Why, sometimes, we desire exactly what makes us suffer

When a woman talks about her romantic choices, she often tries to explain them through reason. She recalls the qualities she noticed in the other person, the circumstances of how they met, the interests they shared, and the expectations that built up over the relationship. At certain moments, though, these explanations start to feel insufficient. She recognizes that this person can't offer the bond she wants. She notices the distance, the lack of reciprocity, the promises that don't hold up, and the repetition of the same frustrations. And still, she stays emotionally attached. She may understand rationally that the relationship causes her suffering, and at the same time feel unable to walk away. She may end it and come back. She may promise herself she won't accept certain situations again, and some time later find herself in the very same place. Then guilt-laden questions arise:

"Why do I keep choosing people like this?" "Why can't I get interested in someone who's actually available?" "Why do I know it hurts me, but still want to stay?" These questions reveal an important truth: not every romantic choice is born from reason alone. We also choose based on experiences we don't clearly remember, relationship models we learned without realizing it, and fantasies, identifications, fears, and desires that remain unconscious.

This doesn't mean a person bears no responsibility for her choices. It means that, to truly understand why she chooses, it isn't enough to look only at what she consciously knows about herself. There's a silent history taking part in every encounter.

The familiar can be mistaken for love

From the earliest years of life, we begin building an understanding of what it means to love and to be loved. This understanding isn't formed only through what we're told in words. It's also organized by how we were cared for, welcomed, waited for, frustrated, and recognized. A child watches how the adults around her relate to each other. She notices whether love comes with safety or with threat. She learns whether she can express her needs or has to hide them. She discovers whether the other stays available when she shows anger, sadness, or discontent. Little by little, certain forms of bonding become familiar. If emotional presence came along with instability, the child may learn that loving also means waiting.

If affection appeared after a period of distance, she may associate reunion with intensity. If she had to please in order to receive attention, she may start to believe that love has to be earned. If the important adults were emotionally distant, she may learn to seek closeness specifically with people who can't offer it. In adult life, these experiences don't show up as organized memories. A woman doesn't consciously choose someone unavailable because she wants to relive an old pain. What happens is more subtle.

What's familiar can be recognized as love even before it's understood. An available person may feel strange. Stability can be mistaken for a lack of passion. Calm can feel like a lack of intensity. Uncertainty, anxiety, and waiting, on the other hand, can produce the sense that something very profound is happening. The body recognizes an old language. A woman doesn't fall in love only with who the other person is. She may also become involved with the place that relationship offers her.

The characters change, but the position can stay the same

Many women say they've been involved with people very different from one another. One partner was outgoing; another, reserved. One seemed affectionate; another struggled to express feelings. One relationship started quickly; another was built over years. Despite these differences, something can remain constant. Maybe she keeps waiting to be chosen. Maybe she keeps trying to prove her worth.

Maybe she's always the one who understands, forgives, and holds everything up. Maybe the other person changes, but she keeps occupying the position of someone who has to fight for love. This is the point where we can recognize a repetition. Repetition doesn't mean reproducing exactly the same events. It can show up in the persistence of a subjective position. A woman may change partners, cities, and circumstances, and still feel she has to win over a presence that is never fully available.

She may end a relationship in which she felt abandoned and later become involved with someone who offers a different form of the same absence. In one relationship, the other person disappeared physically. In another, he stays close, but can't listen to her. In another, he offers affection, but avoids commitment. The scenes are different, but the emotional experience is similar. She is, once again, in front of someone who needs to be convinced to stay.

The hope that this time will be different

Romantic repetition doesn't happen only because the suffering is familiar. It can also be sustained by hope. With each new relationship, a woman may feel that this time, she'll finally live a different outcome. Maybe, at some point in her history, she learned that she needed to fight to receive attention. Maybe she lived with an important figure who was affectionate at some times and distant at others. Maybe she experienced never knowing whether she would truly be chosen. In adult life, when she meets someone emotionally unavailable, a deep desire to change that experience can arise. She thinks that, if she manages to make that person love her, something inside her will be repaired.

If someone who doesn't commit finally commits to the relationship, that might mean she is important enough. If someone distant becomes affectionate because of her, maybe the old feeling of rejection will disappear. If she manages to transform someone who doesn't know how to love, she might feel that her love holds special value. This hope makes the relationship extremely intense. She isn't investing only in the present. She's trying to resolve an old question.

"Will someone stay this time?" "Will I be enough this time?" "Will I manage to turn absence into presence this time?" The problem is that the real other person may not have the conditions or the desire to offer what she expects. Even so, letting go of the relationship would also mean letting go of the fantasy of repair.

