For twenty-five years, I chose the same man. The faces changed, the jobs, the personalities—but the thing underneath never did.
Every single one of them was someone whose warmth came intermittently, whose attention I had to earn, who kept me in a particular state of hoping and reading and working just slightly harder than was comfortable. I told myself each one was different. I had extensive evidence. I was wrong about this for a very long time.
The last time it ended, I was forty-six. I sat in a parking garage for forty minutes afterward, not crying exactly, but unable to drive.
Not because I was devastated about this particular man, but because I’d just heard myself explain the ending in the exact same words I’d used at forty-one, and thirty-seven, and thirty-two. Same why. Same man. I’d been choosing a version of him since I was twenty-two years old, and I finally—sitting in that garage, unable to look away from it—admitted it. The year that followed was the first time I looked at that pattern directly.
What I found there was more uncomfortable, and more useful, than I expected.
They were all different men. They were all the same man.
There was a musician, a lawyer, someone who worked in finance, and someone who didn’t believe in having a career. There was a man who cooked elaborate meals and one who ate standing over the sink. One called me three times a day, and one went quiet for days without explanation and called it needing space. They had different politics, different aesthetics, different levels of warmth, ambition, and willingness to make plans.
From the outside, over twenty-five years, they were different enough that I could have argued I didn’t have a type at all. I did argue that whenever anyone suggested otherwise. I had extensive evidence.
But every single one of them had one thing in common: I had to work for it. The connection was never easy or freely given. There was always something I needed to earn, some version of me more likely to keep them, some uncertainty that kept me off-balance enough to stay oriented toward them. The warmth was real, but it was intermittent—reliable sometimes and not others, which meant I was always paying attention, always reading, always trying to gauge the current weather. The specifics varied. The emotional math was identical. I was always the one who wanted it slightly more, and I spent twenty-five years finding men who ensured that.
Everything I needed to know, I knew immediately and ignored
With almost every one of them, I knew something was off within the first month.
Not off in a dealbreaker way—just a note, a small misalignment I’d register and file somewhere I couldn’t easily access. The way he canceled the second time and his explanation was slightly too smooth. The way he talked about his last relationship and the version of her was a little too convenient. The way he was brilliant company when he showed up, and vague about when that would be next. These things surfaced early, and I’d do something I can only describe as deliberate not-noticing. I saw them. I put them somewhere else.
What I told myself instead was a story about potential. About what he was like at his best, which was often extraordinary. About how the parts that troubled me were just where he was protecting himself, and if I could get past that protection, there would be something worth the effort. About how someone who felt easy from the beginning would probably just be boring. This last belief I held for twenty-five years without ever examining it. It felt like wisdom. It was a justification for choosing the familiar sensation over anything that might actually work.
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None of this started with him—or any of them
When I finally started looking at the pattern instead of excusing it, the trail went back much further than I expected. I thought I was examining relationships. I was actually examining my childhood.
Specifically, I was examining the experience of loving someone inconsistent—someone who was warm and wonderful and then not, who I had to read carefully and manage around and work to stay in good standing with. Someone whose love felt like something I was always in the middle of earning rather than something I simply had. I’d grown up inside a specific emotional climate, and I’d spent twenty-five years recreating it with impressive precision.
The connection, once I saw it, was obvious in the way things that have always been there become obvious when you finally look directly at them. I didn’t choose unavailable men because I was unlucky or had bad taste. I chose them because their availability was my first language. The hypervigilance I’d developed early—the constant reading of another person’s temperature, the careful management of my own behavior to maintain access to their warmth—I’d brought it into every relationship I’d ever had, calling it love. It was love. It was also something else I hadn’t had a name for yet.
The man was almost beside the point
Once I understood the pattern, I had to reckon with something harder: I hadn’t been choosing these men for who they were. I’d been choosing them for what they activated in me. The specific quality of longing that came with someone who wasn’t fully available. The way wanting something I couldn’t quite have made me feel focused and present and alive in a way that easier relationships never quite produced. I’d been chasing a sensation, and the men were the means of getting to it. Some of them were remarkable people. Some of them weren’t right for anyone. What they had in common was the feeling they produced, which I’d been mistaking for proof of their significance.
The problem is that this sensation bears a remarkable resemblance to love. It has all the hallmarks—the preoccupation, the heightened attention, the sense that this particular person is singular and irreplaceable.
For a long time, I took the intensity as proof of something real. What I eventually understood was that intensity and depth are not the same thing. What I felt for all of them was real. It just wasn’t love in the way I needed love to be. It was the feeling I’d learned to mistake for love because it was the only version I’d ever known up close.
I couldn’t go back to not knowing it
Figuring this out didn’t feel the way I thought it would. There was no moment of clean relief, no sense of a door opening onto something better.
What there was, mostly, was grief. For the years. For the specific men I’d genuinely loved and lost, for the relationships I’d walked away from that might have been different if I’d understood myself at twenty-five the way I was starting to understand myself at forty-six. For the version of me who’d been working so hard for so long at something that was never going to give her what she actually needed. There was also, underneath the grief, something quieter—the particular sensation of finally seeing clearly what I’d been looking at the whole time without registering what it was.
The most significant change was practical: I couldn’t unsee it. I tried, briefly, because seeing it meant that the next time I felt that specific pull—the particular charge of someone who required effort and interpretation, who didn’t come easily—I’d know what I was feeling and where it came from. I’d have to decide what to do with that knowledge instead of just following the feeling where it led. That was the part that required something of me. Not the understanding. The choice, made in full knowledge, about what to do next.
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I don’t know what comes next, but I know what doesn’t
I am not confident about what healthy love looks like for me in practice. I’ve spent most of my adult life inside a version of it that I now understand wasn’t quite what I thought, and certainty about what should replace it would require a kind of experience I don’t yet have. I’ve been on a few dates this year that felt pleasant and uncomplicated, and I’ve noticed that pleasant and uncomplicated makes me a little nervous in a way I’m actively working on. Progress is not linear. The honest answer is I’m still figuring it out.
What I do know is the feeling I’m no longer willing to follow. The specific charge of someone at a comfortable emotional distance. The urgency of wanting someone who doesn’t fully want me back. The way that particular hunger has felt, my entire adult life, like the realest version of being alive. I know that feeling the way I know my own handwriting. I also know now what it’s been costing me—what I’ve given to it, what it’s returned. Not knowing what comes next is uncomfortable. Knowing what doesn’t—really knowing it, in my body—is the first time in twenty-five years I’ve felt something that might be called free.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.
