This time, you decide to do things differently. You think carefully about what mattered and what went wrong in your previous relationships, and what you want now. Perhaps you even write a list: emotionally available, reliable, able to communicate, ready for a relationship. You take your time and pay attention. Yet somewhere along the way, you find yourself feeling uncertain of where you stand again, working hard to feel chosen, waiting for the relationship to become what you hoped it would be.
Take a moment to think back. Set aside, for now, what each partner did or failed to do. What position did you find yourself in? Were you pursuing, proving your worth, waiting for someone to become available, or hoping that if you understood them well enough, the relationship would finally feel safe enough to imagine a future together?
This may be difficult to see while you are inside a relationship. Sometimes it takes several relationships, even decades, to notice that although the people have changed, the position you occupy feels familiar. That repetition is one reason I don’t believe we choose the people we love by accident. What might draw you back to a position that has caused you pain before?
A repeated pattern does not mean you are seeking pain, or that every partner is secretly the same. What can repeat is a way of relating: the position you take when closeness feels uncertain, and what you come to expect from the other person. Pursuing someone, asking for very little, or trying to become indispensable may once have helped you feel safe enough to remain connected. In a new relationship, those responses can feel so natural that you may not recognise them as a pattern at all. You may only notice that, with someone different, you have begun to feel the same way again.
Perhaps the connection felt particularly compelling because you could never quite settle into it. There was warmth, interest, perhaps even intimacy, but something always felt just out of reach. You found yourself noticing small signs that things might finally be moving forward: a message, a change in tone, a moment of unusual closeness. Yet the relationship never quite became what those moments seemed to promise.
Somewhere along the way, the question became: Will they choose me? It may have taken the place of another question: Do I choose them? The difficulty of reaching this person was no longer merely in the way of the relationship. It had become part of the attraction.
You can see a smaller version of this in the games people play at the start of dating: delaying a response, concealing interest, trying to appear less available than they are. For some people, that uncertainty makes the pursuit more compelling. For others, the uncertainty arises without any deliberate game-playing. They are drawn, again and again, to a connection that remains tantalisingly unfinished.
The relationship may be deeply intimate in some ways, while still revolving around the commitment, availability or shared life that remains out of reach. Their unavailability may have frustrated you. It may also have drawn you in.
Or you may recognise yourself on the other side of this arrangement. Perhaps you want the closeness, but hesitate when it asks something more of you: making room for the other person in your daily life, responding when they need you, or speaking honestly about the future you can offer. The obstacle may be something you help maintain.
Intensity can feel like intimacy. You think about each other constantly; small moments of closeness carry enormous weight. But how much of that intensity comes from being known and supported, and how much comes from waiting, hoping or trying to close the distance?
Intimacy involves more than feeling close. It means being able to ask for help when life becomes difficult, risk a response you cannot control, and still trust that having needs will not put the relationship at risk.
The relationship may contain real tenderness and intimacy, yet leave little room for that kind of dependence. Perhaps this person has little capacity to support you. Or perhaps you have come to feel that asking for help would be too much, and that you cannot count on receiving it. When life becomes difficult, you find yourself dealing with it alone. That is a particular kind of aloneness: being deeply involved with someone while feeling that your needs have no place in the relationship. What happens to you when preserving the connection depends on asking for less?
An obstacle can keep that question at a distance. If a partner is unavailable, you may have good reason to believe you cannot ask for more. You can continue to long for a different relationship without having to find out what it would be like to express your needs fully, depend on someone, or allow them to depend on you. Greater closeness also means being more fully known: letting someone see what you need, what you fear, and when you are less composed than you would like to appear. The obstacle can spare you that discomfort while also providing a measure of control: you can limit how much of yourself you reveal, what you ask for, and whether you risk an answer you cannot fully control. At times, people knowingly maintain this distance. At others, they sincerely want greater closeness and cannot yet see how the obstacle has become familiar, even protective.
Could it be that you have stopped asking where the relationship is going because you suspect you know the answer? Or that you keep choosing people whose circumstances leave no room for the shared life you say you want? The other person’s unavailability may be real. But it is worth asking whether the distance makes a particular kind of sense to you, too. While you wait for them to become available, are you perhaps conveniently unavailable yourself for a relationship in which you could ask for what you need, be depended upon, and find out what happens when someone truly shows up?
Perhaps the obstacle was someone else’s unavailability, the distance between you, a relationship that could never be public, or a future that was always promised but never quite arrived. Perhaps the obstacle changed from one relationship to the next, while the feeling of waiting in anticipation remained the same.
What obstacles have appeared in your relationships? And when you look back, did they only stand in the way of closeness, or did they also play a part in what drew you in?
If you would like to explore the position you keep returning to, you are welcome to get in touch to arrange a session.