That's why some women stay attached not only to the person, but to the promise that, one day, the ending will be different.

Love directed at potential

In many relationships, a woman clearly perceives who the other person is, but stays attached to who he could become. She sees his difficulties, his unavailability, and his limits. At the same time, she manages to imagine a more mature, present, and loving version of him. Maybe he just needs time. Maybe he never received enough love. Maybe he's afraid.

Maybe he hasn't yet understood the depth of the bond. These possibilities can be true. We all have conflicts, defenses, and emotional difficulties. People can change. However, there's a difference between recognizing that someone has the potential to change and building an entire relationship on that possibility. When a woman mostly loves the potential, she begins relating to a promise. Reality comes to be interpreted as a temporary phase.

She endures the absence because she imagines a future presence. She tolerates the lack of commitment because she believes that, further along, she'll be chosen. She accepts very little because she expects that, at some point, she'll receive everything. The real relationship becomes an interval between the person who exists and the one she imagines will one day exist. With this, a woman can spend years waiting for a transformation that doesn't depend on her. Love comes to be directed less at the other person as he is, and more at what she wishes he would become.

Desire doesn't only seek what's good for us

There's a widespread idea that we naturally seek out what brings us happiness. However, human experience is more complex. We don't always desire only what's good for us. Sometimes, we're drawn to whatever confirms old beliefs about ourselves. A woman who feels she doesn't quite deserve love may distrust someone who loves her clearly. She may imagine there's something wrong with that person, or that the interest isn't real. Upon meeting someone who rejects her or keeps her at a distance, though, she may feel an intense desire.

Not because she consciously wants to suffer, but because that rejection matches something she already believes about herself. The experience seems to say: "You need to try harder." "You're still not enough." "Maybe, if you do everything right, you'll be chosen."

The relationship confirms a familiar image and, at the same time, offers the possibility of changing it. A woman tries to prove that old belief wrong, but does so precisely within a relationship that keeps reinforcing that same belief. She wants to be chosen by someone who doesn't choose her. She wants to receive, from someone unavailable, what an available person could offer with much less suffering. The harder something is to win, the more valuable it can seem.

When anxiety is mistaken for passion

Unstable relationships can produce a very intense emotional charge. The other person comes close and then pulls away. He shows interest and, shortly after, becomes distant. He makes promises, backs away, and returns just as the woman starts to give up. Every moment of closeness produces relief. Every moment of distance triggers anguish. The woman starts living attentive to every sign from the other person. A message can transform her whole day. A silence can generate countless interpretations. A gesture of affection can reignite all her hope.

This alternation between presence and absence can be mistaken for passion. The body stays in a state of expectation. The mind looks for explanations. The woman feels she can't stop thinking about that person. The intensity seems to prove that a great love exists. However, part of that intensity may not come only from the romantic encounter. It may be produced by insecurity. The less she knows about the place she holds, the more she thinks about it.

The less she receives, the more she wants. The less certain she is about the bond, the more attention she directs at it. Anxiety keeps a person emotionally connected. That's why, when she finally finds a more stable relationship, she may miss the earlier intensity. There's no longer the same need to watch, interpret, or win someone over. Calm can be perceived as emptiness, because it doesn't produce the same emotional movements.

It takes time to understand that peace doesn't mean an absence of desire, and that security isn't a synonym for boredom.

Romantic choice and the desire of the Other

From a very young age, we try to understand what the other expects of us. A child depends on the care, presence, and recognition of the important figures around her. That's why she tries to sense what she needs to be in order to keep that bond. Maybe she needs to be obedient. Maybe she needs to take care of others. Maybe she can't show too much need.

Maybe she needs to be strong, pleasant, or successful. These answers begin to take part in building her identity. In adult life, a woman may continue guiding her choices from the question: "What do I need to be, for the other person to love me?" Instead of asking herself whether she wants that relationship, she focuses on figuring out how to be wanted.

She adapts her way of speaking, of behaving, and of feeling. She reduces her needs. She avoids conflict. She becomes whatever she believes the other person expects. Romantic choice stops being organized around her own desire and starts revolving around the desire of the other. The woman wants to be chosen, but may have trouble noticing whether she is also choosing. This difference is fundamental. Being desired by someone doesn't necessarily mean desiring the life that gets built alongside that person.

Winning someone's love doesn't guarantee the bond meets your needs. A woman can dedicate so much effort to being chosen that she stops asking what she is choosing for herself.

