I remember sitting by my phone waiting to hear from someone who made me feel more alive than anyone I’d ever met. He was inconsistent and a little unreachable, and I was constantly trying to read him. I told everyone it was chemistry. Looking back, it was anxiety—low-level, constant, looking like intensity. And the thing is, when I’m honest about it, that was the pattern in almost every relationship I’d had. Not just the one guy. All of them. The ones that felt electric were always the ones where I was slightly unsettled. It took me a long time to realize that wasn’t a coincidence.
A lot of women describe the most intense relationships of their lives in almost identical terms—not being able to stop thinking about someone, the way uncertainty made them more attached rather than less, the feeling that calm and easy might actually mean the same thing as boring. That’s not chemistry. That’s a pattern. And most of the time, it started long before any of those relationships did, with certain experiences.
1. Growing up with a parent whose moods were impossible to predict
Children who grow up with emotionally unpredictable parents become extraordinarily good at reading rooms. They track subtle shifts in tone, the quality of silence from the other end of the house, the particular weight behind a simple question. That skill doesn’t disappear when they leave home—it transfers. In relationships, they find themselves constantly scanning: what does a slow text response mean, is something off in how they said that, has something shifted since yesterday? It feels like attentiveness. It feels like caring. What it actually is is the same vigilance they’ve carried since childhood, just pointed at someone new.
And that vigilance produces exactly the sensations they’ll later call chemistry. The preoccupation, the inability to stop turning things over, the particular spike when a message finally comes through—that’s not the electricity of a great connection. That’s their nervous system doing what it was trained to do. A warm, consistent partner doesn’t activate that system. A partner who runs a little hot and cold, who’s hard to read, who keeps them slightly off-balance—that person feels electric. The electricity was alarm. They just never learned to tell the difference.
2. Having to earn affection instead of simply receiving it
When love was something that had to be earned—through good grades, through good behavior, through being the child who didn’t ask for too much—they learned that affection was conditional by nature. Not as a belief they articulated, but as a feeling baked into how closeness worked. As adults, they’re often drawn to people who make them work for it, people whose warmth has to be coaxed out, people who don’t come easily. Not because they enjoy the effort, but because that’s what love has always felt like: something you prove yourself worthy of, over and over.
Giulia Bassi and colleagues, whose research on early attachment and separation anxiety appears in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that early experiences of anxious attachment shape adult relationship patterns in ways that persist well past the original relationship. Women who grew up needing to perform for connection often find that easy, freely given affection doesn’t feel like real love—it feels incomplete, like they haven’t done anything to deserve it yet. The absence of effort reads as the absence of feeling. So they’re drawn toward the version where they have to keep trying, where they’re never quite sure where they stand, where love feels less like a given and more like something they’re always in the middle of earning.
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3. Watching chaos between their parents and calling it love
The template for love was set early, and it had a particular texture. Raised voices. The specific held-breath quiet of an aftermath. Someone gone, someone waiting, the relief when they came back. Then the tenderness that flooded in after the storm—a softness that felt more present than anything they’d seen in calmer households. That contrast taught them something they didn’t mean to learn: that intensity and love were the same word. That the higher the tension, the more real the feeling underneath it.
A woman I know—I’ll call her Amie—spent most of her twenties in relationships she described as passionate. She talked about them the way you’d talk about a great, dramatic film: consuming, never boring, never quite resolved. It wasn’t until she was in something steady and consistently kind that she realized she’d been mistaking the relief of reconciliation for genuine connection. What had felt like depth was a cycle she recognized from childhood. Calm had felt like absence because chaos had always felt like proof that the feeling was real.
4. Being praised for being easy and undemanding
They were the good ones—the ones who didn’t make a fuss, who adapted, who were reliably fine. Adults loved them for it: so easy, so mature, no trouble at all. And so they kept being that. What nobody said was that it isn’t healthy for a child to have no needs. What nobody told them was that suppressing anxiety doesn’t make it disappear—it makes it go underground, where it keeps running beneath everything, invisible until someone or something reaches it. The child who was always fine was practicing for the adult who would have no idea what she was feeling.
