It's not bad luck and it's not a coincidence. What makes you recognise as closeness exactly the kind of relationship that exhausts you.
Another name, another story, maybe even another city. And yet, after a few months, you have the same feeling, the same conversations and roughly the same ending.
The first explanation that comes to mind is bad luck, and the second is that there are no more serious people. Both are comforting, because they move the cause outside, but neither truly explains why you keep meeting or attracting the same kind of person.
The way you learned, very early on, how affection is asked for and how it's received, stays as the benchmark by which you recognise closeness: someone behaves in a certain way, and something in you recognises that type of behaviour.
Of course, recognition doesn't consider whether that thing was good for you, only whether you know it. And if closeness came bundled with unease, the unease ends up being read as a sign that someone matters to you. And then the attachment brain, the limbic brain, sends the message: familiar means right.
When the important people at the start of your life were unpredictable, attention becomes something you earn, not something that simply exists. Someone who alternates between warmth and distance reproduces exactly that state, and that state is felt strongly.
Against that backdrop, a stable person seems boring, even though they aren't. It's just that the tension is missing, the tension you got used to using to recognise that you matter to someone.
Meeting the same kind of partner again and again comes from what you got used to doing in a relationship. If you learned that your worth lies in what you give, you end up again and again in relationships where there's something to fix, either because you choose people who need that, or because over time you start treating everyone as if they need it.
It's worth asking yourself what you would do in a relationship where no one needs to be saved. If a gap appears where an answer should be, that's the sign that you've found where you have work to do.
When someone who behaves normally appears, so do an unexplained unease and the urge to find something wrong with that person. Why? Because having someone calm beside you wasn't something you'd come across in life, so you read that behaviour as unfamiliar, and therefore unsuitable. That's how the so-called conclusions and decisions appear: I don't feel anything, it isn't the right moment, there's something strange about them.
What truly helps is to notice what happens inside you when someone behaves normally with you: when they reply on time, when they say what they feel without drama, when they don't disappear. If unease, boredom or the need to test appears then, you've just discovered something valuable about yourself.
This part is hard to do alone, because what you feel in that moment simply seems to you to be the truth.
In a psychotherapy session we work precisely on the moment when calm was read as boredom, and from there we begin to make the change that's needed.
It means the only part you can change is yours, and that is usually enough to break the chain of repetitions.
The first 20-minute conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. You tell me what keeps repeating for you, and I'll honestly tell you whether I can help.
Send me a message