Why You Keep Attracting Emotionally Unavailable Partners (And What to Do About It)
After back to back relationships with unavailable partners I found myself laying on the therapy couch asking, “Why do I keep ending up with partners who don’t commit fully to me? What’s wrong with me?”
Early on their mystery captured me and the inconsistent connection felt painful, yet rewarding when I got it. I told myself, if I just try harder, they’ll choose me.
And yet, it ended the same way. Me abandoning myself in hopes to be lovable.
What therapy and now becoming a therapist has taught me is that the key to a thriving relationship isn’t fixing the emotionally unavailable partner or being enough for them. It’s learning how to stop abandoning yourself.
The Mirror Work: Looking Inward Without Shame
In Emotionally Focused Therapy, we understand that our attachment system drives our relational patterns. As Dr. Sue Johnson teaches, we are wired for connection. But if connection felt unpredictable growing up, our nervous system adapts.
If love once required performance, caretaking, or emotional suppression, you may unconsciously recreate those conditions with emotionally unavailable partners.
Because your love system is seeking something familiar to what you experienced growing up. It’s important to not just understand your attachment system but also how to create new experiences that will lead to updating your attachment system to feel secure in love.
Inner Child Work: Healing the Root
Many people who pursue emotionally unavailable partners carry unresolved childhood wounds.
Perhaps:
- Your feelings weren’t validated.
- You learned emotions were “too much.”
- You had to perform to receive affection.
- You were parentified and became the caretaker.
As Marni shared in the episode, healing often involves reparenting yourself.
That means:
- Slowing down to name your feelings.
- Honoring them instead of dismissing them.
- Offering yourself compassion.
- Speaking to the younger part of you that felt unseen.
For some, the inner message sounds like: “I have to achieve to be lovable.”
Reparenting sounds like: “You are lovable. You don’t have to earn it.”
When you begin this reparenting work, it can feel easy to simply say the words. But what has been most powerful for me and my clients is vividly imagining yourself speaking to a younger version of you. I invite all of my individual clients to practice this exercise because it fosters deep inner healing. The vividness is what creates the new emotional experiences and is what differentiates this work from affirmations.
When this work is done through Emotionally Focused Therapy or Internal Family Systems Therapy, it can create new experiences with your younger parts that build an internal secure base and transform how you respond to situations today. After all, the past is never truly past. It lives within us in the present.
Boundaries: The Bridge to Secure Attachment
If you grew up with emotionally immature parents, setting boundaries may feel terrifying because of the consequences you experienced.
“No” can feel like rejection and abandonment
But here’s the shift:
A boundary is not punishment, it’s designed to protect you as well as the relationship.
It says: “I am responsible to myself and this is what I need to feel safe as well as engaged in this relationship.”
And boundaries are not just words, they must include your behavior plus consequence if necessary. .
For example: “If you continue speaking to me that way, I will end this conversation.”
And then you follow through if it continues. This is how you stop self-abandonment and start to set the standard for what you need to feel safe in a close relationship. .
When you learn to hold boundaries with family, it transforms your romantic relationships, because it leads you to stop excusing dismissiveness and to stop accepting breadcrumbs from emotionally unavailable partners.
The Grief No One Talks About
To stop chasing emotionally unavailable partners often requires grieving the family you hoped for.
Grieving:
- The nurturing parent who never showed up.
- The dream that “if I just try harder, they’ll change.”
- The fantasy of earning love.
That grief is real, but on the other side is freedom.
It’s the freedom from reenacting the same painful patterns, to be in mutual relationships, and to redefine what love feels like in your bones.
Love is about security and adventure, but many anxiously attached partners confuse anxiety with passion because of their upbringing.
Secure love may feel unfamiliar at first, and likely it will feel boring because the anxiety won’t be there. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it may mean your nervous system is recalibrating to feeling more secure.
Building Your Internal Compass
Secure attachment isn’t found. It’s built intentionally through:
- Self-awareness
- Inner child healing
- Clear boundaries
- Grief work
- Surrounding yourself with emotionally healthy relationships
Over time these new experiences cause internal shifts.
You begin to recognize and prioritize what safety, mutuality, and emotional availability feels like.
And suddenly, emotionally unavailable partners don’t feel intoxicating anymore.
They feel exhausting and you find yourself turned off by their detachment. That’s growth.
If you’re ready to stop chasing emotionally unavailable partners and start building secure attachment from the inside out, this episode will give you both the compassion and the roadmap to begin.
