Do damaged people attract each other?

For a while after I learned I had bipolar disorder, it seemed like I was finding bipolar people everywhere. I’d meet them, and somehow I’d know. People I barely knew or was meeting for the first time would have a conversation with me, and a half hour later we’d both confess to our similarity.

The same thing seems to happen to folks who share other kinds of damage—childhood abuse, drug addiction, people who engage in all kinds of self-destructive behavior.

We seem to seek each other out almost unerringly. We’ll meet an absolute stranger and sometime later, discover our similarity, as if we had some detection machine that identified the other person for us.

It seems like I’ve run into so many people with these kinds of experiences. Someone with bipolar disorder is probably the least healthy partner for another person with the illness, yet so often, they seem to end up together in a romantic relationship. A man with abuse in his past seems to always be attracted to women who have been raped.

Do you think this is a common occurrence? If so, why do they attract each other? Why do they like each other? Why can’t they stay away from each other and find someone much more capable of having a healthy relationship?

Obviously I don’t really have data to understand how prevalent this kind of thing is. However, it is something I’ve noticed with the people I know, and I’ve been wondering why. Sometimes it seems like we always find the least healthy person for us.