The Person Who Wants Love So Much They Never Get It

There is a person who, ostensibly, wants love very much. They are ‘dating with intent’. That is, dating with an intent to marry, to form a complete life with someone, to stop ever having to date anyone again. In many ways, they are a textbook example of anxious attachment in relationships: deeply earnest, intensely hopeful and determined that this time love must finally work.

They don’t hold back. They suggest a second date almost immediately. And a third one. They message constantly. They aren’t shy about declaring their feelings by the end of the first month. They buy little gifts. They hug a lot. They love holding hands.

When Love Has Never Felt Secure

It is a hugely moving picture of love; the difficulty is how much this person wants it to come right. They’ve been lonely for the longest time – arguably since they were a child. They did have love back then, but it was shattered or compromised to an extent that has never really been dealt with or understood. Maybe a beloved adult died, or went away, or someone got very sick. And now it doesn’t feel like the world can ever be stable. Love always seems on the verge of being extinguished. Nothing ever quite feels solid. That’s why one has to move very fast and hold on tightly. And ask a lot of questions of the partner: Are you sure you’re OK? Do you still care? Is this real?

Anxious Attachment in Relationships

It’s because of worry – worry about how safe love is – that the worried person often feels they need to raise their voice and ends up sounding harsh. Anger feels warranted, or at least becomes inevitable, when their partner comes home ten minutes late. It’s because of worry that they start an argument about the partner’s ex – who they suspect, the more they think about it (and they’ve thought about it all afternoon), may not be entirely off the scene. It’s because of worry that they spoil a dinner in a restaurant by accusing their partner of flirting with the waiting staff. It’s because of worry that they call their partner ungrateful and, in extremis, threaten to leave them.

They want so much to be reassured, to be told they matter, but they are so alarmed that it seems all they may really want to do is attack, criticise, create pressure and destroy.

When Fear Pushes Love Away

It can be dispiriting to be on the receiving end of love from someone who can’t accept that love might be real. Eventually, even the most patient lover may start to get fed up; they have told them again and again that they love them; they have spent an hour trying to unpick a fight about nothing; they have done everything to prove that they aren’t having an affair with anyone at work. They have stressed that the weekend they have to spend by themselves has nothing to do with rejection and everything to do with catching up on their projects.

And so begins – by a terrible irony – the very thing the loving-but-worried person has feared from the start. One sombre day, their lover tells them they just can’t take it any more. They need space. They don’t have the energy to explain once more. They might walk out very suddenly – and ask never to be disturbed again.

This sorrowful lover who loves with too much fear alerts us to a curious aspect of love, one closely bound up with anxious attachment in relationships: that wanting a safe relationship with too much intensity can be the very element that preclude us from getting it. That if we never enjoyed security in childhood, we may seek it with excessive urgency in adulthood, resulting in a double punishment and exclusion. That we need to believe that trust and goodness could be real in order to give them a chance to one day become so.