Why You Keep Choosing the Wrong Person (And How to Finally Stop) | Faith Jenkins

What It Covers

Attorney and TV judge Faith Jenkins, who married at 42, shares lessons from witnessing hundreds of divorces and navigating roughly 10 long-term relationships over 20 years. She outlines how self-knowledge, emotional maturity, pre-engagement counseling, and radical acceptance of endings build the foundation for choosing the right partner.

Key Questions Answered

• •Pre-Engagement Counseling: Seek counseling before getting engaged, not after, because announcing an engagement creates social pressure that makes it harder to walk away from incompatibilities discovered later. Jenkins and her husband completed two rounds — pre-engagement and pre-marital — specifically to surface misalignments around daily expectations, life goals, and unresolved past wounds before any formal commitment was made.
• •Subtle Red Flag Detection: Small inconsistencies — like someone claiming to be vegan but eating meat on social media — signal a deeper pattern of self-presentation over honesty. Jenkins argues these minor deceptions reveal how a person will handle larger conflicts. Cross-check someone's public digital footprint, including what they find humorous online, as a reliable indicator of core values and compatibility.
• •Pattern Analysis Over Words: When evaluating someone with a problematic past, ignore verbal assurances of change entirely and examine behavioral patterns exclusively. The FBI builds profiles from behavioral patterns because people lie but patterns do not. Look for sustained, documented behavioral evidence — months or years of consistent action — before trusting that a person has genuinely changed direction.
• •Three Pre-Commitment Conversations: Jenkins identifies three non-negotiable counseling topics: how each person has healed from past relationships, what specific daily expectations each holds for the other, and whether life-path visions align. Unspoken expectations are the primary driver of resentment buildup. Asking a counselor to facilitate surfaces questions couples would never think to ask each other independently.
• •Cynicism Blocks Attraction: Carrying bitterness from past relationships actively prevents attracting healthy new ones. Jenkins spent time consciously reframing past pain, refusing to make a new partner pay for previous betrayals. Six months before meeting her husband, she wrote down her intention to meet him within one year and shifted her internal narrative from self-protection to readiness — he arrived within six months.
• •Compatibility Means Co-Growth, Not Compatibility at a Snapshot: Evaluating a partner based solely on who they are today is insufficient because life events — job loss, children, illness — continuously reshape people. The more durable question is whether both people are committed to ongoing personal growth. Couples who divorce frequently cite one partner stagnating while the other evolves, creating an unbridgeable gap over time.