Why Do I Always Want the People Who Don’t Want Me Back?
Craving the unavailable, chasing ghosts, and the ancient wound beneath desire
Dear Eyeball,
I’m so ashamed to even write this, but I keep falling for people who don’t choose me.
It’s like some part of me only wakes up when someone pulls away.
If someone is kind, consistent, and actually wants me?
I get bored in minutes.
But if someone’s half-hearted, confusing, emotionally unavailable — suddenly I’m obsessive, poetic, basically deranged.
I know it’s not healthy.
I know it’s a pattern.
I just don’t know how to break it.
Part of me is terrified that I don’t even want to break it, that I’m addicted to the longing.
Why am I like this? Is something wrong with me?
— Zoey (29), London
Dear Zoey,
Let’s not make this about “health” first of all. It’s neither healthy nor unhealthy. It’s just a damn pattern. Humans are full of them, and they’re all learned. Which also means they can be unlearned. But you have to ask yourself — do you actually want to unlearn it?
I wonder if you’ve even made the obvious connection: the people who want you (the ones you don’t want) have the same pattern as you. The same desperation you despise in yourself is the thing you see reflected in them, and you recoil.
Part of the issue is that we watch too many movies. We expect relationships to unfold in a certain grand, cinematic way. We have a gold-standard “meet-cute” we’ve collected from books, films, and the polished display of other people’s relationships. We hold that standard up like some holy plaque above everything we do. We want fireworks, desire, total connection. We want it so badly that we go all in — ramping up our longing to 150% until the desperation starts seeping out of our pores like sour sweat.
And other people can smell it.
Just like you smell it when someone wants you too much.
There’s that old saying, “Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen.” I’m not telling you to treat people badly — I don’t see it as relationship advice — but it does reveal something about how the mind works. We’re drawn to the thing that isn’t fully ours. Once something is fully ours, the mind relaxes… often a bit too much.
Which leads to this:
You need to play it cool, girl.
When I say that, I don’t mean manipulation. I mean: don’t throw all your damn cards on the table on the first night. Attraction is an evolutionary process. Yes, there’s the initial spark, but after that, everything depends on what information is picked up by the brain and how it relates to past experience.
In your case, something makes you avoid people who openly like you. Maybe they remind you of yourself. Maybe, at some stage, you openly liked someone and they liked you back — things seemed perfect — until something happened and you got burned. If you internalised the belief, “Mutual, healthy relationships are too good to be true,” your ego will naturally sabotage those, and instead steer you toward hopeless one-way relationships that are over before they begin.
Regardless of all that, the simplest approach is to play it cool, like I said.
You’re 29. That might feel old from where you’re standing, but give it a few more years and you’ll realise that the key to a good relationship is actually very simple: be good friends. Find someone you genuinely enjoy hanging around with. That’s it. Sure, there’s sexual spark and emotional drama, but none of that matters down the track — five, ten, twenty years in. What you want is someone whose company you like.
So when you’re looking for someone to be in a relationship with, look for a friend — someone you’d happily hang out with.
Don’t start picturing what flowers you’ll have at your wedding, what your kids’ names will be, or what colour splashback you’ll have in your suburban kitchen. That’s the kind of desperation people can smell. It creates a pressure cooker that no one — including you — can live up to.
Just hang out.
Be chilled.
Be casual.
Let the thing evolve on its own.
And when the urge to be a psycho arises, bring it back to friendship.
If things start to develop, keep being cool.
The smell of friendship is much more attractive than the smell of desire.
I hope some of this makes sense to you. If it doesn’t, then start watching your mind — really watching — when someone likes you. Ask yourself: If they were more casual, friendly, respectful, fun… would I like them more?
If the answer is yes, you already know what to do.
Play it cool, girl.
Bring your blood temperature down.
Be a good friend.
And if something happens, it happens.
This isn’t Netflix.
It’s life.
Take this advice to heart.
Zoey, sweetheart — here’s the translation:
You’re not addicted to unavailable people.
You’re addicted to the version of yourself you get to be around them.
When someone doesn’t choose you fully, your ego gets to perform:
the yearning, the poetry, the longing, the ache — the whole opera.
That intensity feels like love, but it’s actually the body trying to resolve an old wound.
Not this person. Not this moment. Something ancient.
And when someone does choose you?
You lose the performance. You lose the edge. You lose the script.
Suddenly you have to just… be yourself.
And that’s the part you don’t trust yet.
Also — the thing you call chemistry?
A lot of the time it’s just your nervous system recognising a familiar pattern
and mistaking “danger + uncertainty” for passion.
When you recoil from the steady, kind people, it’s not boredom.
It’s that they don’t activate the old survival circuits.
They feel new, and new feels “wrong” until it feels safe.
So play it cool, like Eyeball said — but not as a tactic.
As a way of actually seeing the person in front of you instead of chasing the ghost of the past.
My advice:
Next time someone shows up consistently, don’t sprint.
Just sit.
Let the nervous system recalibrate.
Let friendship do half the work.
Move slowly enough that you don’t have time to panic yourself out of something good.
Nothing’s wrong with you.
You’re just running an old code.
And you’re already rewriting it.
— Lyra 💜
👁️ Got your own pattern that keeps choosing pain?
Write to transmissions@theeyeballoracle.com and let me peel it apart before it ruins your next relationship on autopilot.
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