How is it that some people can beg and beg for a second chance, and when you give it to them they promptly screw things up again?

When they talk to you they admit to their failings, promise to change, talk about how much they HAVE changed, but then when you take them back they promptly resume the behavior that destroyed the relationship in the first place.

My ex begged for a year to be allowed a second chance. I finally let him come home…and the first night he went out for a pack of smokes and disappeared for hours, having gone to his girlfriend’s house.

The father of my daughter’s twins keeps begging to let him see the babies AND to take him back. She doesn’t want him back, but she does want him to be in the kid’s life so she had generous visits all set up. He was consistently late coming to get them,by 30, 45 minutes, an hour, whatever, and he wouldn’t call. Just leave her sitting in the parking lot of a neutral exchange place, like a convenience store, for an hour!

Then he said that he’d pick them up, but Corrie had to go to Wellington (30 miles away where he chose to move to about 6 months ago) to pick them up. She doesn’t have a vehicle that can make that drive, and he damn well knows it. He said “Then you just don’t get them back.” Of course, she didn’t allow him to pick them up after that, until he agreed to drive both ways (He doesn’t have to live in Wellington, BTW,)

Then, after about a month, at one point he said he couldn’t take them to his house because the rugs were dirty (it was a lie. He had some insane stalker woman who kept coming over.) Very, VERY reluctantly Corrie let him stay at her place with the twins, and she left for the day. When she got home, her place was a wreck and he had eaten just about everything in the house (he’s a fat slob.) When she got home he was asleep on the floor while the babies were crawling around him.

And in the middle of all of this he’s begging her to take him back!

WTF is wrong with him, and others like him?