🌊Come Here, Go Away: When love feels real only when it hurts

How it started

Growing up, love came with mixed messages: sometimes your parent was emotionally available and caring, other times distant, or angry 🎭. You learned that love could disappear without warning, that people you depended on might suddenly become unavailable or leave entirely. At the same time, you experienced moments of genuine connection that felt so good you'd do anything to hold onto them ✨. This taught your nervous system a cruel equation: the more you care, the more you have to lose 💔. While a part of you desperately seeks closeness and intimacy, the other part is terrified that once you have it, it will be taken away—so you learned to guard against losing it by not raising your hopes too high.

How it shows up in relationships

Now you find yourself caught in a double-bind of conflicting desires for both closeness and defense, creating simultaneous pull-push behaviors that feel confusing, yet protective 🌊. In relationships, you alternate between extremes—sometimes showing intense attraction, while also picking fights, or pour your heart out, but then immediately downplay and qualify what you just shared. You might act distant to protect yourself from potential heartbreak or test your partner constantly—pushing them to prove they won't leave, while simultaneously giving them reasons to want to 🌀. Your nervous system can't tell the difference between getting closer to intimacy (good) and getting closer to inevitable loss (bad). Sometimes you do both with the same person within a single day—desperately reaching for them when they feel distant, then feeling suffocated and needing space the moment they respond to your need for closeness 🔄.

The core pattern

This pattern feels almost intentional, except it's not under your conscious control. Relationships feel either dangerously suffocating or painfully absent, with no middle ground. You either lose yourself completely in new partners or keep them at arm's length to prevent being overwhelmed by their "unreasonable" needs. With time, many of your relationships become chaotic and volatile, which sometimes drives you to swing to the opposite extreme and avoid deep connections entirely—keeping things strictly casual. Your heart wants what it fears most—the very intimacy that could heal you also feels like it could destroy you.