5 Hard Truths About Why Committed Love Feels Out of Reach
You say you want something real. You tell your friends you’re ready for a healthy relationship. You journal about it, you manifest it, you go on the dates. But then something happens. You get a text back too fast and suddenly you’re icked out. Someone shows up consistently, and you can’t feel the spark (or don’t trust it). You lose sleep over the one who gives you nothing but breadcrumbs. You say you’re keeping your options open by stacking up your dating roster, but you end up feeling empty. You keep ending up in situationships that go nowhere, craving attention and love, but deep down…terrified of closeness.
The people who actually like you, the ones who are kind and emotionally available, you ghost them. You pick them apart. You feel weirdly repulsed.
If this is hitting a nerve, take a breath. You’re not broken. You’re not dramatic. And you’re definitely not the only one. But you are probably stuck in some deep, unconscious attachment patterns that are quietly running the show.
Especially if you relate to anxious or disorganized attachment, this isn’t just about your choices, it’s about what your nervous system learned to expect from love.
The way we learn to love gets wired into our bodies early on. If you grew up with love that felt inconsistent, painful, or unpredictable, your brain and body might now associate love with longing, anxiety, chaos, not safety or consistency.
For so many women with anxious or disorganized attachment styles, dating starts to feel like a rollercoaster that never leads anywhere. You chase the ones who keep you at arm’s length. You feel a spark with the ones who don’t choose you. You dismiss the steady ones, or try to convince yourself you’re just “not that into them.”
And it’s not because you’re sabotaging yourself on purpose. It’s because your nervous system has been trained to find comfort in the uncomfortable. What feels exciting or passionate to you might actually be a stress response. And what feels “boring”? That might just be what safety actually feels like.
Below, we’ll explore five hard, eye-opening truths about why committed, healthy, love might not feel attractive yet, and the science behind why your body might be resisting exactly what you say you want.
1. You might not even really like them, you just like the chase and the validation of being chosen.
That intoxicating rush you feel when you pursue someone who’s just out of reach. When they look at you a certain way. When they disappear and then suddenly come back with just enough to make you feel wanted again.
That feeling is real, but it’s not always about them. It’s the validation. The unpredictability. The high of not knowing if they’ll choose you, and then the temporary relief when they do.
If early experiences taught you that love is something you have to earn, or that it’s unpredictable and inconsistent, your nervous system might’ve adapted by getting hooked on the chase.
Maybe one of your parents was warm one moment and cold the next. They were distracted, overwhelmed, overworked, or just didn’t have the capacity. They praised you for being helpful and quiet but got irritated when you had needs or big emotions. You learned that being loved meant staying small, staying impressive, walking on eggshells, proving yourself, waiting.
That kind of inconsistent care creates what’s called an intermittent reinforcement pattern, the same mechanism that makes gambling addictive. Your body literally gets hooked on the uncertainty of whether someone will give you affection or attention. When they pull away or go cold, your dopamine drops. When they come back with even just a scrap of connection, dopamine surges. You feel that hit of excitement.
This dopamine rollercoaster feels like chemistry. It feels like passion. But really, it’s just anxiety and relief playing out in your body.
Which is why people who are emotionally unavailable or hard to get can feel magnetic, and genuinely committed, consistent people can feel “meh” by comparison.
If you resonate with this, you might recognize moments where you think, “Do I actually like this person, or do I just like trying to win them over?” That’s the hard part. Sometimes it’s not even about the connection, it’s about the familiar feeling of trying, of chasing, of being chosen after proving yourself. That can feel like worthiness. But it’s fleeting. And it’s always dependent on someone else.
Meanwhile, someone who’s kind and interested from the start doesn’t give you that same high, so you subconsciously write them off.
This pattern is what many refer to as a trauma bond, not bonding over trauma (as the internet often misuses it), but a nervous system pattern formed from inconsistent care or emotional unpredictability. It’s not that the connection isn’t real. It’s that the intensity can be familiar in a way that keeps you chasing, rather than feeling safe and loved.
The good news is, you can retrain your body to experience calm, steady, mutual interest as exciting and sexy. But first, you have to admit the “spark” you crave might actually be anxiety in disguise.
And just to be clear, I don’t believe every connection is just a trauma bond. Love is complex, and sometimes even those addictive-feeling connections hold real meaning. But understanding the role your nervous system and body plays is what gives you choice. And that’s where the healing begins.
2. You’re not dating multiple people to “keep your options open,” you’re trying to fill a void only you can fill.
In the era of dating apps, it’s easy to rationalize juggling several “situationships” or crushes at once. You might tell yourself you’re keeping options open, being a modern dater, protecting yourself from getting hurt or too attached. But underneath that logic is often something else entirely. For many people with anxious or disorganized attachment, the attention, flirtation, and novelty serve as a self-soothing strategy.
