When Love Had to Be Earned: Healing the Pull Towards the Unavailable

“How come I can’t find someone who really loves me for who I am?” This is a question that comes up in therapy more often than you might think. The answer often reaches much further back than dating or compatibility- it reaches into how we first learned to be loved.

When Love Had to Be Earned

If, as children, we had to fight for love, to earn attention, to behave perfectly, to stay quiet, to please, we learned that love is conditional. That it must be worked for, proven, or chased.

As adults, that early blueprint often shapes the kind of love we seek. Without realizing it, we might be drawn to people who feel familiar: distant, unpredictable, or unavailable. We go after love that has to be earned, because deep down, that’s the love we recognize.

But that kind of love keeps us caught in an old pattern of chasing closeness that never quite arrives. It feeds the painful belief that if we just try harder, we’ll finally be chosen. Yet real love, mature love, isn’t something we have to win. It’s something we can rest in.

The Pull of the Unavailable

No adult partner can (or should) love us the way a parent loves a child. A parent’s love is one-sided and protective, built for dependence. Adult love is different, it’s reciprocal, equal, and grounded in choice and mutual care.

Still, if we never received the steady, secure kind of love we needed, we may keep replaying the old story: searching for someone who will finally make it right.

Healing the Old Story

The healing begins when we grieve what we didn’t get and stop trying to rewrite the past through our partners. When we learn to give ourselves the safety and acceptance we once fought for, we stop being drawn to people who withhold it.

Therapy offers a space for this unlearning. It’s not about quick fixes or techniques, but about being deeply heard, not judged, not pathologized, but understood. Together, we look gently at the patterns that keep repeating and what they’re really trying to protect, what purpose they serve.

Learning to Rest in Love

As you begin to see and accept yourself more fully, something shifts. You stop chasing behaviors that hurt and start recognizing when connection feels genuine. You grow clearer about what you want rather than what you’ve learned to tolerate, and you begin to feel the difference between being met and being dismissed, between love that feels steady and love that keeps you guessing.

Self-awareness grows into self-trust and from there, you begin to attract relationships built on mutual respect, not longing.

If this speaks to you, know that nothing about you is broken. You learned to fight for love because, once, you had to. But you don’t have to keep fighting. The love you deserve doesn’t need to be earned. It’s the kind that meets you as you are.