Marriage can be an iffy thing. Especially if you’re an auto company that can’t seem to exist without being coupled, sometimes with a parasite. That’s what the entity commonly just called Chrysler seems to be.

Full disclosure—I worked at the company for 11 years through three of its marriages. One ended in divorce, another as a result of bankruptcy and a third where Chrysler just became the second of its combined name.

I retired in 2016, five years before the company was sucked into another relationship and lost its identity altogether, as part of a blob of corporate Play-doh called Stellantis.

Keep in mind the last three letters in Stellantis are also the final three letters in the suffix “it is” which is a medical term for some sort of inflammation. Appropriate, since the CEO just flamed out and flew the coop with a nice multi-million dollar nest egg.

So this seems like a good time to examine Chrysler’s marriages from both my inside perspective and a more macro view to better understand how this corporate Sadie Hawkins should go about chasing its next partner—or should it?

In 1998 the all-American Chrysler Corp. was joined in a shotgun marriage to the German automaker Daimler AG. It was billed as a “merger of equals.” There should have been a pre-nup. There was nothing equal about the marriage. The Germans were clearly in charge.

I joined the DaimlerChrysler in 2005 as a contractor—hired to ghost write and manage the company’s first corporate communications blog. A year later, having been a broadcast and print journalist since 1973 and covering autos since 1989, a new digital communications team was created around me. I was hired on staff to run it.

My boss at the time sent me to attend the annual “communicators conference” at DCX headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. To get there I was granted a seat on the company’s plush jet.

Somewhere over the Atlantic I received some valuable insight as to how the Chrysler side of the marriage was regarded. I overheard a couple of engineers complaining that “they want us to build Chrysler vehicles with Mercedes quality on a Chrysler budget—impossible!”  Yes, it was.

During the actual meeting, a German executive declared any quality issues should be blamed on Chrysler—and welcome to Stuttgart. Ach!

Some marriage. Even the late Dr. Ruth Westheimer couldn’t fix that relationship.

On Valentines Day 2007 the Germans decided to ditch their American spouse with little warning. At the “annual news conference,” held for the first time at Chrysler headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan, CEO Dieter Zetsche spilled that all options were open with regard to the future of the tenuous tie-up. By summer the divorce was final and Chrysler found itself in a new abusive relationship—this time with capital management company Cerberus—yes, the three-headed dog guarding the gates of hell.

The upside was the company went back to being just Chrysler. The downside was everything else. Cerberus was known as a corporate slum lord and the new CEO, Robert Nardelli, known for being passed up as successor to General Electric boss, Jack Welch and for being fired from Home Depot after its stock tanked as a result of his bad decisions.

Cerberus had no experience running an auto company and it showed. Its main strategy was simply firing people. I watched as dozens of my immediate co-workers and hundreds more were suddenly told to grab a box, fill it with their stuff and take a hike.

There was a guy installed in one of the little glass offices on our floor who spent his days hovering over a computer and transferring figures to a white board with the mission of plotting where, and whom, to cut.

At one point, to make the world think the company was actually doing something constructive, the company decided to invite the automotive media, along with CNBC’s auto reporter, to anchor live coverage from our headquarters of the unveiling of a line of “production intent” electric and extended-range vehicles under the acronym, ENVI..the first letters of the word, “environment.”

There were three ENVI vehicles–a coupe based on a Lotus that went by the name Dodge Circuit, and two others based on a Jeep Wrangler and Chrysler Town and Country minivan. Coverage was massive.

In fact, the CNBC reporter called me a few weeks later to say if I could get the Dodge Circuit to New York City by that Thursday, he could get it on the Today show along with the Chevrolet Volt.

No problem. I flew out to NYC for the show and was both heartened and horrified when Today host Matt Lauer said to the CNBC reporter he liked the Volt but if given the choice, he’d go for the Dodge. See the segment here. Sorry in advance for the rough quality.

Cerberus said the ENVI vehicles would go into production by 2010 but they never did.

Greatly summarizing here, the combination of the recession and the company going into bankruptcy, along with General Motors Co., buoyed by federal government bailouts, led to Cerberus exiting and Fiat S.p.A. at first taking a partial stake in Chrysler with Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne leading both automakers.