Love as proof of worth

When personal worth depends heavily on how the other person sees you, romantic choice can turn into an evaluation. Being loved means being important. Being rejected means not being enough. The end of a relationship stops being lived only as a loss and starts working like a verdict on one's own identity. The woman doesn't only think:

"This relationship wasn't possible." She may conclude: "I wasn't good enough." "I couldn't make someone stay." "There's something wrong with me."

Faced with this, holding on to the relationship becomes a way of protecting her self-esteem. As long as the other person is still present, even precariously, there's a possibility of receiving confirmation. As long as there's hope, the woman doesn't have to fully face the feeling of rejection. She can keep trying. She offers more care, more understanding, and more availability.

But the more she tries to prove her worth through the relationship, the more dependent she becomes on the other person's response. Her worth starts fluctuating according to that person's closeness or distance. When she receives attention, she feels important. When the other pulls away, she feels she disappears.

The familiar can seem safer than the healthy

Even when a relationship causes suffering, it can offer a familiar way of organizing life. The woman knows how to act toward someone distant. She knows how to wait, take care, try to understand, and look for signs of closeness. Maybe she developed these abilities throughout her whole life. In a reciprocal relationship, she would need to occupy a different place. She would need to express desires, hold limits, and allow herself to be known.

She wouldn't only be the one who cares or wins someone over. She would also need to receive. Receiving can be harder than giving. By giving, she keeps some control. She chooses how much, when, and how she gets close. By receiving, she needs to trust. She needs to admit she needs the other person. She needs to accept she doesn't fully control what will be offered. For someone who learned to protect herself from disappointment, that vulnerability can feel dangerous.

So an unbalanced relationship, though painful, can feel emotionally safer than a bond in which the woman would have to truly reveal herself.

Understanding doesn't mean blaming childhood

Recognizing that romantic choices are influenced by early relationships doesn't mean claiming that every current difficulty is the responsibility of one's parents or childhood. Psychoanalysis doesn't try to build a simple explanation in which an adult would be merely a victim of her history. Early experiences leave marks, but those marks don't absolutely determine everything. Throughout life, we meet other people, build new bonds, go through losses, and create singular ways of responding to what we live. Moreover, two children who grow up in the same family can build completely different meanings out of similar experiences.

What matters isn't only what happened, but how it was lived, interpreted, and psychically inscribed. Understanding your own history doesn't mean blaming one single person. It means recognizing that our choices don't come from nowhere. They have roots. And knowing those roots can expand our freedom.

Why isn't knowing enough?

Many women have already rationally understood their patterns. They can say they choose unavailable people, that they try to save the other person, or that they're afraid of being alone. And still, they keep repeating. This happens because knowing an explanation isn't the same as working through an experience. A person may know she needs to set limits, but be unable to bear the guilt that appears when she says "no."

She may understand the other person won't change, and still feel that giving up would mean abandoning someone. She may recognize she deserves reciprocity, but be unable to emotionally believe that a calm love is really possible. Rational knowledge belongs to one dimension. Repetition is sustained by affects, fantasies, and conflicts that don't transform just through advice. That's why sentences like "you need to value yourself" or "just leave that relationship" can be true, but insufficient.

The question isn't only knowing what to do. It's understanding what makes it so hard to do what you already know.

Psychoanalysis and the singular meaning of choice

Psychoanalysis doesn't try to determine who a person should love. Nor does it offer a checklist of traits that would define the right relationship. Its work is to investigate the singular meaning of each choice. Why did that person spark your desire? What does she or he represent?

What place do you occupy in that relationship? What are you trying to receive? What are you afraid of losing? What old experience seems to be repeating itself? What promise keeps the bond alive?

These questions don't have immediate answers. They begin to be built through speech. By narrating her relationships, a woman may notice that certain events repeat. She may notice words, situations, and feelings that run across different bonds. Maybe she notices she always gets close to someone who needs to be taken care of. Maybe she recognizes she loses interest once her feelings are returned.

Maybe she discovers that the chase is more exciting than the actual life together. Maybe she understands she's still waiting for permission to be loved without having to prove her worth. In analysis, repetition stops being just a sequence of bad choices. It comes to be heard as a psychic attempt to respond to something.

From repetition to the possibility of choice

When a woman begins to recognize the meaning of her choices, it doesn't mean she'll immediately stop desiring what she used to desire. Desire doesn't follow orders. She may still feel drawn to someone unavailable. She may still miss a relationship that caused her suffering. The difference is that these feelings no longer have to determine her decisions on their own. She can feel desire and observe reality.

She can love and recognize a limit. She can feel longing and not go back. She can understand the other person's history without taking on the responsibility of transforming him. Little by little, a distance opens up between what she feels and what she chooses to do. This distance matters because it allows the person to stop being entirely driven by repetition.

