I’ve been through a few relationships. None of them were good. I crave attention and love, but the moment I meet someone stable, I lose interest. I’ve started noticing a pattern — I keep dating people who hurt me, and it’s only then that I actually feel something. Can someone explain this to me?
Answer:
The fact that you’ve noticed this pattern yourself — that you only feel real emotion around people who hurt you, while stable people leave you cold — is a sharp observation. It’s also the first condition for actually changing it.
This isn’t because you’re choosing pain on purpose. It’s because your nervous system learned the wrong formula for love — and it learned it from the very first place you ever learned what love was: your parents.
For the first 20 years of your life, your parents were your only source of safety and survival — but they could also be a source of threat, whenever anger, yelling, or control showed up. To a child, these aren’t two separate things. They’re the same person, the only source of love you’ve ever known. So your brain recorded a rule: real love has to come with fear and instability — that’s simply what love is shaped like.
Growing up, when you meet someone stable — someone who creates no fear, no hurt — your brain doesn’t recognize it as love, because it doesn’t match the only formula you were ever taught. That “boredom” isn’t because the person is dull. It’s the absence of a signal your brain has been trained to associate with love since childhood.
With someone who hurts you — warm one moment, cold the next, keeping you on edge — that instability is the one signal your brain does translate as love, because it matches exactly what you lived through as a child. That’s why you only feel truly alive inside a relationship that hurts.
To change this, the first step isn’t forcing yourself to love someone stable right away. It’s recognizing that the formula “love = fear” you’ve been carrying isn’t the truth — it’s just a lesson your brain learned wrong, from what you went through. Give yourself time to teach your nervous system a new formula, one where calm can be real love too, not just the version that comes wrapped in fear.
Kikazik — demystifying human psychology and behavior. Author of “Demystifying Anxiety, Fear, and Anger.”