Why the person who is wrong for us can feel so strangely right.
After some relationships end, we make promises to ourselves that usually sound like, “Never again.”
Never again someone emotionally unavailable. Never again someone I have to chase. Never again someone who makes me question where I stand. Never again someone who needs rescuing, refuses to communicate, disappears during conflict, or leaves me feeling as though I am always asking for too much.
Then, months or years later, we meet someone new. The details are different, and the chemistry feels different. We whisper to ourselves that this person is nothing like the last one.
And eventually, there we are again.
Maybe the new partner withdraws when things become intimate. Maybe we find ourselves anxiously monitoring the relationship. Maybe we are once again doing most of the emotional labor. Maybe admiration slowly becomes disappointment, disappointment becomes resentment, and resentment turns into the familiar argument we could practically perform from memory.
At some point, a disturbing question appears: Why do I keep ending up here?
It is tempting to answer this question by focusing entirely on conscious choice. Maybe I have terrible taste. Maybe I missed the red flags. Maybe I need higher standards. Sometimes there is truth in those explanations. But psychoanalysis asks another question:
What if some part of us recognizes these relationships before we consciously understand what we are recognizing?
Not because we want to suffer. Because we have been here before.
The Strange Pull of the Familiar
More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud (1914/1958) became interested in something that did not fit neatly into his earlier theories. People seemed to repeat experiences that brought them pain. They returned to familiar conflicts. They recreated old disappointments. They found themselves in relationships that seemed to reproduce emotional situations they consciously wanted to escape.
Freud eventually called this the compulsion to repeat.
He had already noticed that people do not simply remember their emotional histories. They often reenact them. Later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he became increasingly interested in repetition precisely because it seemed to challenge the assumption that human beings simply move toward pleasure and away from pain (Freud, 1920/1955).
Contemporary psychoanalysis does not require us to accept all of Freud's explanations for why this happens. His later attempt to connect repetition to the death instinct remains one of the more speculative parts of his theory.
But his clinical observation remains powerful: The past does not remain neatly in the past.
It becomes organized into expectations about what love feels like.
Who will stay. Who will leave. Whether other people can be depended on. What happens when we need something. How much of ourselves we are allowed to bring into a relationship.
And perhaps most importantly, what role we expect ourselves to occupy in relation to another person.
When Familiarity Feels Like Chemistry
We usually imagine attraction as something immediate and mysterious. There is chemistry or there isn't. But what we call chemistry may contain more history than we realize.
The person who keeps us slightly uncertain may feel unusually exciting. The emotionally restrained person may seem intriguing rather than unavailable. Someone who immediately needs us may make us feel valuable. A demanding partner may initially feel reassuring because there is never any question about what our role is.
Meanwhile, someone who is emotionally consistent might produce a surprisingly different response. They seem boring. There isn't enough spark. Something feels missing.
This does not mean that every lack of attraction is secretly psychological resistance. Sometimes we simply are not attracted to someone.
But sometimes what is missing is not chemistry.
It is anxiety.
And if anxiety, longing, uncertainty, pursuit, jealousy, caretaking, or emotional deprivation became intertwined with love early enough, their absence can produce an unfamiliar quiet. We may interpret that quiet as emptiness.
A safer relationship can therefore present a peculiar psychological problem: it asks us to experience intimacy without some of the feelings through which we previously learned to recognize intimacy.
The relationship may be healthier. But it does not yet feel like home.
Attachment: What We Learn to Expect From Love
Attachment theory offers another language for understanding this. Through repeated experiences with important people, we develop what John Bowlby (1969/1982) called internal working models: expectations about ourselves, other people, and relationships. Some examples are:
Can I expect someone to be there when I need them?
Am I worth caring for?
Does closeness lead to comfort or engulfment?
Will expressing a need bring someone closer, make them disappear, or lead to punishment?
Do I have to intensify my distress before anyone notices me?
Is depending on another person dangerous?
These expectations are not necessarily conscious beliefs. They become ways of anticipating relationships and responding to them, often unconsciously. Research on adult attachment continues to find that these working models influence how people interpret partners, respond to relationship threats, and regulate closeness and distance (see Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R., 2016). Importantly, they are not destiny. Later relationships can revise them.
That last point matters.
Psychoanalytic thinking is sometimes caricatured as saying, “Your childhood happened, so now you are doomed to date your mother.” That is not particularly useful.
Early relationships influence us, but they do not write an irreversible script. What they may provide is something more like a relational grammar: a largely unconscious set of expectations about how intimacy works.
We can speak new sentences. But we may initially construct them using very old rules.
We Seek Relationships, Even Painful Ones
The Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn offered one of the most radical revisions of Freud.