She can ask not only: "Why do I want this person?" But also: "What happens to me when I'm in this relationship?" "Who do I become beside them?"

"Is there room for me in this bond?" "Am I meeting the other person, or trying to repair my own history?" Choice becomes more conscious not because every unconscious dimension disappears, but because the woman starts to recognize something of what used to act silently.

Choosing differently can also cause anguish

Leaving behind a familiar pattern doesn't always bring immediate relief. A woman may leave a painful relationship and feel an enormous emptiness. She may meet someone available and feel fear. She may set limits and experience guilt. These feelings don't necessarily mean she's making the wrong choice.

They can indicate that she's leaving behind an old position. For a long time, maybe she knew who she was within lack. She was the one who waited, cared, and tried. When she stops occupying that place, she needs to discover another way of existing in love. This takes time.

A healthier relationship doesn't immediately erase the marks of previous ones. A woman may keep expecting abandonment, interpreting silences, and distrusting calm. Change doesn't happen only because she found a different person. She also needs to build, within herself, a new way of being in the bond.

Loving without turning the other person into an answer

No relationship can fully resolve the questions built up over a lifetime. A partner can't guarantee, forever, that you have worth. He can't repair every absence. He can't erase every rejection. When the other person is placed in that role, the relationship is given an impossible responsibility.

Any distance triggers despair. Any conflict threatens all sense of security. Any change seems to put your very identity at risk. Loving more freely involves recognizing that the other person matters, but can't be your only source of existence. He has his own desires, limits, and contradictions. He isn't in the relationship only to repair your history. In the same way, you don't need to occupy the place of the one who repairs his.

A romantic encounter can produce transformation, but it shouldn't depend on the mission of saving, completing, or convincing someone.

Not everything intense is love

Perhaps one of the hardest discoveries is recognizing that intensity doesn't guarantee depth. A relationship can be intense because it activates fear, insecurity, and the desire for repair. It can occupy a large part of your thoughts precisely because it remains undefined. It can feel unforgettable because it touched old wounds. This doesn't mean the feeling is false.

It means it may be made up of different elements. There may be love, perhaps. But there may also be fear of loneliness. The desire to be chosen. The need to prove your worth.

The hope of changing the past. Familiarity with absence. Psychoanalysis doesn't reduce love to a single explanation. It broadens what we call love, recognizing that our bonds are crossed by experiences we often don't know about.

A freer choice

No romantic choice is entirely rational. Nor does a choice exist that is completely free of our history. We always carry with us marks, fantasies, and desires. The freedom available to us isn't found in eliminating every unconscious influence. It's found in expanding our capacity to recognize what drives us.

When a woman notices she seeks out unavailable people because she learned to associate love with conquest, something can begin to shift. When she understands she tries to save the other person in order to feel needed, she can build other forms of connection. When she recognizes that anxiety isn't necessarily passion, she can begin to tolerate calm. When she understands that being chosen isn't enough, she can ask what she is choosing for herself. Romantic choice becomes freer when it stops being just an automatic repetition.

This doesn't mean there will be no fear, doubt, or conflict. It means the woman will be able to look at the real other person, not only at what he represents in her history. She'll be able to recognize desire without ignoring reality. She'll be able to love without disappearing.

An invitation to reflect

Maybe you've already asked yourself why you remain emotionally attached to someone who doesn't offer what you want. Maybe you've noticed that your relationships change, but certain feelings remain. Maybe you're still trying to win over a presence that always seems to slip away. This isn't about blaming yourself for your choices. Nor is it about claiming that everything you felt was an illusion.

It's about recognizing that, in love, we don't always seek only the other person. We also seek answers. We try to repair absences. We look to confirm our worth. We rediscover familiar forms of connection.

Understanding this can be the beginning of change. Maybe the question isn't only: "Why did I choose this person?" But: "What, inside me, recognized this relationship as familiar?"

"What am I trying to live through again?" "What ending am I still hoping to change?" "Is there room for my desire, or am I only trying to match the other person's desire?" "Do I want this real person, or the promise I built around them?" In our first conversation, we can talk about what you're going through, understand what has brought you to seek support, and both sense whether it makes sense to continue with an analytic process.

Theoretical references

FREUD, Sigmund. Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (1914).

FREUD, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

FREUD, Sigmund. On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914).

LACAN, Jacques. The Seminar, Book IV: The Object Relation.

LACAN, Jacques. The Seminar, Book V: Formations of the Unconscious.

LACAN, Jacques. The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.