The Real Reason You Keep Choosing “The Wrong” People
When Love Feels Just Out of Reach
You tell yourself you’re done falling for the wrong people. You promise that next time, you’ll choose someone who understands you instead of needs so much from you. But somehow, it keeps happening, and you find yourself in the same cycle of hope, disappointment, and longing.
The real reason might not be about bad luck or bad taste. It’s about what your nervous system recognizes as love. Often, these patterns trace back to avoidant attachment: the subtle conditioning that makes closeness feel unsafe, even when you crave it.
What Is Avoidant Attachment?
Avoidant attachment develops early in life when emotional needs are consistently unmet. If you grew up with caregivers who were distant, critical, or uncomfortable with vulnerability, you learned to rely on yourself.
As a child, you might have stopped crying because no one came. You learned to hide your needs because they went unnoticed or were met with irritation. These early adaptations helped you survive emotionally, but in adulthood, they can make intimacy feel out of reach.
Avoidant attachment doesn’t mean you don’t want love. Actually, it means love feels risky. It’s safer to keep people at a distance, to intellectualize emotions, or to focus on independence rather than interdependence.
The Attraction to People Who Want Too Much
When you carry avoidant attachment tendencies, you often attract or are attracted to partners who try really hard to “find you”, the real you. They want closeness, conversation, emotional transparency. They want to “get” you, to feel you open up, to finally connect to the version of you they sense is under the surface. They chase intimacy while you quietly back away, feeling overwhelmed by their intensity.
You don’t mean to shut down. You care deeply. But something about their pursuit, even if it’s loving, makes your chest tighten. And you decide it just doesn’t work with them.
This is the complex, invisible dance of avoidant attachment in relationships.
Why Avoidant Attachment Draws You Toward Pursuers
In avoidant attachment development, chances are closeness once felt unsafe. Maybe as a child, emotional needs were met with criticism or rejection. Maybe love came with strings attached…you had to perform or be perfect to earn it.
Over time, you learned to protect yourself by not needing too much, by becoming self-sufficient and emotionally contained.
So when you meet someone who does express their needs openly, who reaches for connection and emotional closeness, a deep part of you is both drawn to and repelled by that energy.
You might be attracted to their warmth, their openness, their intensity. It feels like something you long for but never learned how to tolerate. Yet as the relationship progresses, that same intensity can start to feel intrusive, like they’re trying to crawl inside your skin.
It’s not that you don’t want love…it’s that your nervous system still associates intimacy with engulfment.
The Push-Pull Cycle of Avoidant Attachment
This dynamic often turns into a cycle:
Attraction: You’re drawn to their emotional expressiveness, and they make you feel alive, wanted, seen.
Activation: As they move closer, your system senses danger. You start to feel pressure to reciprocate, to reassure, to reveal yourself to them.
Withdrawal: You pull back, needing space to breathe. Maybe you become distant, distracted, or overly logical.
Pursuit: Your partner senses disconnection and moves closer, asking questions or seeking reassurance.
Escalation: The more they pursue, the more you retreat.
Both partners feel misunderstood. The pursuer feels rejected, and the avoidant partner feels suffocated.
This is the classic avoidant attachment dynamic: longing for connection, yet fearing the vulnerability it requires.
The Hidden Fear Beneath Avoidance
At the core of avoidant attachment isn’t coldness — it’s fear. Fear of being trapped, smothered, consumed by someone else’s needs. Fear that if you let someone close, you’ll lose yourself.
This fear often stems from early experiences of enmeshment or inconsistent caregiving, situations where your needs weren’t respected as separate or valid. Emotional independence became your survival skill.
So when a partner “wants too much,” it’s not really them you’re reacting to, it’s the buried panic of being emotionally overrun.
What Healing Looks Like
Healing from avoidant attachment doesn’t mean forcing yourself to be vulnerable all the time. It means learning to stay present when intimacy feels uncomfortable, rather than defaulting to distance.
Here are a few starting points:
1. Get curious about your shutdown moments.
When you feel the urge to withdraw, pause and notice what’s happening in your body. Is your heart racing? Do you feel heat in your chest, or an urge to escape? Label it gently: “I’m feeling overwhelmed by closeness right now.”
2. Communicate your need for space without disappearing.
Try phrases like, “I need a little time to process this, but I care about you and want to come back to it later.” This helps your partner feel anchored instead of abandoned.
3. Practice micro-vulnerability.
You don’t have to open the floodgates all at once. Start with small disclosures like sharing a thought, an opinion, or a small emotional truth. Each moment of openness helps rewire your brain to tolerate connection.
4. Explore your story in therapy.
Approaches like EMDR or Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) can help you process the early attachment wounds that made closeness feel unsafe.
When You Choose Differently
The good news? Avoidant attachment is not a life sentence. With awareness and practice, you can learn to connect without losing yourself.
Eventually, you’ll begin to notice a shift: you’ll still value independence, but you’ll no longer confuse distance with safety. You’ll recognize that love doesn’t have to mean invasion, it can mean interdependence.
You’ll attract partners who can hold both closeness and space, who won’t try to “find you,” but will gently wait as you learn to reveal yourself on your own terms.
Because when you start feeling safe in your own emotions, you stop needing to run from the people who care enough to want too much.
You Deserve Healthy Relationships Once And For All