As adults, they often can’t name what they’re actually experiencing in the early stages of a relationship. Something strong is there—they know it—but they call it chemistry, connection, a feeling they’ve never had before. They were taught not to register their own unease as real information, so when someone makes them feel unsettled—the slightly short text, the canceled plan, the comment that lands strange—they don’t think this person makes me anxious. They think I’ve never felt this way about anyone. And technically, that’s true. They just don’t know yet what the feeling actually is.
5. Being comforted by the same person who made them afraid
There’s a particular confusion that comes from needing comfort from the person who just scared you. When the parent who yelled or went cold was also the one they turned to afterward—because who else was there—they learned that safety and threat could live inside the same person. They didn’t develop the ability to walk away. They developed the ability to wait it out, to find the warmth inside the person who also frightened them, to stay close to what felt dangerous because leaving felt worse. That’s not weakness. That’s what children do when those are the only options.
Ioulia Kokka and colleagues, whose research on attachment and relationship patterns in women is published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that women with anxious attachment—often rooted in early relational experiences—show distinct patterns in close relationships, including a higher tolerance for ambivalence and inconsistency in partners. As adults, they often find themselves with people who replicate that original push-pull. A partner who is tender one week and distant the next doesn’t register as a warning sign. It registers as familiar. Not comfortable, exactly. But known.
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6. Being told that what upset them wasn’t worth being upset about
When a child is told—not always cruelly, sometimes gently, sometimes by people who loved them—that they’re overreacting, the lesson isn’t just to be quieter about feelings. It’s that feelings aren’t reliable information. The reaction becomes the problem, not the thing that caused it. So they get good at second-guessing themselves, at assuming a bad feeling is their fault, at finding generous explanations for behavior that isn’t okay. By the time they’re grown, it’s automatic. They feel something off, and the first move is to talk themselves out of it.
In a relationship with someone inconsistent, this plays out in a particular way. They notice the unease—feel it fully—and then reframe it. He’s just stressed. This is just what early stages feel like. I’m probably too sensitive. The anxiety stays, but the interpretation shifts. Instead of reading their discomfort as information about the relationship, they read it as information about themselves: I ask for too much, I need to be more patient, this is my anxiety talking. That story—the one where their feelings are the problem—keeps them exactly where the anxiety is highest. Because if it’s their fault, they can fix it. And if they can fix it, they don’t have to leave.
7. Loving someone who always seemed like they might leave
An emotionally unavailable parent—one who was there but never quite present, or who left and came back, or who was simply hard to reach on the inside—produces a child who is always monitoring for signs of departure. Always trying to secure the attachment. Always turning up their own warmth or effort to see if that’s the thing that will make someone stay. That vigilance becomes their normal. The feeling of working to keep someone close becomes indistinguishable from the feeling of caring about them. The two fuse, and they stop being able to tell them apart.
As adults, they often find that secure people—people who show up consistently, who don’t manufacture uncertainty, who aren’t going anywhere—feel a little flat. Not because secure people are dull, but because there’s nothing to monitor. The anxious scanning has nowhere to go. With someone who might leave, there’s a constant low hum of effort and urgency, and that hum feels like aliveness. Like they’re really in it. What they’re actually in is a state of low-grade fear they’ve lived in since childhood—one so familiar it no longer reads as fear at all.
Eventually, what most of these women, including myself, find—not all at once, not without a lot of confusion along the way—is that they weren’t bad at love. They were working from the wrong map. The relationships that felt most vivid, most real, most like the thing they’d always been looking for—those were the ones activating old circuitry, not new feeling. Learning to tell the difference is slow and disorienting and doesn’t come with a sudden moment of clarity. It comes with time, and with staying somewhere long enough to let calm become familiar. To find out what it’s like to breathe next to someone without waiting for everything to change.
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