Freud's theories began largely with describing how we are motivated by drives seeking satisfaction. Fairbairn (1952) argued that human beings are fundamentally object-seeking. In psychoanalytic language, an “object” simply means another person, as that person is experienced psychologically. Fairbairn's central idea was that the child needs relationship so profoundly that even a painful relationship may be preferable to isolation.
A child cannot simply conclude: These people aren't emotionally available. I'll find another family.
The child must remain attached to survive. So we adapt ourselves to whatever forms of connection are available. If warmth is available, we attach through warmth. But if connection reliably comes through criticism, pursuit, caretaking, unpredictability, conflict, longing, or rejection, those experiences can also become woven into the fabric of how we attach and love.
Fairbairn therefore offers a striking way of understanding repetition. We do not necessarily return to painful relationships because we enjoy pain. We may return because pain was once part of how relationship itself was organized. Stephen Mitchell (1988) later described the implication beautifully: painful feelings and relationships can be recreated because they preserve modes of connection learned in our earliest relationships.
What we repeat, then, may not simply be an event. We repeat a relationship.
A self who longs and another who withholds.
A self who performs and another who judges.
A self who rescues and another who collapses.
A self who pursues and another who disappears.
A self who remains perpetually disappointed and another person who never quite becomes what we need them to be.
The cast may change, but the roles remain strangely familiar.
The Parents We Carry Within Us
When psychoanalysts talk about internal objects, they are not simply talking about memories of other people. We are talking about the ways important relationships become part of our inner lives.
Our parents and caregivers are among the first people through whom we come to understand what it means to be loved, needed, disappointed, comforted, rejected, or misunderstood. Over time, these experiences become more than memories of what happened. They help organize how we experience ourselves in relation to others.
Consider a child whose parent is loving but emotionally unpredictable.
On some days, the parent is warm, attentive, and available. On others, the parent is distant, preoccupied, or irritable. The child learns to watch closely, searching for subtle changes in expression, tone, or mood. Closeness becomes something to anticipate, monitor, and perhaps work to restore.
Years later, this person may find themselves unusually sensitive to a partner's emotional availability. A delayed text message, a distracted expression, or an evening of quietness can provoke feelings that seem disproportionate to the situation.
The adult may know perfectly well that their partner is simply tired. But another part of them experiences something much older.
Something has changed. Have I done something wrong? Am I about to lose you?
Or consider a child whose parent is highly critical.
The child may spend years trying to become someone who cannot be criticized. Achievement, compliance, and perfection become ways of preserving the relationship and protecting against shame.
As an adult, this person may find themselves drawn to partners whose approval is difficult to obtain. They may feel most invested in relationships where they must continually prove their worth, while struggling to trust affection that arrives without conditions.
There are other possibilities.
A child who becomes responsible for a parent's emotional stability may grow into an adult who feels most valuable when needed.
A child whose independence was experienced as rejection may later associate closeness with obligation or guilt.
A child whose needs were dismissed may learn to conceal them, only to become resentful when a partner fails to recognize what has never been expressed.
These are possibilities, not formulas. Two children can experience the same parent quite differently, and later relationships are shaped by far more than childhood alone.
But Fairbairn offers an especially important insight here: we do not simply internalize our parents as they objectively existed. We internalize relationships with them, including who we had to become in order to remain connected.
The internalized parental object is therefore not a perfect psychological photograph of one's mother or father. It is a representation shaped by the child's emotional experience, needs, fantasies, defenses, and limited understanding of what was happening.
A parent who was frequently overwhelmed, for example, may become internally experienced as someone who cannot tolerate the child's needs. Alongside that, the internal parent may develop a corresponding experience of the self as burdensome or excessive. The adult can then carry both sides of the relationship: an expectation that others will feel overwhelmed and a tendency to experience their own needs as too much.
And these internal relationships can persist even after the actual parent has changed, the childhood relationship has improved, or the parent is no longer alive.
This is part of what makes repetition so puzzling.
We may consciously know that our partner is not our mother or father. We may even recognize that the relationship is entirely different. Yet in moments of vulnerability, conflict, dependency, or disappointment, we can find ourselves relating to the person in front of us as though an earlier relationship has returned.
Sometimes we become the child who longs for recognition.
Sometimes we become the critical parent we once feared.
And sometimes we move between the two, longing for love while attacking ourselves for needing it.
What persists is not necessarily a wish to recreate childhood. It may be an attachment to an internal relationship that has never entirely lost its emotional force.
The question is no longer simply, Why do I keep finding people like my parents?
It becomes something more interesting:
What relationship do I continue to carry within myself, and how does it shape the people I love, the things I fear, and the person I become when I am close to someone?
