do you expect your relationship to enhance your personal growth as we've mentioned before? What would you rather do in your relationship? Would you rather give it, or would you rather receive? Do you expect your relationship to enhance your social acceptability? In other words, to help you with conforming to society? Do you wish your relationships to confer social status on you? Do you expect your partner to be sexually available? How important is sex in your relationship? What can you do without? Don't confuse sexual relations with intimacy. You can have either or, or both. Do you want to have children? Do you expect your relationship to provide you with opportunities for procreation? Are you looking for companionship, unrestricted and immediate physical and mental availability of another person with whom one shares the same range of opinions, interests and pursuits? Are you looking for a friend in your spouse or mate or partner, this deep or pervasive bonding to another person involving full, unmitigated trust, a great measure of non-sexual or also sexual intimacy and the pursuit of the mutual well-being and happiness of both parties? Friendship. Then, having prioritized this list, you should proceed to identify your commitment triggers. What is it that determines whether a prospective partner, a person you've just met on a first date or a second date, what is it that determines whether this person you have met and would end up being a one-knife stand or your life-long spouse? What makes you commit? Which triggers? And what are your relationship predictors? In other words, you should commit to paper or screen. Everything that your inner voice tells you, when it says, this may be the one. This may be Mr. Right or when it guesstimates how long the relationship is likely to last. These inner voices are critical, very important. You should listen to them. You should ask yourself, when, when do they come into play? When do they tell me that, you know, this may be the one? You should list your expectations of yourself and of your partner and generate a coherent expectations profile. What am I looking for or what to look for and what is he looking for? You should determine how you test for reciprocity. What in your mind? How does it go in your mind? The sort of quid pro quo type of ledger is, are you an accountant in your mind? Like, do you measure each and every given take and balance them out in sort of an accounting ledger? Is, or is it more diffuse, synoptic test? Like, generally you feel that your love is being reciprocated, your giving is being answered. How do you get trust in the context of your relationships? Do you share information with your partner? Are you more into information discovery, or not to put too fine a point on it, spying? Do you constantly grudge his reliability and responsibility easy on a constant test, in a constant test? Or exam? To what extent are you self-aware of your own good and bad qualities, foretaste, limitations, and shortcomings? Then there is, of course, the issue of sexual trajectory. What is the frequency of sex throughout the life of your typical past relationships? Are you sexually creative, imaginative, inventive? Do you initiate or merely respond to advances and cues? Are you initiating or the responsive type? Do you frequently end up finding yourself in sexless relationships? Are you mostly sexually available, or are you withdrawn? To what extent do gender roles express themselves in your sex life, with your intimate partner? What about social, religious, and cultural structures, strictures, and biases? Do they ender your sex life, and hence them? Should ask yourself, with regards to your past relationships, what is your relationship horizons, what are your expectations regarding the longevity of the relationship? And whether this expectation determines a relationship style? When you believe the relationship is going to be short lived, do you choose one type of one style of relationship? Or do you treat all relationships as created equal, and give all of them the same chance? Do you expect your relationships to last? Or are you always doubtful, pessimistic, cynical, and fatalistic from the get-go? Then there is a question, of course, of spatial proximity. Are you into cohabitation, or otherwise sharing the same premises, or area of life? Or would you rather live in separate apartments, and schedule your encounters, or so possibly? What role does territoriality play in describing the survival of your relationships? Ask yourself about time as well, temporal proximity. Do you need to do everything together with your partner, which could amount to cleaning and smothering? Or can you give him or her some space? Is it synchronous interactivity, or time-delayed interaction that you seek? Do you immediately progress from casual acquaintance to full-fledged commitment? Or do you give it time, and proceed incrementally, and gradually, and carefully? There is a question also, role allocation. Who decides on the allocation of roles, and functions, and duties in the couple? And how are these allocations? Do you typically talk over your roles, functions, and responsibilities, and reach an agreement explicitly? This is called explicit role allocation. Or do you let life dictate? Do you leave it to life, and play it by ear? Role allocation by emergence. How specific are your roles? Once the roles in your relationships have been defined, are they cast in stone, are they rigid, or are they subject to change, or circumstances change, and both of you grow and develop? Essentially there are two types, two models, two major models of relationship. The type of relationship can be negotiated, matchmaking, as simple as that. So it's more of a business arrangement with some companionship thrown in. The relationship can be emergent, can be romantic, love-based. The type of partner. The partner could be a companion, a friend, and then you know. You seek out an active intellect, some charm, accomplishments, goal orientation, self-sufficiency. Or the partner can be hypersexual, adventure, or even a narcissist. Which of these two appeals to you? The dynamics of your relationship. The relationship could be based on routines, full disclosure, common activities, hobbies, common growth goals. Or the relationship could be based on excitement, thrill, surprises. The type of bond. The bond can be based on demonstrated exclusivity and perceived threat protocols where you communicate to your partner that you are feeling threatened, that you are hurt, that you feel insecure, demonstrated exclusivity together with threat protocols, communication protocols. Or it could be an open relationship where both of you can do whatever you want, even in the sexual field. There are then the territorial dimensions of the relationship. There is a predefined relationship with predefined autonomy enclaves, these are areas of your life or even physical premises where you are autonomous, you have your privacy and no one can barge in or ask you anything. And there is another type of relationship with this dependence and clinging and smothering and utter enmeshment of the two partners. There is a type of relationship where there is spatial progression. You start with separate apartments and you move in for a few days a week and then you end up cohabiting. So limited cohabitation with private spaces reserved in-house or outside and then up to full cohabitation. Full cohabitation is the other point. Then there is a relationship with temporal progression where you move incrementally and gradually and cautiously and relationships which are immediate full-fledged. So it's important to clearly define the model of relationship to cohere with to be compatible with the mates you select. Once you've done that and once you've tackled your termination figures by establishing communication protocols with your partner, the longevity of your relationship is virtually guaranteed.