The dopamine hit from a new match, the excitement of flirtatious texting, the rush of being wanted, all of it gives a temporary break from anxiety, depression, insecurity, or loneliness. But it never lasts. As soon as you’re alone, or the situationship starts requiring emotional availability or commitment, the discomfort returns. You feel the emptiness creeping in again, so you add someone else to the roster.
This is a cycle. One that mimics addiction. Research on love addiction shows that many people become dependent on the thrill of new romance. It becomes a way to feel alive, to feel wanted, to escape. You start needing someone, or several someones, to give you attention in order to feel okay. There’s a constant reach for validation and often, a pattern of avoiding being single altogether, jumping from one fling or relationship to the next, keeping someone, anyone, on standby.
What’s happening chemically is a series of highs and crashes. In the early stages of romantic connection, your brain is flooded with dopamine, norepinephrine, and cortisol. These chemicals create the feeling of obsession, butterflies, and euphoria. It gives you a lift, a buzz, and a sense of purpose. It can become a way to avoid deeper pain.
But the body is not wired to live in that honeymoon high forever. Studies show that as connection deepens, those chemicals naturally level out. That intensity softens around the one or two year mark. What’s left is steadier, calmer, more secure.
For someone stuck in this pattern, that shift feels like a problem. When the intensity dips, it starts to feel like something is missing, not because the connection is wrong, but because the anxiety, depression, and internal emptiness start rising again. Instead of staying and building something real, you chase the next high.
No partner can permanently fill that void, because the void itself is about unmet self-love and unresolved pain. No matter how many people you date, no matter how exciting it is in the beginning, the emptiness will return again and again until you turn inward. The thrill of a new crush can temporarily distract you from your loneliness, but it will never cure it.
Healing begins when you learn to be with yourself, to find contentment without distraction, to source validation from within, to build a full life that does not rely on the attention of others to feel whole. Also, you are probably dating people who are doing the exact same thing. Chasing highs. Avoiding discomfort. Staying stuck in the loop.
3. You turn away people who want commitment because your body associates care with intensity or unavailability.
It sounds counterintuitive, but the answer lies in your body’s association between love and anxiety. If you grew up with caregivers who were neglectful, unpredictable, or made love conditional, your nervous system learned to equate love with feelings of intensity, longing, and abandonment. Chaos was your “normal.”
So when someone comes along and offers steady affection with no strings attached, your subconscious actually finds it unfamiliar. Calm feels like boredom. Consistency feels suspicious. You might catch yourself thinking, “They’re too nice, there must be something wrong,” or feeling icky that they’re so available. This isn’t because “nice isn’t your type,” as much as it is that “nice” triggers discomfort in a body wired for instability. The nervous system craves predictability, so it would rather be comfortable in pain and confusion than uncomfortable in newness, even if that newness is what you consciously want. In other words, when no anxiety is present, something feels off.
Because of this wiring, you might unconsciously sabotage with perfectly good partners. You become hyper-critical, nitpicking their minor flaws or pulling back as soon as they show more interest. It’s as if you’re searching for a reason to justify the uneasy feeling that “this is too easy” or “I don’t really like them.”
If you have a disorganized attachment style (also known as fearful-avoidant), this pattern is even more pronounced. Disorganized attachers live in a constant push-pull of “I want you, go away.” Your brain craves closeness one moment and panics the next, oscillating between pursuit and withdrawal. You may deeply want love, but once it’s offered freely, it triggers your deep fear that love inevitably means hurt. So you, often subconsciously, create drama or distance to restore the familiar emotional chaos. This can look like starting arguments, ghosting someone who is treating you well, fixating on an unavailable ex instead of the stable person right in front of you, or shutting down emotionally the second you feel exposed. Sometimes, when the relationship feels too calm or not intense enough, you might even start a fight just to feel something, not because you enjoy conflict, but because your body associates chaos with connection.
If you have an anxious attachment style, you may become more graspy and hypervigilant. You crave closeness but often question it as soon as it arrives. You do not trust that the love is real or that it will last, so you start scanning for signs that something is wrong. You overanalyze text messages, need constant reassurance, or compare the current connection to past pain.
It’s painful to recognize, but here’s the illuminating truth: there is no magical person who will make that emptiness and fear go away. Even the most loving partner cannot singlehandedly heal an attachment wound. If you let a caring person in, you have to face that the love they offer feels unsettling only because it’s healthy.
That realization can be scary, it means the problem was never that you “hadn’t met the right one,” but that you must look into your own attachment. The good news is, by sticking with the discomfort of a safe relationship a little longer than usual, you can teach your nervous system that security is the new sexy.
4. Trying to “play it cool” and not show how much you care creates the very distance and hurt you’re trying to avoid
When you’ve been burned before, it makes sense to want to protect yourself. You tell yourself not to text back too fast, not to say “I love you” first, not to act needy. You pride yourself on being chill and not catching feelings, at least on the outside. But inside, there’s often a deep yearning for affection and commitment.
