We either live in a magical universe, where unseen threads of emotion draw people inexorably onward towards the discovery of themselves by mirroring outward in the world what thoughts they inwardly contain (but are in denial about), or we live in a magicless, robotic, mechanistic, stochastic world where people bump into each other semi-randomly and group together on the basis of pheromones, conscious expectations, and every other gross mechanism that demonstrable science permits itself to believe in as a result of the visual attestation of physical evidence.

Your case seems to demonstrate that submerged emotionality plays a role in human relationships, because there is no realistic way you could have known consciously or selected for consciously, this relationship dynamic to play out this way multiple times. So, I conclude, it is you. But it is everyone else as well. We are all "doing it to ourselves". Human beings contain a super-consciousness that winds these strings in subtle patterns that guide us along the paths from outcome to outcome, just like our system of roads helps us navigate space to reach our destination when running errands. There is also an emotional and spiritual "grid" or "system of roads" that humans move along in defined patterns, and seeing the same scenery again for the third time, it becomes possible to realize what is going on. My understanding is that the same lesson keeps repeating over and over again until its learned. Once its learned, another lesson is unlocked. A video game is an extremely apt metaphor for what our lives actually are, on the spiritual and emotional levels. Cycling through the same (emotional) experience is the real-life equivalent of replaying a level once again.