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You want connection more than almost anything. And every time you get close to having it, you find a way to destroy it.
Not dramatically. Not always. Sometimes it's a slow withdrawal - replying less, cancelling plans, letting the warmth drain out until the other person gives up. Sometimes it's faster: a fight you start for no reason, a cruelty you didn't know was in you, a sudden coldness that shocks even you. Sometimes you just disappear, and when they ask what happened you say "nothing" because you genuinely don't know.
But the result is always the same. Distance. The person who was getting close is now at arm's length, confused and hurt, and you feel that familiar mix of relief and devastation.
Relief, because the tension is gone. You can breathe again.
Devastation, because you've done it again.
You tell yourself stories about why it happens. They were getting too clingy. You need your space. The relationship wasn't right. You're just not wired for intimacy. You're independent. Self-sufficient. You don't need people the way other people seem to.
But that's not what's happening, and somewhere underneath the explanations, you know it.
What's happening is that closeness terrifies you. Not the idea of it - you want the idea of it desperately. The reality. The moment when someone sees you clearly and you can't control what they find. The moment when it matters enough that losing it would break something.
That's where the sabotage lives. Not in the distance, but in what the distance protects you from.
It usually follows a pattern. You meet someone. There's connection - real, genuine, the kind you've been craving. For a while, it's good. Maybe even wonderful. You let yourself hope this time will be different.
Then they get close. Really close. Close enough to need you. Close enough that you start to need them. Close enough that losing them would actually hurt.
And something shifts.
Maybe it's a tightening in your chest. A restlessness you can't explain. A sudden, urgent need for space. Maybe they do something small - ask about your day with too much concern, leave a toothbrush at your flat, tell you they love you - and instead of warmth, you feel something closer to panic.
So you pull back. Just a little. Test the distance. See if you can breathe.
They notice. They ask what's wrong. And here's where it gets cruel: their concern makes it worse. Their very attempt to close the gap you've created becomes the reason you need to widen it. Because their concern means they care, and their caring means they'll eventually want more of you than you know how to give.
So you pull back further. Or you pick a fight. Or you do something so obviously hurtful that they have no choice but to leave.
And then you're alone again. Safe. Empty. Wondering why you always end up here.
Here's the thing about distance: it's not comfortable. You know that. You're not someone who enjoys being alone. You're someone who tolerates it because the alternative feels worse.
But worse how? This is the question you avoid, because the answer isn't simple and it isn't flattering.
Closeness threatens you because closeness requires being seen. Not the curated version - the real one. The one who needs things. The one who's afraid. The one who doesn't have it together. The one who might be too much, or not enough, or some devastating combination of both.
And you learned, somewhere, that being seen like that is dangerous.
Maybe someone you depended on left. Maybe someone you loved used your vulnerability against you. Maybe the people who were supposed to be safe weren't - not because they were monsters, but because they were limited and overwhelmed and couldn't hold what you needed them to hold. Maybe nobody taught you that needing someone could be anything other than the first step toward being abandoned by them.
Whatever happened, you drew a conclusion. Not consciously - you were probably too young for conscious conclusions. But the body keeps its own records, and yours decided: closeness is where you get hurt.
So you developed a system. Get close enough to feel the warmth, then pull away before the warmth becomes dependence. Want people, but never so much that losing them could damage you. Keep one foot out the door at all times, so that when they leave - and they will leave, the logic goes, because everyone leaves - you'll already be halfway gone.
It's an elegant system, in its way. It even works. You never get devastated the way you would if you actually let someone in. You're protected.
You're also completely alone.
There's a part of this you probably don't talk about. The meanness.
The way you can turn cold in an instant. The things you say when someone gets too close - cutting, dismissive, designed to make them step back. The contempt that rises up when someone is vulnerable with you, or worse, when they ask you to be vulnerable with them.
You don't want to be cruel. You're not a cruel person. But something takes over in those moments, something that feels automatic and alien and deeply familiar all at once.
What's happening is simpler and more painful than cruelty. It's terror. The contempt is a defence against feeling dependent. The coldness is a defence against needing someone. The cutting remark is a defence against the unbearable possibility that this person could actually matter to you and then not be there.
