Hi, it’s Ameenah. I hope you’ve got a quiet minute wherever you’re reading this from. Let’s get into it.
I had a client a while back — I’ll call her R — who sat down across from me and said, half laughing, half exhausted, “I need you to explain why I keep dating the same man with three different faces.”
She wasn’t wrong. Different jobs, different cities, even different heights. But underneath, the same shape. Someone warm at first and then slowly unavailable. Someone she had to work to keep.
She wanted to know what was wrong with her. That’s almost always the first question. I asked her a different one instead. What did unavailable used to mean to you, before you ever dated anyone at all.
The pattern isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t bad luck
Here’s what I’ve come to understand after 26 years of sitting across from people in exactly R’s seat, and what the research actually backs up: we are not unlucky in love so much as we are loyal to something old.
In 1987, psychologists Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver ran a study that changed how the field understood adult relationships. They found that the same bond system that forms between an infant and a caregiver doesn’t retire once we grow up. It becomes the template we bring into romantic love. In their research, people who remembered their early caregiving as warm and consistent tended to move through adult relationships feeling secure — comfortable with closeness, not too rattled by a partner’s absence. People who remembered it as inconsistent or distant tended to land in one of two other places. Some became anxious, scanning for signs that a partner was pulling away. Others became avoidant, keeping love a little at arm’s length before it could disappoint them the way it once did.
None of that is a character flaw. It’s an internal working model, which is really just a fancy way of saying: a child built a map of how love behaves, using the only two people who were available to teach it. And then, without ever consciously deciding to, that child grew up and kept using the same map.
Your nervous system isn’t looking for happy. It’s looking for familiar.
This is the part that trips people up, so I want to say it plainly. The subconscious mind was never built to find you a good relationship. It was built to find you a recognizable one. Familiar feels safe to the nervous system even when familiar was never actually safe. If chaos was the water you learned to swim in as a child, calm can feel oddly like nothing is happening. Some people mistake peace for boredom because their whole system was trained on a different baseline.
Sigmund Freud noticed this pattern over a century ago and called it repetition compulsion — the unconscious pull to recreate an old wound, again and again, sometimes with the private hope of finally getting a different outcome. Modern psychology has moved past some of Freud’s specific theories about why, but the pattern itself holds up. Children raised around emotional unpredictability often go on to find predictability boring and unpredictability magnetic, because the nervous system has learned to read chaos as the sound of love actually happening.
R didn’t choose unavailable men because she didn’t value herself. She chose them because some part of her, still very young, already knew exactly how to love someone who might leave. That was a skill she’d been practicing since she was small. Stability, by comparison, was a language she’d never been taught to speak.
What happened to you, not what’s wrong with you
I keep coming back to Gabor Maté’s question in almost every session, because I think it’s the only honest door into this work: not what’s wrong with you, but what happened to you. And what did this pattern protect you from.
For R, chasing someone’s affection had once meant something. If she could just be good enough, attentive enough, easy enough, maybe the parent who came and went emotionally would finally stay. That strategy made complete sense at six years old. It kept a small, dependent person hopeful in a situation she had no power to change. The tragedy isn’t that she developed the pattern. The tragedy is that nobody told her, twenty years later, that the pattern had a shelf life, and that it had quietly expired.
I understand where that part of her came from. Truly. It was never trying to sabotage her adult love life. It just never got the memo that she wasn’t six anymore, and that she now had choices a six-year-old never had.
Sometimes the story is older than any parent
I’ll go a little further here, the way I sometimes do, and I say this with wonder, not certainty. In over two decades of past life regression work, I’ve sat with people whose relationship pattern didn’t trace back to any parent or childhood wound at all. No cold mother, no absent father to point to. Just a pull toward a certain kind of person, or a certain kind of pain, that’s been there for as long as they can remember.
In Vedic astrology we look at the seventh house for partnership, and Rahu and Ketu, the karmic nodes, for the unfinished business the soul is still working through. Sometimes what shows up in a relationship isn’t only this childhood repeating. It’s an older loop. A soul that has found the same lesson, or the same person, across more than one lifetime, still circling the same question until it’s finally answered instead of avoided.
I don’t think every relationship pattern needs a past life explanation. Most of what plays out really was built right here, at a real kitchen table, with real parents doing their best with what they had. But some of it is older. And when it is, no amount of dating differently fixes it, because the pattern was never really about this particular person to begin with. It was about a soul still trying to complete something.
We are not victims of our own wiring
Whatever built the pattern — a childhood, or something further back — we are not stuck being run by it. That’s not a hopeful thing I’m saying to soften the truth. It’s the most literal thing I know about the brain. Neurons that fire together wire together, which is Hebbian learning in its plainest form, and it cuts both ways. A pathway built by repetition, reaching for the same kind of unavailable love again and again, can be rebuilt the same way. Through repetition. Through safety. Through finally noticing the pattern while it’s happening, instead of only recognizing it in hindsight, months into another relationship that started to feel familiar in all the wrong ways.
Choice is a superpower, and here it starts small. Not swearing off dating, not overhauling your entire type overnight. Just the choice, the next time someone feels instantly, thrillingly familiar, to pause and ask why. Is this person actually safe, or does this just feel like something I already know how to survive.
R, by the way, is still doing this work. She’ll catch herself now, mid-crush, and ask the question out loud before she lets herself fall any further. That pause is the whole shift. Not that the old pull disappeared. Just that she stopped mistaking it for a sign.
If you want to hear more of a story like this — including one of my own, because I know exactly what it is to confuse familiar with safe — I go into it on this week’s episode of Chai With Ameenah. The blog is the research. The podcast is the part that actually happened.
