Educating Our Love-Lives??

Why are we so defensive about learning something new in our love-lives? You think it has something to do with the fact that we learned what we know about love when we were young? Some kind of loyalty to the family of origin? As a psychologist I see a lot of love-life repetition. The same mistakes being made over and over again. Some people, however, do manage to break out of the repetitive cycle of disappointment and do something new. Its like getting out from under the influence of someone else's love-life. I know a man once who took emotional care of his depressed mother when he was a child. In adulthood he found one depressed woman after another to love with the same disappointing endings. He realized one day that he was recreating the same kind of relationship over and over. Trying to rescue each woman and shape her into someone who could give him the love he did not get earlier in his life. As a consequence of this conscious understanding he grieved the loss of what he did not get earlier in his parent-child relationship and was freed to find a more emotionally available woman. The point is...it is possible to step out of these repetitive cycles of disappointment once they are consciously identified. You just have to tolerate the uncomfortable feelings that come with discovery.