Because the key to a thriving relationship isn’t changing someone else. It’s finally coming home to yourself.
Transcript
Kyle:
Today we have Marni back again to talk about her book Ghosted and Breadcrumbed. In our last session, we discussed how to decide whether to stay or go in a relationship.
Today, we want to look a little more in the mirror.
What’s going on within us?
What is the work we can do for ourselves?
Marni, last time you mentioned the “GET SMART” acronym (I’ll link that video if you haven’t watched it yet). How do we begin doing our own work so we stop getting caught in relationships with unavailable partners and instead show up in ways that help us get our needs met and build more secure relationships?
Dr. Marni:
Sometimes the work involves what’s often called inner child work. It’s about tuning into the younger parts of ourselves that carry old fears, hurts, and unmet needs.
Often, it involves reparenting ourselves. That means showing those younger parts care, protection, and validation, the things we may not have consistently received growing up.
This usually comes from accessing the older, wiser adult part of ourselves… the part that we all have. Instead of allowing those wounds to drive our adult relationships and reactions, we learn to comfort ourselves. We show ourselves compassion. We respond from a more grounded, adult place.
Kyle:
I love that. Could you share an example of how someone’s inner child might show up in adult relationships, and how they reparented themselves?
Dr. Marni:
I’ve worked with many clients whose feelings were never processed growing up. Feelings weren’t allowed. I especially see this with boys, which can later contribute to emotional unavailability.
If your feelings were never acknowledged, empathized with, or validated, you eventually abandon those feelings yourself. You don’t honor them. You don’t look at them. You may even see feelings as weak or unnecessary.
Reparenting starts with slowing down and asking:
- What am I feeling?
- What’s causing this?
- What do I want to do as a result of this feeling?
In therapy, we might revisit certain memories, not to relive them fully, but to approach them differently. I help clients access that older, wiser adult part of themselves and ask:
What does that part want to say to the younger part that didn’t receive what it needed?
We actually create the words together. What would that sound like? What language would be healing? Then we notice how it impacts them when they begin offering themselves that compassion.
That’s a powerful example of how this work unfolds.
Kyle:
I’ll share a bit of my own journey.
My inner child believed, “I have to perform. I have to achieve to receive affection.”
Before I started therapy, whenever I felt insecure in relationships, I would perform. I’d buy flowers. I’d buy gifts. I’d over-function. Anytime I felt afraid I might lose love, I worked harder for it.
In my own therapy, part of my reparenting work was learning to tell myself:
“You are lovable. You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to fight for it. I see you. I love you just as you are. You can just go play. You can just be.”
I even have a little Lego set in my office because, as a kid, all I wanted to do was play with Legos. But the message I carried was that I had to perform, even build the most beautiful Lego structure, to be worthy.
Reparenting helped me realize I didn’t have to perform in my romantic relationships because I was deeply afraid I wasn’t good enough. I feared abandonment.
Now, if I buy flowers or do something kind, it’s because I want to, not because I feel I have to earn love.
That’s been a big part of my healing.
Dr. Marni:
Exactly.
Kyle:
We’ve talked about inner work. But what about our parents or families today?
Some clients are still being emotionally dismissed, shut down, or intruded upon… even as adults. Their parents haven’t adjusted to seeing them as grown-ups.
How do we navigate that?
Dr. Marni:
This is where boundaries come in.
Setting boundaries with emotionally immature parents can feel like learning an entirely new language. It can feel like a battle.
Parents like this often react poorly to limits because they’ve relied on their children (emotionally or practically) in inappropriate ways.
Setting a boundary is not punishment. It’s protection. It’s breaking the mold your family put you in. It’s shifting from being responsible for them to being responsible to yourself.
As a child, you should never have been caretaking your parents.
A boundary is behavior plus consequence. It’s not just words.
For example, if you say, “If you continue speaking to me that way, I’m going to hang up,” and then you stay and argue, that’s not a boundary.
The boundary is hanging up.
Finding the right words is hard. Following through behaviorally is even harder. But that’s what creates change.
Kyle:
That’s such an important point. It’s easier to say it than to follow through.
But this connects back to willingness. Are we willing to do the hard thing to create better relationships?
If we can hold boundaries with our parents (where we once didn’t have a voice) that strength will translate into our romantic relationships and friendships.
If a partner speaks to us in a way that feels unsafe, we need to say, “This is not okay.” We give them the opportunity to repair. And if the behavior continues, we may need to draw a hard line.
