My relationship history looks like a playlist on repeat. Different faces. Different names. Same song. Emotionally unavailable. Critical. Hot and cold. I’d get attached, get hurt, swear off love for six months, then do it again with someone who had the exact same patterns in a slightly different font. I thought I had terrible luck. Then a therapist asked me something that stopped me cold. She said: What does this pain give you? Not why do you deserve it. What do you get from it? That question – not why does this keep happening to me, but what am I getting out of this – is the most uncomfortable, most important question I’ve ever been asked. Here’s the answer. It took me years to find it.
The answer I didn’t want to hear
The pain gave me certainty. When someone is inconsistent – hot one day, cold the next – your nervous system goes into overdrive trying to solve the puzzle. You become hyper-focused. Every text is analysed. Every silence is a crisis. And in that hyper-focused state, you feel intensely alive. There’s no room for existential dread because you’re too busy managing the immediate emotional emergency. The pain was terrible – but it was never boring. The boredom of a healthy relationship – the calm, the predictability, the absence of drama – felt, to my traumatised nervous system, like death. I was not addicted to the person. I was addicted to the activation. The chaos was the drug. The pain was the high. The crash was the withdrawal. And I kept going back because I had mistaken intensity for intimacy.
The neuroscience: your brain on chaos
When you’re in an unpredictable relationship, your brain releases dopamine in response to the uncertainty. The intermittent reinforcement – sometimes they’re loving, sometimes they’re distant – is the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. You never know when the reward is coming, so you keep pulling the lever. Your brain is not stupid. It’s just running ancient software that mistakes unpredictability for importance. Something that’s consistently good doesn’t need constant monitoring. Something that’s unpredictable does. Your brain prioritises the unpredictable because, in evolutionary terms, it might be a threat. The result: you mistake anxiety for chemistry. Butterflies in your stomach are not necessarily attraction. Sometimes they’re a warning.
The pattern I finally recognised
Every person I’d ever been deeply attracted to shared one trait: they were emotionally inconsistent. They gave me just enough to keep me hoping, and just little enough to keep me working for it. This felt like chemistry. It felt like passion. It felt like the real thing. What it actually felt like was my childhood. My father was loving and attentive – sometimes. Other times he was absent, preoccupied, critical. I never knew which version I was going to get. I learned to read his mood from the sound of his footsteps. I became an expert at managing his emotions. I brought that expertise into my adult relationships. I was drawn to people who needed managing. Who were inconsistent. Who made me work for their affection. Not because I enjoyed suffering. Because it felt like home. The nervous system doesn’t know the difference between familiarity and safety. It just knows what it knows. And what I knew was unpredictability. Love that was steady, available, and consistent felt foreign. Foreign felt threatening. Threatening felt like something to run from. So I ran. Straight into the arms of the next person who would hurt me in exactly the same way.
How I broke the cycle – and how you can too
Step one was recognising the pattern. Naming it. Writing down the names of every significant relationship and identifying the common thread. Mine was clear: emotional unavailability disguised as mystery. Step two was learning to tolerate the discomfort of healthy love. The first time I dated someone who was consistently kind, I was bored. I thought the spark was missing. The spark wasn’t missing – I was withdrawing from chaos. It felt like withdrawal because that’s literally what it was. I had to sit in the boredom. I had to learn that calm wasn’t death. It was safety. It took months. Step three was rewriting my definition of love. Love is not intensity. Love is not having to earn someone’s affection. Love is not the emotional hangover after a fight that made you feel alive. Love is consistency. Presence. Someone who shows up. Every time. Not just when it suits them. Step four – and this is the hardest – was learning to be alone without feeling abandoned. If you can’t sit with yourself, you’ll accept anyone who keeps you from having to. Build a relationship with yourself first. Become the consistency you’ve been looking for. Then – and only then – will you stop being drawn to people who can’t give you what you’ve already learned to give yourself.
This is not a love story. It’s a recovery story. And the person I recovered was myself.
More stories like this.
Real talk about desire, intimacy, and figuring yourself out. No spam. Just honest writing.