How do you define your life? If you would put up a list of five significant events that shaped you behaviorally, what would they include? To be more specific, what are you a product of, historically? If I would enlist mine I think we can have a great starting point:

1. Lack of parental affection from childhood
2. Strife for financial independence through educational career
3. Obsession with culture's unending standards

Lets leave the list with 3.

I am going to explain from my experience and I hope you can trace trends that built you up thus far; possibly to reflect, analyse and act on trends currently shaping you so that you can avoid some redundancy.

Everything that you've been thought or learned add a little bit to how you reason about yourself and others around you. If you've ever questioned your relationship with people and wish it would be different, it means you have actively contributed to how your relaionship works in the way it does. Not physically contributing relationally also speaks a lot in iteself about you. There is nothing you could possibly do that will not generate some results that affects you or someone. If you leave you bed undone in the morning, a guest in your house might tag you as disorganised, busy or lazy individual. In addition to your undone bed, if you've left a breakfast dish unwashed on the table, the guest will be more informed to your standards - regardless of how great you thought of yourself.

At some point I realised that relationships are a process and this helps me think of getting into relationshp differently. Married couples are also in a process of unlearning (or learning) what they knew individually which could be a great learning process especially if a partner is dominant the balance is said to be loaded with self-centredness, just as as the case with my parents. Those separated or divorced are also leanrning perhaps what could have been done earlier in the chain of processes leading to their status, that could contribute to sustenance instead of ending it.

So now you realiZe that the baggage we brought through experience into relationship are important in determining how we will end up relationally, because we are a product of history and events that caused us think and act how we do.
Now, how can a relationship work out clean and nice? Understanding from my father's dominance over my mother's ideas for the family, I will say reasoning alongside each other's thoughts and letting go to gain more as two people is lacking. For example, what happens if I think my thoughts are the best in driving a relationship with a girl, and if she thinks hers are the best too. We will both work hard to prove each other wrong. To do so, I will build a wall to protect the cons so that the beautiful outer part of my idea will be appealing and using it to reveal the cons with her idea. This is just one defense mechanism, there are lot more. Each time we prove the other partner wrong ideally the relationship is fading away quickly.

Not acknowledging the importance of a partner, regardless of the ideas he/she brings is a highway to losing integrity and something worthwhile to anticipate in the relationship. If my father could let my mother to take the lead in certain areas knowing that it will be bad, I believe that after the idea crashes she could say "he respects my idea and acknowledges me as a person", now this is love. Sometimes things don't have to be controlled to perfection, but the mistakes along the way are what build each other out and strengthens relationship. However we must be careful while using situations going wrong to strangthen relationships because if a partner fails to learn lesson out of the event, you can be assured that things will get lot worse.

Understanding the various events that shaped your partner into thinking how he/she acts and relate is crucial almost above all things in relationship. This is because past events leave scars in our thoughts and minds. We naturally grow sensitivity to those scars such that other upcoming life events are weighed by it. If not, why then partners after break up modify their standard when getting into new relationships - simple, they have learned something of value out of hurts and they can counter a possibility in the future by engineering events or guiding them to expected states. Since events are really crucial in our lives, and they do tell us what to think of our partners, the question now remains: how could our chances be facilitated of nurturing one another? A situation whereby two lovers came along with opposite scars will mean misunderstanding. Our sense of reasoning into situations act oppositely with wide range life events between people.

As you are here looking to get who is there to pick you as partner or whatever, be prepared that mr./mrs. right have their life events and they are coming into your life with the consequence of their experiences. Sum it up all, get to know who likes you, get to know their history and work out how they have been shaped in their thoughts -- I guarantee you that you can have a fantastic and memorable relationship if you understand reasoning perspective of your partner and relate accordingly because that is love to them in their thoughts.