If you make them leave, at least you chose it. At least the ending was yours.
This is the logic of someone who learned early that love is something that gets taken away. If it's going to go - and it is, because it always does - then better to be the one who ends it. Better to push than to be pushed. Better to be the villain than the abandoned child.
It's not rational. It doesn't need to be. It runs beneath your rational mind, in the part of you that still flinches when someone reaches for you.
What nobody tells you about this pattern is how tiring it is.
Not the distance itself - you've mastered that. What's exhausting is the constant almost. Almost letting someone in. Almost trusting that they'll stay. Almost saying the thing that would make you understood. Almost, almost, almost - and then pulling back at the last second, every time, because you can't quite make yourself step off the ledge.
You live in the doorway. Not in the relationship, not fully outside it. Just hovering. Wanting to come in but unable to put down the bag you packed in case you need to leave.
And the people who care about you feel this. They can sense the reservation, the held breath, the invisible wall. Some of them try harder, which makes you retreat further. Some of them match your distance, which makes you panic that they don't care enough. You've built a test that nobody can pass, and each failure confirms what you already believed: nobody stays.
You're right, in a way. Nobody does stay. But not because people are inherently unreliable. Because you've created conditions in which staying is impossible.
You probably have a theory about why you're like this. Attachment style. Childhood stuff. A bad relationship that broke something. And the theory is probably accurate, as far as it goes.
But knowing why you push people away has never stopped you pushing people away. Understanding the pattern doesn't break it. You can map your attachment style with perfect accuracy and still flinch the next time someone tells you they need you.
That's because this isn't a thinking problem. It's a feeling problem dressed in thinking clothes. You understand your pattern intellectually. What you haven't done is felt your way through what's underneath it.
Underneath the pushing away is fear. Underneath the fear is need. And underneath the need is the thing you've been running from your entire adult life: the knowledge that you want to be loved, that you can't make anyone love you, and that wanting something you can't guarantee is the most exposed position a person can be in.
That exposure is what you're defending against. Not closeness itself, but the vulnerability that closeness demands.
Every time you pull back, you're saying: I'd rather be lonely than heartbroken. And that made sense once. When you were small and had no choice about who stayed or left, loneliness was survivable in a way that abandonment wasn't.
But you're not small anymore. And the system you built to protect yourself at seven is now running your life at thirty-five.
This isn't the part where you get five steps to stop pushing people away. You already know the advice: communicate your needs, practise vulnerability, challenge your core beliefs. You've read the articles. They haven't changed anything because advice addresses the wrong layer.
What would be different isn't a technique. It's a willingness to stay in the room when every part of you wants to leave. To feel the panic that comes with closeness and not immediately act on it. To let someone matter to you and sit with the fact that you can't control whether they stay.
That sounds simple. It is almost unbearably hard. Because sitting with it means feeling the thing you've spent years building elaborate systems to avoid: the rawness of needing someone. The exposure of caring. The grief of all the times you pulled away from something that might have been real.
This is work that usually can't happen alone, because the pattern is about what happens between you and other people. You need a relationship in which the old pattern can show up - the withdrawal, the testing, the sudden coldness - and not end the way it always has. You need someone who can tolerate your distance without either pursuing you into retreat or giving up.
That's what therapy can do, when it goes deep enough. Not teach you about your attachment style - you already know that. But give you an experience of staying when everything in you says leave. Of being known and not destroyed by it.
Every time you push someone away, you think you're choosing safety. But you're not. You're choosing a familiar kind of pain over an unfamiliar kind of risk. You're choosing the loneliness you know over the vulnerability you don't.
That was a reasonable choice once. It kept you intact when intact was all you could hope for. But the cost has been compounding for years, and you can feel it - in the relationships that never quite deepen, in the friendships that stay on the surface, in the particular ache of wanting someone you've just convinced to leave.
You don't push people away because you don't want them close. You push them away because wanting them close is the most frightening thing you know.
And the only way through it is to let yourself be frightened.
