You meet someone. They’re magnetic. Interesting. There’s a spark. You feel the pull—you’re excited, maybe even a little lit up inside.
Fast forward a few weeks or months: they’re emotionally unavailable, avoidant, inconsistent, or something just feels off.
You’re frustrated. Maybe even heartbroken. Again.
So what’s happening here? Why do smart, self-aware people keep getting attached to the wrong kinds of partners?
The answer isn’t bad luck or bad taste. It’s something deeper.
Your Attraction Is Not Random
Here’s the truth I often tell my dating coaching clients: who you’re attracted to isn’t random.
Attraction is a powerful, mostly unconscious process. It’s rooted in early experiences, attachment patterns, and the emotional blueprints you carry around—often without realizing it.
In psychology, we sometimes call this your Attraction Template or Imago (Harville Hendrix’s term). It’s the internal composite of early caregivers—how they made you feel, what love felt like in your family of origin, and how much safety, consistency, and attunement you received (or didn’t).
Even if you consciously want a healthy, mutual, emotionally present/healthily independent partner, your unconscious is often seeking something else:
What’s familiar.
What feels unresolved.
What matches the old story.
If connection in childhood was inconsistent, intense, or hard to earn—you may unconsciously associate that “emotional friction” with real love.
And that’s what you keep finding yourself, albeit unwittingly, pulled toward.
The Pull is Real—but So Is the Pattern
Here’s the kicker: the pull you feel toward the “wrong” kind of person is often chemistry rooted in survival adaptation. Not chemistry rooted in true compatibility. Now, I'm not saying chemistry is bad. But it can make things complicated.
Your nervous system may light up because that person mirrors a familiar relational dynamic—one where you had to work for closeness, overfunction to feel safe, or tolerate hot-and-cold behavior to stay connected.
And that feels kind of familiar, homey.
Even when it hurts.
This isn’t your fault. It’s your wiring. But wiring can be re-patterned.
From Repetition to Repair
If you’re committed to conscious dating—and you’re working with a therapist or dating coach who understands these deeper layers—you can start to shift the cycle.
Ask yourself:
Am I feeling attraction—or emotional activation?
Is this kind of experience familiar in any way?
Am I pulled toward them because of who they are—or because of a familiar feeling in my body?
What would it feel like to be with someone who feels safe, consistent, and available… even if it’s not immediately “exciting”?
Often, the partners who feel boring at first are actually the ones who don’t activate your attachment wounds. That’s why they can feel unfamiliar. But that unfamiliarity might be a sign you’re healing—not settling.
The Work Isn’t to Change Who You Like
It’s to understand why you like them.
It’s to get curious about your nervous system’s role in your love life.
It’s to stop chasing intensity and start choosing availability, compatibility.
This doesn’t mean you have to give up passion or chemistry. It means learning to recognize the difference between real compatibility and trauma reenactment dressed up as “spark.”
When you start to date from a grounded place—with awareness, self-compassion, and new internal alignment—you can finally stop repeating the same painful cycle.
You’ll still feel attraction. But now it’ll be attraction with discernment. Attraction to healthier qualities. And that’s what opens the door to a relationship that’s actually good for you—not just good at activating you.