Addictive Love
Thomas Ogden's (2010) reading of Fairbairn takes this idea somewhere especially useful for understanding romantic relationships. Fairbairn imagined that painful early relationships become internalized. Parts of ourselves remain psychologically attached to different aspects of the people we needed.
One of these is what he called the exciting object. The exciting object offers the promise of love without quite providing it. There is enough warmth to create hope. Enough possibility to keep waiting. Enough affection to make leaving difficult. But never quite enough satisfaction to allow the longing to end and find security.
Another part of the internal world is organized around the rejecting object: the person who frustrates, withholds, disappoints, humiliates, or turns away.
Ogden describes these internal relationships as having an addictive quality. One part of the self continues craving the exciting object that never fully returns their love; another remains preoccupied with somehow winning over the rejecting object.
“Addictive love” here is not a diagnosis and does not mean romantic attachment is literally equivalent to substance dependence. It describes something psychologically recognizable: I cannot stop needing something from you that you have repeatedly shown me you cannot give.
And this helps explain why certain relationships are so difficult to relinquish.
The person is not merely a person. They have become the location of a hoped-for ending.
Maybe this time I will finally be chosen.
Maybe this time they will understand.
Maybe this time the emotionally distant person will become emotionally available.
Maybe if I become more attractive, less demanding, more successful, easier, more sexual, more independent, more patient, or simply better, I will finally receive the love I have been trying to obtain.
The relationship begins to contain a fantasy of repair. We are not only trying to love someone in the present. We may also be trying to resolve something quite older than them… with someone else.
Ogden argues that one of the forces holding Fairbairn's internal world together is precisely this futile effort to transform the disappointing or rejecting object into a loving one.
Which means giving up the relationship may require giving up more than a person. It may require relinquishing the fantasy that this time the old story will end differently.
Resentment and Contempt Can Also Keep Us Attached
This is where Fairbairn and Ogden become particularly interesting.
We usually think of attachment in terms of love, longing, desire, and affection. But hatred can bind us to people too. So can resentment. So can contempt.
Ogden (2010) pays particular attention to the emotional world surrounding Fairbairn's “internal saboteur”: the part of the self that attacks both the object of our desire and that longing itself.
You can almost hear its voice:
How can you still want this person?
How many times do you need to be disappointed?
They're pathetic.
You're pathetic for needing them.
Contempt can appear to solve the problem of longing: If I can reduce you, dismiss you, diagnose you, ridicule you, or convince myself that I am above you, perhaps I no longer have to feel how much I wanted something from you.
But contempt does not necessarily free us from the relationship.
Sometimes it preserves it.
We remain intensely preoccupied with the person, only now through grievance.
The relationship continues internally through arguments that never happen, imaginary confrontations, fantasies of finally being recognized, repeated retellings of what they did, or the hope that one day they will understand exactly what they lost.
Resentment can therefore become another form of attachment.
I am still waiting for you to become the person you should have been.
Ogden's reading of Fairbairn suggests that resentment, contempt, disillusionment, and addictive love can all help maintain an internal relationship long after it has ceased to nourish us. His larger point is not that anger is unhealthy. Anger may be necessary, clarifying, and entirely appropriate.
The question is different: What relationship does the anger allow us to keep having?
Sometimes contempt protects against grief. Because grief would require acknowledging something far more painful: You may never become who I needed you to be. And perhaps you never could.
Psychological freedom begins to become possible when we no longer need the rejecting person to transform in order for our life to move forward. Ogden sees this relinquishment as central to growth: loosening the internal ties that keep us trying endlessly to turn disappointing relationships into the relationships we wished they had been.
That process is less like “getting over someone,” and often we call it mourning.
Sometimes We Are Trying to Rewrite the Ending
This may be one reason repetition is so persistent. The psyche is not simply repeating history passively. Sometimes it seems to be returning to familiar emotional territory in search of another ending.
If I can make this unavailable person available, perhaps something changes.
If this critical person finally admires me, perhaps the old sense of inadequacy disappears.
If someone who keeps leaving finally chooses me, perhaps I am no longer the person who gets abandoned.
If I can rescue someone who is falling apart, perhaps helplessness becomes competence.
The repetition therefore contains both suffering and hope. That is part of what makes it so difficult to surrender. We are not merely attached to what happened. We may be attached to what could still happen. But the tragedy is that our efforts to create a different ending can help reproduce the original story.
We choose someone unavailable, then work desperately to make them available.
We fear abandonment, then monitor the relationship so intensely that neither person has much room to breathe.
We fear being controlled, then retreat from intimacy until our partner begins demanding more closeness.
We expect criticism, become highly sensitive to disappointment, and gradually experience the other person through the expectation that judgment is coming.