Holding back your true feelings doesn’t keep you safe from hurt, it often causes it. Love cannot grow without vulnerability. By consistently playing it cool, you end up putting up walls that prevent genuine connection. The other person only sees a wall, so they assume you’re not that invested, and they may mirror that same distance back to you. Over time, both of you feel emotionally disconnected, not because the potential wasn’t there, but because neither person made the first move toward openness.
Acting like you don’t care creates relationships where real love never develops. And eventually, that leaves you feeling exactly as unloved, unchosen, or unseen as you feared. From an attachment perspective, this dynamic is especially common for those with anxious attachment or anxious avoidant tendencies who swing into protective avoidance. Expressing love or need once led to rejection or shame, so now you attempt to stay emotionally self-contained.
But suppressing emotions in relationships leads to more misunderstandings, more distance, and more distress for both people. Warmth, care, affection, stating feelings and needs, these are the very things that open the door to lasting love. There is nothing wrong with stating a need or desire with love and without demand or expectation. When you share what’s true for you, and you do it gently, openly, and without trying to control the outcome, it allows for intimacy to grow. Letting someone see your vulnerability is not a liability, it’s an invitation.
The mind says keeping emotions in check means not getting hurt, but what it really creates is disconnection. Over time, being chill becomes a mask, a way to stay hidden even in relationships that have potential. The realization here is that genuine interest, sharing your needs and desires, and allowing others to witness your vulnerability is not something to be ashamed of. Premature over-investment can become unhealthy, fantasizing, obsessing, losing your friends or identity or passions, but caring, showing up, and letting yourself be seen are necessary for real love to take root.
The right person won’t be scared off by your warmth. The ones who are were never going to offer the kind of love your heart was really seeking. In the end, letting yourself care out loud and allowing others to really see you is the only way to receive the love and understanding you’ve been trying to protect all along.
5. You date people who aren’t at your level or who need caretaking because it makes you feel more in control
You might find yourself choosing people who are struggling in their career, with their mental health, addicted, or completely disconnected from their own healing. They aren’t grounded. They aren’t available. And they aren’t meeting you where you are. But something about it feels familiar.
You think being needed means they won’t leave. Or if you can help them, fix them, or save them, it reflects your worth. But it doesn’t. It never did. Their healing has never been your job, and your worth was never supposed to be something you had to earn.
This dynamic often forms when love and over-responsibility got wired together early in life. If you grew up feeling like you had to stabilize a parent, take care of someone else's emotions, or be the strong one while everything around you fell apart, love became something you worked for, not something you received freely. So now, as an adult, you might feel safest in relationships where you’re the one doing the most. The one holding it together. The one being needed.
For those with anxious attachment, this often looks like self-abandoning to try to secure closeness. You overfunction, over-apologize, over-care, hoping your consistency will be enough to make them finally choose you. You take responsibility for how the relationship is going and carry the weight of their growth on your back.
For those with anxious-avoidant or disorganized attachment, the pull is different. There’s a subconscious attraction to chaos, emotional volatility, and addiction, because it matches the unpredictability your nervous system learned to survive. You seek intensity because stability feels foreign. The more dysfunctional the dynamic, the more it confirms your role as the emotionally competent one. You stay connected by staying superior, more self-aware, more grounded, more capable, and that power dynamic gives you just enough safety to remain attached without feeling exposed.
Over time, you give more than you get. You try harder, hold more, and suppress your own needs to keep the relationship alive. And when it falls apart, which it often does, because caretaking is not intimacy, you don’t just grieve the person. You grieve the identity you built around trying to be enough for them.
You were never meant to be the one carrying it all. You don’t need to earn love through usefulness or emotional labor. You don’t need to be the healer, the helper, or the strong one just to feel worthy of staying. Real love doesn’t ask you to shrink so someone else can survive.
Let your nervous system relearn what it means to be met. To be supported. To be loved without having to prove anything.
If this hit hard, that’s okay.
It just means part of you is ready.
Ready to stop calling chaos “chemistry”.
Ready to want something better.
Ready to believe that safety and commitment can actually feel sexy.
Ready to build a beautiful shared life with someone.
It’s not too late.
You’re allowed to be loved in a new way.
You’re allowed to stop chasing love that hurts and start receiving the kind that heals.
This is the work I do with clients every day, helping women untangle the patterns that keep them stuck in almosts, chasing, and self-doubt, so they can finally feel safe being fully loved.
If you’re ready to shift these patterns in a deep, body-based way, I’m currently accepting new 1:1 therapy clients and my women’s dating and relationship group To Stay or Go is now enrolling .
Disclaimer:
This blog is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy, counseling, or medical advice. Reading this content does not establish a therapeutic relationship. If you are in crisis or need immediate support, please call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).
