The relationship pattern that took me years to recognize—and even longer to break.

I’ve dated the same person at least seven times.

Not literally the same person, of course. But the same energy. The same emotional unavailability wrapped in different packaging. The same promises that things would be different this time. The same cycle of intensity, disconnection, and inevitable heartbreak.

Each time, I convinced myself this one would be different. This one would finally be the relationship that worked. This one would prove that I was worthy of the love I’d been searching for my entire life.

Spoiler alert: none of them were different. Because the problem wasn’t them—it was me.

After 13 years of working with people in recovery, watching them transform not just their relationship with substances but with themselves and others, I’ve learned something crucial about why we keep choosing the wrong people. And it’s not what most relationship advice will tell you.

We don’t choose the wrong people because we have bad judgment or terrible taste. We choose them because they feel like home. And sometimes, home is the very place we need to heal from.

The Familiarity Trap

Here’s what nobody tells you about attraction: we’re not drawn to what’s good for us. We’re drawn to what’s familiar.

Think about your earliest relationships—not romantic ones, but the relationships that shaped you. Your parents, caregivers, siblings, the people who taught you what love looked like before you had language to name it. Those relationships created a blueprint in your nervous system for what connection feels like.

If love came with conditions, you learned that you had to earn affection through performance or perfection. If love was inconsistent, you learned to anxiously seek reassurance. If love came with chaos, you learned that calm relationships feel boring or untrustworthy.

This is why the emotionally unavailable person feels exciting while the stable, consistent person feels like they’re missing something. This is why drama can feel like passion. This is why we mistake anxiety for chemistry and peace for the absence of spark.

Our bodies literally don’t recognize healthy love because it doesn’t match the pattern we learned early on. So we keep choosing people who replicate our original wounds, hoping that this time, we’ll get a different ending. This time, we’ll be enough to make them stay. This time, our love will be powerful enough to change them.

Except it never works that way.

My Pattern (And Maybe Yours Too)

Let me paint you a picture of my relationship pattern, because recognizing it was the first step toward breaking it.

I would meet someone charismatic, intense, slightly mysterious. The kind of person who made me feel alive in a way that calm stability never could. The beginning would be intoxicating—long conversations that stretched into the early morning hours, undeniable chemistry, a feeling that I’d finally found someone who truly understood me.

Then, slowly, the cracks would appear. They’d pull back when I got too close. They’d be inconsistent with communication—intensely present one day, distant the next. They’d talk about commitment but their actions told a different story. They’d have one foot in and one foot out, keeping me perpetually off-balance.

And here’s the worst part: instead of recognizing these red flags and walking away, I’d double down. I’d try harder. I’d become more understanding, more flexible, more accommodating. I’d convince myself that if I just loved them enough, if I was just patient enough, they’d finally feel safe enough to fully commit.

I became addicted to the intermittent reinforcement—those moments when they’d show up fully and remind me why I’d fallen for them in the first place. Those brief glimpses of what could be kept me hooked through all the times they proved what actually was.

Sound familiar?

The thing is, I wasn’t stupid or desperate or lacking self-respect. I was simply replaying a pattern I learned long before I met any of these people. I was trying to earn the unconditional love I didn’t receive as a child by finally being enough for someone emotionally unavailable.

What We’re Really Searching For

Every relationship we enter is, in some way, an attempt to heal an old wound. We’re looking for someone to give us what we didn’t get before. Someone to prove we’re lovable despite the voices in our head that say we’re not. Someone to fill the empty spaces inside us that we haven’t learned to fill ourselves.

This isn’t inherently problematic—we all carry wounds and we all long for healing. The problem comes when we expect another person to do the healing for us. When we outsource our sense of worth to whether someone chooses us. When we mistake being needed for being loved.

I spent years searching for someone to make me feel complete, not realizing that I was approaching relationships from a place of lack rather than wholeness. I wasn’t looking for a partner to share my life with—I was looking for someone to validate my existence. To prove I mattered. To fill the void I felt inside.

That’s an impossible burden to place on another person. And it’s a recipe for choosing people who can’t actually meet our needs, because on some unconscious level, we believe we don’t deserve to have our needs met.

The Moment I Started Choosing Differently

My wake-up call came after yet another situationship ended exactly how all the others had—with me feeling confused, hurt, and wondering what I’d done wrong. I was sitting on my therapist’s couch, crying about how I kept attracting emotionally unavailable people.

She looked at me with gentle directness and said, “You’re not attracting them. You’re choosing them. And you’re choosing them because unavailability feels safer than vulnerability.”

I wanted to argue with her. But deep down, I knew she was right.

I chose emotionally unavailable people because if they couldn’t fully commit, I didn’t have to either. If they kept one foot out the door, I never had to risk fully being seen. If the relationship was always uncertain, I never had to face the scarier prospect of being in a stable relationship where I might eventually be rejected for who I actually am rather than for not being enough to change them.

My pattern wasn’t about bad luck or poor judgment. It was a defense mechanism. I was protecting myself from the very intimacy I claimed to want.

