Stop explaining him to me.
I don’t need to know what he said, what he didn’t say, whether he looked you in the eyes at dinner. Whether he touched you. Whether he even smiled and seemed “different.”
If you want things to change, the brutal truth is this: “I’m not interested in his behaviour.”
I’m interested in the itch. Your itch. The one that keeps sending you back for more of the same old shit.
Every time you reach for him (or her), you’re not hoping. You’re self-medicating. And the addiction to getting love out of an emotionally stunted stone is not that different to a cocaine habit.
Here’s the truth. When you picked him – and you did pick him, as much as he picked you – your nervous system found the exact frequency of the devastating “love-that-almost-arrives” game. And you built a whole life around chasing a meagrely cold dose.
It’s exhausting, soul-shattering, and it certainly isn’t romance. It’s a system that’s learned to call the toxic chase for adrenaline, intimacy. It’s NOT.
You’re not choosing neglect because something is wrong with you. You’re choosing it because your body was trained in it so young that it registers as normal. As the only version of love that feels real.
And it does feel real – because it feels like something you must keep earning. Even when earning looks like compromising yourself, prostituting yourself, abandoning your own needs, or even zoning in on another woman’s man, all in the hope that finally, this time, he might turn towards you and mean it when he says “you’re the one!”
Your brain releases more dopamine for an unpredictable reward than a consistent one. Not less. More. Which means the man who is sometimes warm, and mostly bloody not, is neuro-chemically more addictive than a man who simply loves you every day.
It’s the same mechanism that keeps people pulling the lever on a slot machine. The occasional win doesn’t just reward you – it programmes you to keep pulling. And everyone knows that about slot machines. But almost no one applies it to the man (or woman) they love.
“I just want a man who consistently loves me.”
Yeah right. I believe you. You might say you want it but you’d probably be bored shitless if you had him – right now.
This is not a flaw. It’s because your nervous system was built for the chase. Steady, present, unglamorous love doesn’t give you the hit. It doesn’t make your heart race. It doesn’t have you checking your phone at 2am or replaying that look across the dinner table trying to decode what the body language meant.
It just… loves you. Quietly. Reliably and every day.
But to a system wired for survival, that feels like death. Like nothing is happening. Until that changes, a good man won’t feel like love. He’ll feel like suffocation.
So, you stay (or go back) with the one who keeps you guessing. The one who’s cruel. The one who loves you one hour and can’t stand you the next. Because uncertainty kept you alert as a child. And alert kept you safe, and alive!
That wound has a specific shape. It’s the shape of the original person who ran hot and cold. Who was everything and then nothing. Who left you alone, scared, and sobbing. Who taught you that love requires you to earn it back, repeatedly, from someone who was never quite sure they were able to give it.
But your nervous system cast him in the role before you’d finished your first drink.
If you stop reaching for him, you don’t get peace. Not at first. You get the truth of the frigid, toxic space that’s actually there.
The heartbreaking silence. The lack of interest. The cold eyes. The specific qualities of someone who’s already left while still sitting across from you.
And that knowing – that gut-punching knowing – is so much more unbearable than his ongoing rejection. Because rejection at least means you’re still in the game. The silence means the game is over and nobody told you.
So, you keep reaching. Not because you believe it will work. You know he’ll likely say no to your invitation to share a lunch, a massage, even a simple bubble bath.
But you do it anyway. Because the alternative is feeling the emptiness that not reaching leaves behind. The one that has nothing to do with him. The one that’s been there since before you had words for it.
That emptiness is not the problem. That emptiness is what you’ve been running from your entire life.
And as long as you keep running, you’ll keep finding men who make sure you never have to stop.
Men who give you just enough warmth to keep you hooked. Just enough distance to keep you alert. Just enough rejection to keep the heartache alive.
Reaching for him isn’t about love. It’s about not having to feel the shocking pain of aloneness that’s underneath. The moment you stop, there’s no distraction left. There’s no chase. No story. No bullshit chemistry to analyse. And it’s f@cking awful – there’s no denying that.
It’s just you, without the adrenaline. And that’s the moment most women panic and call it “losing him.”
You’re not losing him. You’re losing the gob-smackingly brutally effective arrangement that’s kept you from meeting yourself.
That’s why this hurts more than rejection. Rejection keeps you in the game.
This ends it.