And sometimes the other person has a complementary history of their own. One person's fear of abandonment meets another person's fear of engulfment. The more one pursues, the more the other withdraws. The more the other withdraws, the more urgently the first pursues.
Soon both people have convincing evidence that the other is exactly who they feared they would be.
Relationships Are Not Repetitions With Only One Author
Contemporary relational psychoanalysis complicates the picture further. We do not simply carry a template into a relationship and project it onto an innocent bystander. There are two people there. Each arrives with histories, vulnerabilities, desires, expectations, defenses, and ways of eliciting responses from others.
The relationship that develops is created between them.
Relational psychoanalysis has increasingly emphasized this interactive field: old patterns are not simply replayed internally but can become enacted between two people. This prevents psychoanalytic thinking from becoming a sophisticated form of victim-blaming. If someone is deceptive, abusive, cruel, or exploitative, their behavior belongs to them. A person's childhood does not cause another person's abuse.
The more useful question is how our histories may shape what attracts us, what alarms us, what we overlook, what we hope will change, what we feel compelled to repair, what we tolerate, and how long we remain inside a relationship that repeatedly harms us.
Repetition is rarely one simple act of “choosing the wrong person.”
It is often a whole relational process.
Why Healthy Love Can Feel Uncomfortable
Breaking the pattern is therefore more complicated than finding a different kind of partner. Because when the relationship changes, our internal experience changes too.
Someone who answers when they say they will may not produce the exhilarating relief of finally hearing from someone who disappears for three days.
Someone who communicates directly leaves less room for obsessive interpretation.
Someone who consistently loves us does not offer the intoxicating project of finally earning love.
Someone who does not need rescuing may leave us wondering what our role is.
Someone who respects a boundary may not chase us when we withdraw.
Security can initially feel strangely uneventful. And this is one of the cruel ironies of repetition:
What is healthier is not always what initially feels safest.
The familiar nervous system response may say, This is love. The absence of that response may say, Something is missing.
Part of psychological growth involves becoming curious about that gap. Not automatically distrusting chemistry. But becoming interested in what our chemistry recognizes.
Change Requires More Than Insight
Recognizing a pattern is important. But anyone who has ever said, “I know exactly why I do this, and I am doing it anyway,” already understands the limitations of insight. Patterns formed within relationships often need to change within relationships.
This is one of the reasons psychoanalytic therapy pays so much attention to what happens between patient and therapist. The old expectations eventually appear there too.
Will you become disappointed in me?
Will you leave if I am angry?
Do I have to impress you?
Will you control me if I depend on you?
Will you disappear if I need too much?
Can I disagree without losing the relationship?
The therapeutic relationship does not magically eliminate these fears. In fact, it often brings them into sharper focus.
But something new can gradually become possible. Instead of simply living the pattern, two people can begin thinking about it together. The repetition becomes recognizable while it is happening.
There is a small space between expectation and action. Then, perhaps, a larger one.
Giving Up the Old Relationship
Eventually, changing our relationship patterns involves something more painful than choosing better partners.
It involves mourning.
Mourning the parent who may never become the parent we needed. The former partner who may never understand what they did. The person whose love we could not finally earn.
The fantasy that if we become good enough, attractive enough, successful enough, calm enough, undemanding enough, or lovable enough, someone from the past, perhaps represented by someone in the present, will finally give us what we have been waiting for.
This mourning can feel like defeat. But perhaps it is something closer to freedom. Because when we stop requiring the present to repair the past, another person can gradually become someone other than a character in an old story.
We can encounter them with greater curiosity.
We can notice what is actually happening instead of only what we expect to happen.
We can tolerate a kind of love that does not require constant pursuit.
We can become less interested in winning over people who remain determined not to be won.
And maybe the question changes.
Instead of asking: Why do I keep choosing the same person?
We might begin asking: What kind of relationship has felt so familiar that I have mistaken familiarity for inevitability?
And then an even more difficult question: Who might I become in a relationship where I no longer have to play my old role?
That question does not promise a perfect relationship. It offers something more modest, and perhaps more meaningful: the possibility that love does not have to keep proving what we already learned about it.
References
Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46.
Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1969)
Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1943). The repression and the return of bad objects (with special reference to the “war neuroses”). British Journal of Medical Psychology, 19(3–4), 327–341.
Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic studies of the personality. Tavistock Publications.
Freud, S. (1955). Beyond the pleasure principle. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 1–64). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1920)
Freud, S. (1958). Remembering, repeating and working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 145–156). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1914)
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Mitchell, S. A. (1988). Relational concepts in psychoanalysis: An integration. Harvard University Press.
Ogden, T. H. (2010). Why read Fairbairn? The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91(1), 101–118.