I grew up without a lot of affection—and I’m beginning to realize that’s behind my relationship patterns

A few months ago, someone I’m close to reached over and held my hand while we were watching something sad.

Nothing big—just a quiet, spontaneous gesture. And I froze.

Not in a big way. Not visibly, I think.

But something in me went still and uncertain in a way that took me a moment to process.

I didn’t know what to do with it.

I didn’t know how to just let it be what it was—warmth, freely given, no strings attached.

I’ve been thinking about that moment since. About how something so ordinary could feel so foreign. About how I got from wherever I started to here, a person who can give affection more easily than she can receive it, who is more comfortable being needed than being held.

My childhood wasn’t cold exactly. My parents loved me.

But affection—the easy, physical, unprompted kind—wasn’t really the language of our house. Love was practical. Love was showing up and providing. Love wasn’t the hand on the arm while you watched something sad.

I’m beginning to understand how much that shaped me. Here’s what I’m finding.

1. I don’t know what to do with tenderness

The kindness lands, and I feel a kind of scramble—a search for what the appropriate response is, how long to stay in it, whether I’m doing it right.

There’s no script for just receiving. I wasn’t taught that part.

So I deflect, or I minimize, or I quickly reciprocate in a way that redirects the attention. Something to make the tenderness feel bilateral and transactional rather than just… given. Just there, for me, for no particular reason.

I’m getting better at noticing this. I’m not sure yet that I’m getting better at staying still for it.

2. I’ve organized my relationships around being useful

For most of my adult life, the way I’ve known I belonged somewhere is by having a function there.

By being the person who helps, who shows up, who handles things, who makes the situation better than it was before I arrived.

Studies show that when affection is inconsistent in childhood, kids often learn to base their worth on what they do rather than who they are. Being useful becomes how they earn their place.

The problem is that being useful is not the same as being close. I’ve spent a long time confusing the two.

3. I say “I’m fine” even to the people I love most

Needing something from someone I care about feels dangerous in a way that needing something from an acquaintance doesn’t.

With people who matter, the stakes are higher. The possibility of being too much, too needy, too demanding—that possibility carries weight it doesn’t carry with strangers.

So I say I’m fine. And mostly I say it convincingly. And mostly the people I love believe me, and the moment passes.

What I’ve also done is make it impossible for them to actually know me. That part I’m still working through.

4. I’m more comfortable with criticism than a genuine compliment

Criticism? I know what to do with it. It has a clear implication—improve, adjust, try harder. It’s transactional, and it makes sense.

A genuine compliment, offered warmly and without agenda, produces a discomfort I can’t always hide. The instinct is to deflect it, qualify it, point out why it’s not quite right. To make it smaller, less direct, less like something I have to actually receive and sit with.

I’ve been told I’m hard to compliment. I’m beginning to understand why. The deflection isn’t modest. It’s the same not-knowing-what-to-do-with-warmth that shows up everywhere else.

5. I read urgency and anxiety as signs of love

When a relationship felt urgent and consuming and a little destabilizing, I understood that as closeness.

That was what connection felt like—charged, slightly anxious, dependent on the other person’s mood in a way that kept me on alert.

Studies show that when care is inconsistent early on, people often grow up confusing emotional intensity with closeness—they’ve learned that love comes with a certain amount of uncertainty. It feels familiar, so it feels right.

6. I pull back right when things get close

There’s a specific moment that keeps showing up in my relationships, so reliably now that I’ve started to recognize it coming.

It’s the moment when real closeness is possible, when someone is genuinely seeing me, and something in me wants to retreat. Not because I don’t want the closeness. Because closeness is exactly where the fear lives.

If you let someone see you clearly, they can leave you clearly. The closer they are, the more it costs when they go.

I’ve sabotaged things at this exact point without always knowing I was doing it. The withdrawal happens fast and usually has a plausible explanation attached, so neither of us has to look at what it’s actually about. The timing is always interesting, in retrospect. It’s never when things are bad. It’s right when they’re getting genuinely good—which is, I’ve come to understand, exactly the point.

7. I’ve been drawn to people who couldn’t fully show up

For a long time, I thought this was bad luck, or a type I needed to stop falling for.

It took me longer to see that I was selecting, at some level, for the familiar—for people whose emotional availability had limits I already knew how to work around.

Studies show that people with anxious or avoidant attachment often end up with partners who echo the emotional patterns they grew up with.

It’s not a conscious choice—your nervous system just recognizes what feels like home and gravitates toward it.

Home, in my case, was someone present but not quite there. Loving but not quite available. I kept finding that.

8. I work hard to earn the affection I can’t quite receive

The effort is real and constant.

I remember birthdays. I show up. I track what matters to people and return to it. I make myself as useful, low-maintenance, and uncomplicated as I can be, as if the right combination of those things will eventually produce a love I can actually let in.

It doesn’t work that way. Earning doesn’t produce the kind of love I’m actually hungry for, which is the unprompted kind—the hand on the arm, the text for no reason, the tenderness that doesn’t need to be activated by something I did.

I’m still learning this. I’m not sure I fully believe it yet.

9. I learned that love means making yourself manageable

Don’t need too much.

Don’t take up too much space.

Don’t make things complicated, heavy, or difficult.

Be the easy one, the low-maintenance one, the one who never requires anything extraordinary to keep loving.

Studies show that kids who grew up with love that felt conditional often learn to shrink themselves in relationships. Being ‘small’ became a kind of safety, and that habit sticks long after childhood.

10. I didn’t know what I was missing because I’d never learned to want it

This is the part I keep coming back to.

You can’t miss what you never learned to expect.

The easy warmth, the casual physical affection, the love that doesn’t need to be earned or carefully maintained—I didn’t know these were things that relationships could just contain.

I thought the version I’d grown up with was just how love was.

I’m beginning to understand it differently now. Not to blame anyone for how it was—just to see it more clearly, and to notice what it built in me, and to start, slowly, learning to stay still when someone holds my hand while we watch something sad.

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.