Stop Chasing People Who Don’t Know How to Love You

The Space Between Wanting and Having

I once believed that loving someone deeply was enough—that if I could just show them how completely I understood their darkness, they would finally let me in. But love isn't something you can force into existence through sheer will or understanding. This is a story about a particular kind of heartbreak: the one where you recognize someone's soul but they can't—or won't—fully recognize yours back.

When I first met Holly, what struck me wasn't just her charisma or how effortlessly she commanded a room. It was something more elusive—the shadow that occasionally crossed her face when she thought no one was looking. I recognized that shadow because I carried one too. We were two people fluent in the language of unspoken pain, and that created a bond that felt unbreakable.

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." — Carl Jung

But our transformation wasn't the kind that heals. Instead, it reinforced patterns that needed breaking.

When Trauma Bonds Disguise Themselves as Twin Flames

"We're twin flames," she told me one night, her eyes reflecting moonlight through my bedroom window. We were lying side by side, not touching but close enough to feel each other's warmth, listening to music I'd carefully selected to match our shared melancholy.

Twin flames. I later realized this was just a poetic name for trauma bonding—when two wounded people recognize each other's pain and mistake that recognition for destiny.

Esther Perel, renowned psychotherapist, explains that "often, behind our attractions lie the hopes that someone will repair what's been broken in us." But people who are still drowning can't save each other. They can only pull each other deeper underwater.

Our relationship existed in a carefully constructed bubble. She would appear in my life like an unexpected storm—thrilling, consuming, destructive—and then vanish just as suddenly. Weeks would pass without a word. Then she'd return as if no time had passed, carrying stories of other people she'd been with, other lives she'd tried on.

Each story was a small death.

The Emotional Terrorist: When Intimacy Becomes Warfare

I once told my therapist that Holly was an "emotional terrorist." The term emerged from my subconscious, but it captured something essential about the relationship. She would plant bombs of connection and intimacy, then detonate them from a safe distance. I kept returning to the blast site, convinced that if I could just withstand one more explosion, she would finally see me—really see me.

According to attachment theory, this dance is sadly predictable. My anxious attachment style (constantly seeking reassurance) perfectly complemented her avoidant one (fleeing when connections grow too intense). We were locked in what psychologists call the "pursuit-distance cycle"—the more I pursued, the more she distanced, creating a self-reinforcing loop of mutual frustration.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." — Carl Jung

That "fate" kept me chasing someone who could only love in fragments—sporadic moments of connection followed by longer periods of absence. I existed in the spaces between her appearances, building a relationship largely in my imagination.

The Revelation at the Pho Shop

The last time we met was at a Vietnamese Pho restaurant. We then went to the beach and took Polaroids of each other—tangible evidence of a connection that was already dissolving.

And then later that day we kissed, and only afterward did she reveal she had a girlfriend. I was confused and sad as she left, taking pieces of my heart with her.

In that moment, I understood something fundamental about people who don't know how to love: they are drawn to the warmth you offer but cannot bear to stay near the fire. They want the feeling without the commitment, the connection without the vulnerability, the love without the risk.

When I later told her girlfriend about that kiss—an act born from my own wounded sense of justice—I lost Holly completely. Was it the right thing to do? I still don't know. But it was the final breaking of a bond that was never healthy to begin with.

Internal Family Systems therapy suggests that what appears as inconsistent behavior often stems from different "parts" of ourselves taking control at different times. The Holly who kissed me wasn't the same Holly who committed to someone else—she was a part seeking something she couldn't name, at the expense of her own integrity and my heart.

The (500) Days of Misinterpreted Love

Growing up, my favorite movie was (500) Days of Summer. Like Tom in the film, I misinterpreted the story, seeing it as a tale of star-crossed lovers rather than a cautionary tale about projection and idealization. I was building relationships not with real people but with the versions of them I created in my mind—versions that could fill the empty spaces in my own story.

Bell hooks writes in All About Love that "rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion." But true communion requires two people equally committed to the process of healing. It cannot happen when one person is doing all the emotional work.

Letting Go: The Liberation of Surrender

Letting go of Holly meant letting go of an identity I'd carried since childhood—the rescuer, the one who could see the beauty in broken things and somehow make them whole. It meant accepting that some people, no matter how much we understand them, cannot meet us where we need to be met.

"The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too." — Ernest Hemingway

This is the hardest truth to accept when you're deeply empathetic: your capacity to understand someone else's pain doesn't obligate them to evolve beyond it. Some people are not ready to be loved the way you're capable of loving them.

The Alchemy of Self-Reclamation

There's a particular kind of freedom that comes with stopping the chase—not just of a specific person, but of the idea that love must be earned through persistence or perfect understanding.

Research in neuroscience confirms what philosophers have long suggested: painful rejection activates the same regions in the brain as physical pain. Your heartbreak is not just emotional—it is a full-body experience, a physiological response to loss. Understanding this can be the first step toward compassion for yourself.

The versions of ourselves who chase unavailable people are often reenacting ancient patterns, trying to finally win the love that felt conditional or absent in our formative years. As psychologist Nicole LePera puts it: "We don't attract a certain type of person. We are attracted to a certain type of person based on our unresolved wounds."

The Path Forward: Loving from Wholeness, Not Hunger

The true lesson isn't to stop loving deeply—it's to stop offering your deepest love to those who have shown they cannot hold it. It's redirecting that extraordinary capacity for connection toward people who have demonstrated their ability to stay, to see you clearly, and to love you back with equal intention.

More importantly, it's about turning that love inward. The part of you that could see the hidden beauty in someone else—that intuitive, compassionate core—deserves to be seen and honored by you first.

As Rumi wrote, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

Those barriers often look like:

• Mistaking intensity for intimacy
• Believing you can love someone into healing
• Accepting crumbs because you don't believe you deserve the whole meal
• Finding comfort in the familiar pain of uncertain attachment

The Courage to Want More

There is a universe where Tom and Holly could have made it work—but it would require both of them completing long, separate journeys toward wholeness first. It would require Holly learning that real love isn't sporadic or conditional. It would require Tom understanding that his worth isn't determined by his ability to heal someone else's darkness.

The most radical act isn't continuing to love someone who doesn't know how to love you back—it's having the courage to stop, to turn away from the familiar ache of almost-connection and toward the terrifying possibility of being truly seen.

Because when you finally stop chasing people who don't know how to love you, you create the space for the arrival of those who do.

And more importantly, you create space to finally, fully love yourself.

This essay blends personal experience with insights from psychology, philosophy, and attachment theory. If you're currently struggling with patterns of chasing unavailable people, remember that understanding these dynamics is the first step toward changing them. You deserve to be loved as completely as you are capable of loving others.