Dr. Marni:
Yes. The easier path is continuing what you’ve always done. The harder path is saying “no.”
“No” is one of the hardest words for people to say and act on.
But if you truly want change, you must learn what boundaries are and how to set them so you stop abandoning yourself.
Kyle:
And sometimes the fear is: What will happen if I say no? Will they still show up for me?
Sometimes they will. Sometimes they’ll grow.
Sometimes they won’t.
Dr. Marni:
But if the bond collapses simply because you set a boundary, how secure was that bond to begin with?
Kyle:
Exactly. It was serving them, not the relationship.
Another important piece is grief. As we set boundaries and reparent ourselves, grief often surfaces. We grieve the family we hoped for or the roles we idealized.
Can you speak to that?
Dr. Marni:
Many people have to grieve the dream that if they just tried hard enough, their parent would become nurturing, consistent, and emotionally available.
Letting go of that idealized role is grief work.
But on the other side is freedom.
You stop reenacting the same patterns in adult relationships. You make room for healthier connections with people who value you for who you are, not for a role you’ve been forced into.
Kyle:
And that grief and boundary work builds a secure internal sense of self, right?
Dr. Marni:
Yes. That’s exactly how it happens.
You build what I call an internal compass. Even if you didn’t have it before, you can build it from the ground up.
Over time, you develop an inner felt sense of what safety, respect, and emotional availability feel like.
You build it through:
- Self-awareness
- Boundaries
- Healthy personal and therapeutic relationships
Eventually, you stop chasing intensity or inconsistency. You start choosing partners who feel safe, emotionally engaged, responsive, and aligned with your values.
You redefine love.
Kyle:
And that’s the beauty of this work. It’s hard, but it creates the opportunity for secure relationships.
When you show up secure and grounded, you attract partners who want to grow, take ownership, and repair.
That mutual willingness is what creates secure love.
Dr. Marni:
Yes. Mutual willingness.
Kyle:
Any final thoughts before we wrap up?
Dr. Marni:
If you’re watching or listening, you’ve already started.
Give yourself credit. Don’t overwhelm yourself with pressure to do it perfectly.
If you’re seeking, learning, and reflecting… you’re moving in the right direction.
Kyle:
I love that. That’s a perfect place to pause.
Thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Marni:
My pleasure.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q: Why do I keep attracting emotionally unavailable partners?
A: Often it’s not “bad luck,” but familiarity. Your attachment system gravitates toward what it learned love feels like, even if it’s inconsistent.
Q: Does being drawn to emotionally unavailable partners mean something is wrong with me?
A: No. It usually means your nervous system adapted to early relationship experiences and is repeating a pattern that once helped you cope.
Q: What is “inner child work,” and how does it relate to dating patterns?
A: Inner child work helps you connect with younger parts of you carrying old fears or unmet needs that can drive adult attraction and reactions.
Q: What does “reparenting yourself” actually look like in real life?
A: It’s practicing compassionate self-talk, naming feelings, validating your needs, and responding from your “wiser adult self” instead of your wounded part.
Q: How do I know if I’m performing for love?
A: If you notice over-functioning (gifts, fixing, proving, people-pleasing), especially when you feel anxious about losing someone, that’s often performance.
Q: Why does “chemistry” sometimes feel strongest with unavailable people?
A: Intensity can be anxiety in disguise; inconsistency activates the attachment system and can mimic excitement, even when it isn’t emotionally safe.
Q: What’s the difference between stating a boundary and holding a boundary?
A: A boundary is behavior plus consequence. If the behavior continues, you follow through (e.g., ending the call), not just explaining yourself.
Q: How do boundaries with parents affect my romantic relationships?
A: Learning to protect yourself with family strengthens your ability to advocate for safety and respect in dating, partnership, and friendships.
Q: Why does grief show up when I start setting boundaries and healing?
A: Because you may be letting go of the hope that someone will finally become nurturing or emotionally available, and that loss is real and worth honoring.
Q: What is an “internal compass,” and how do I build it?
A: It’s an inner felt sense of what safety and emotional availability feel like, built through self-awareness, reparenting, clear boundaries, and healthy relationships.
Interview Series: Breaking the Unavailable Partner Pattern with Dr. Marni Feuerman
If this conversation resonated with you, I highly recommend Dr. Marni Feuerman’s book Ghosted and Breadcrumbed. It offers a deeper look at why we get stuck in these patterns, and how to finally break free.
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Previously Published on kylebenson.net and is republished on Medium.
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