That realization broke something open in me. Because once I saw the pattern, I couldn’t unsee it. And once I understood that I was choosing familiar pain over unfamiliar love, I had a decision to make: keep repeating the pattern, or do the terrifying work of breaking it.

How to Actually Break the Pattern

Breaking a relationship pattern isn’t about making better choices—it’s about becoming a different person. It’s about healing the wounds that created the pattern in the first place.

For me, this meant getting really honest about my childhood and how it shaped my understanding of love.

It meant grieving the love I didn’t receive and accepting that no romantic partner could go back and give it to me. That healing had to come from within, not from finally finding the right person.

It meant learning to sit with the discomfort of being alone rather than jumping into relationships to avoid feeling lonely. It meant developing a relationship with myself that was so solid that I didn’t need someone else to validate my worth.

Most importantly, it meant recognizing that the butterflies I’d been chasing weren’t actually chemistry—they were my nervous system recognizing a familiar pattern and lighting up in response. Real chemistry isn’t anxiety. It’s safety. It’s someone whose presence helps you regulate, not dysregulate.

I had to learn to trust peace. To recognize that boring wasn’t actually boring—it was stable. That someone who communicated clearly wasn’t less exciting—they were emotionally mature. That consistency wasn’t the absence of passion—it was the foundation for sustainable love.

What Healthy Actually Feels Like

Here’s what blew my mind when I finally started dating differently: healthy love feels underwhelming at first.

There’s no dramatic intensity. No roller-coaster highs and lows. No wondering where you stand or whether they’ll text back. No trying to decode mixed signals or convince yourself that breadcrumbs are enough.

Instead, there’s clarity. Consistency. Someone who says what they mean and follows through with their actions. Someone who doesn’t play games because they’re secure enough to be direct. Someone whose presence feels calming rather than activating.

At first, my nervous system didn’t know what to do with this. My body kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I found myself almost manufacturing drama because the peace felt too unfamiliar, too suspicious, too good to be true.

But as I stayed in it—as I resisted the urge to sabotage or run—something shifted. The peace started feeling less foreign and more like home. Not the home I came from, but the home I was creating. The home I deserved.

I learned that real love isn’t supposed to hurt. It’s not supposed to make you question your worth or doubt your reality. It’s not supposed to require you to shrink yourself or perform or earn affection.

Real love is supposed to feel like coming home to yourself, not losing yourself. It’s supposed to make you more you, not less.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Changing Patterns

Here’s what I need you to know if you recognize yourself in this pattern: you can’t change it until you’re ready to grieve what keeping it protected you from.

We hold onto dysfunctional patterns because they serve us in some way. They protect us from deeper fears. For me, choosing unavailable people protected me from the terror of being fully seen and potentially rejected. It protected me from having to confront my own worthiness. It gave me something external to focus on rather than doing the internal work.

Letting go of the pattern means letting go of the protection it offered. It means getting vulnerable in ways that feel terrifying. It means risking real rejection—not rejection based on not being enough to change someone, but rejection of your authentic self.

That’s scary as hell. But it’s also the only path to real intimacy.

Breaking the pattern also means accepting that you’ll probably feel tempted to fall back into it. Old patterns don’t die easily. They whisper seductively when you’re lonely or insecure or doubting yourself. They promise the familiar thrill, the comfortable discomfort, the known suffering over the unknown possibility of something better.

But each time you choose differently—each time you walk away from someone who can’t meet you where you are, each time you stay present with the discomfort of healthy love, each time you choose your own well-being over the pattern—you’re rewiring your nervous system. You’re teaching yourself that you deserve better. You’re proving to yourself that you’re worth the risk.

An Invitation to Choose Differently

So here’s my invitation to you: get curious about your patterns. Look at your relationship history not with judgment, but with compassionate awareness. What keeps showing up? What are you repeatedly drawn to? What does the pattern protect you from having to face?

And then ask yourself the harder question: What would it cost you to keep this pattern? Where will you be in five years if nothing changes? Is the familiar pain really safer than the unfamiliar possibility of healthy love?

You’re not broken for having these patterns. You’re human. You learned to survive with the tools you had available. But survival strategies that served you once can become the very things that keep you stuck.

You don’t have to keep choosing the wrong people. You don’t have to keep breaking your own heart trying to earn love from people who can’t give it. You don’t have to keep settling for scraps when you deserve the whole meal.

You can choose differently. You can break the pattern. You can learn to trust peace, embrace vulnerability, and allow yourself to be loved by someone who’s actually available.

But first, you have to become available to yourself. You have to do the work of healing the wounds that created the pattern. You have to learn that you’re worthy of the love you’ve been seeking, and that worthiness starts with how you treat yourself, not with whether someone else chooses you.

The right person won’t feel like a fix to your problems. They’ll feel like a partner in creating a life that doesn’t need fixing. They won’t complete you because you’ll already be whole. They’ll just add to the wholeness that’s already there.

That’s the relationship worth waiting for. That’s the relationship worth choosing differently for. And that relationship becomes possible the moment you stop choosing people who confirm your old stories and start choosing yourself.

What patterns have you noticed in your relationships? Have you found yourself choosing the same type of person over and over? I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments.

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