I want to tell you about a Tuesday night, about three years ago, when a woman I’d been seeing texted me at 11:47 p.m. after going dark for nineteen days.
The message said: “hey you up?”
And I felt happy. That’s the part that stops me, even now. Not relieved. Not vindicated. Happy. Like a dog hearing a key in a lock.
I remember sitting on the edge of my bed, phone in hand, and a quieter voice in the back of my head said something I’d been avoiding for about thirty-five years: this is the only kind of love you know how to recognize.
The relief should have been the warning
Healthy love, when it shows up, doesn’t feel like much at first. It feels boring. It feels like someone texting you back when they say they will. It feels like plans that happen on the day they were planned for.
For most of my adult life, that flatness read to me as absence. Where was the spike? Where was the gnawing hunger of waiting? Where was the dopamine cliff when they finally, finally came back?
If a relationship didn’t have weather, I assumed it didn’t have a pulse.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that the spike I was chasing wasn’t love. It was the body remembering something. A nervous system trained, very young, to confuse intermittent reward with affection.
What inconsistent parenting actually teaches a kid
My parents loved me. I want to say that plainly because I think people expect a story like this to come with villains and it doesn’t.
They loved me out loud, in birthday cards, in big gestures, in the tearful hugs at airport gates. They were also, most of the time, somewhere else. Working. Traveling. Distracted. Promising a thing on Monday and apologizing for it on Friday and meaning both, completely, on both days.
The kid I was could not square those two facts. So the kid I was made a deal with himself. The deal went something like this: love is the thing that comes back. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been gone. The coming back is the love.
That deal is, as far as I can tell, the operating system I ran on for the next three decades.
The technical name for what happened to me is an insecure attachment—specifically the anxious-preoccupied flavor, where a child raised on inconsistent caregiving learns that connection is a thing you have to scan for, work for, and never quite trust. Researchers describe it almost clinically: the baby learns that they may or may not get what they need, so they aren’t easily comforted. The Cleveland Clinic’s primer on the topic puts it about that bluntly.
The clinical language sounds tidy. Living it isn’t.
Why the disappearing partner always felt like home
I have a type. Or rather, I had one, and I’m still in the process of un-having it.
The type was charming on the front end. Warm. Quick to call me brilliant. Then, for reasons that were always articulated in slightly different words but came down to the same thing, they would vanish. A week. Three weeks. A month. The reasons were good. They were always good. Work crisis, family crisis, mental health crisis, ex-crisis.
And then they’d come back. And I’d light up.
What I didn’t see, for years, is that I was doing the choosing. I was scanning rooms for the person whose attention felt slightly out of reach. The available ones—the steady ones, the ones who actually wanted to be with me on a Tuesday at 7 p.m.—registered as something less than partners. Nice. Sweet. Not quite it.
“Not quite it” was code for: my body doesn’t recognize you as love.
The pattern was set before I had a vote
This is the part I find hardest to write because it sounds like an excuse and I don’t mean it as one.
I did not choose any of this. The kid I was had no say in what came to count as normal. By the time I was old enough to date, the mold had been poured and cooled. Everything I called chemistry, everything I called “a real connection,” everything I called “this one feels different”—all of it was running through a filter installed before I was tall enough to reach the kitchen counter.
You can’t see your own filter. That’s the thing about filters. They don’t announce themselves. They feel like reality.
I’d read about attachment styles in my twenties. I knew the words. I would have told you, at a dinner party, that I was probably anxiously attached. I would have said it with a self-aware little smile, like a man describing a charming flaw. And then I’d have gone home and texted someone who hadn’t responded in eleven days.
Knowing about a pattern is not the same as breaking it. Not even close.
The almost-40 reckoning
Something shifted in the last year or so. I’m not going to pretend it was a single moment of clarity. It was more like a series of smaller moments where I noticed myself doing the thing.
I noticed I was drafting a forgiving message to someone who didn’t deserve one. I noticed I was making excuses for behavior I would have called unacceptable in any of my friends’ relationships. I noticed I was doing the thing my mother used to do—rationalizing absence as a kind of love, finding the silver lining inside another canceled plan, calling someone “complicated” when the truth is they were just unkind.
I’m almost forty. I have a strong suspicion that the back half of my life is going to require a different operating system than the front half ran on.
I’m in therapy. I’m reading the books. I’m doing the unsexy work of asking, every time I feel the spike, what is this actually about? Because the spike has been wrong before. The spike has been wrong many, many times. The spike is not a reliable narrator.
What I’d say to anyone else running this program
A few things, briefly, because I can’t stand long lists of advice and I assume you can’t either.
The boring person isn’t boring. The person who shows up when they say they will, who doesn’t trigger your nervous system into a state of low-grade panic, who returns your texts within a normal human timeframe—that person is not the consolation prize. They are the prize. Your body just doesn’t know that yet. Your body will need time to learn.
The withdrawal is real. When you stop chasing the disappearing ones, there is a stretch of weeks or months where everything feels muted, like someone turned the saturation down on the world. This is not proof you’ve made the wrong choice. This is proof you’ve made the right one. The high you’re missing was never the love. It was the relief between the absences.
You did not choose the pattern, but you are the only one who can choose to stop running it. Nobody is coming to do this work for you. The slow rebuild of a different default is a quiet, mostly invisible job, and it’s the most important one you’ll do in your forties.
And one last thing. The parents who loved you and weren’t there—you don’t have to forgive them on any timeline that isn’t yours. But you also don’t have to keep dating them.
That, more than anything, is the lesson I’m trying to learn this year.
