An Honest Letter About My Fear of Love

What It Means to Want Love and Run From It at the Same Time

Sat over a zoom call with my therapist last week, I spoke about the lack of desire I have for a relationship right now. The idea of anyone seeing me - really seeing me - is giving me the biggest ick that you can imagine. I invited someone round the other day, only to instantly regret it and wonder why I bothered.

I knew this wasn’t what I needed or wanted, and yet I went ahead anyway.

Between my plans to uproot everything and move away, and the trauma-work I’ve been doing, my life is pretty chaotic. I know I don’t have the time or energy to entertain a romantic connection, yet I wonder when I’ll feel ready to love again, or if I even want to.

I followed this thread in the therapy session, and went on to talk about my previous relationships. None of them ended well. And I guess I’m holding a humongous grudge against myself for how things played out and who I became.

It seems their downfall is the evidence my mind uses to validate a core belief of mine: Love is something I can attract but never hold. I won’t be able to cope, and I’ll sabotage it, hurting others and myself in the process.

I think this is fueling my current love-avoidance. History has shown me that the closer someone gets to me and the more they say they like me, the more I want to push them away.

I remember vividly, towards the end of my first relationship, my boyfriend turning to me, confused. He couldn’t understand why I was freaking out about my feelings all of a sudden - we’d just reached a stage in our relationship where we were starting to get to know each other.

That, I’ve come to realise, was the problem.

It’s never my intention to sabotage or freak out when people tell me they like me. Somatically, intimacy sends my amygdala (the fear-detection part of my brain) into overdrive. It’s a strange experience to sit across from someone, see the love in their eyes and panic thinking: Oh my gosh, this person likes me, and I fear I’m going to hurt them.

Instinctively, this fear tells you to pull away, and even if you don’t, there are subtle shifts in character  that can be sensed.

For example, during my last relationship, my ex surprised me by travelling a day early to see me. It was a lovely gesture, but it caught me off guard as I hadn’t prepared myself for the usual anxiety I’d experience when we spent time together. I lay in my bed, stunned, trying to hide my shock as my flatmate brought him in.

Knowing me well enough by then, he could see something was up, but I couldn’t explain what I was feeling. Physically distant, muted and inaffectionate, what appeared to be a lack of care that night was actually me caught up in a freeze response filled with self-judgement.

There’s this metacognitive process that goes on in these moments where you’ll judge yourself for how you’re reacting as you’re reacting, creating more stress that only compounds the original stress. I felt trapped, and suggested we go to sleep - a typical Joe coping mechanism. We spoke about it the next day, something I’ve written about before.

I’ve come to recognise this fear - essentially a fear of intimacy, as a part of my disorganised attachment style. One side of me wants to love and urges me to pursue romantic connections, whilst another pushes care and love away.

If I’m really attracted to someone, the honeymoon period can intoxicate my mind to distract me from the fear I have of being seen, but when the initial high wanes and the connection deepens, I get more and more uncomfortable and confused. How can I want this, yet experience so much doubt?

The Origins: I Learned To Need Love, but Also Fear It

I can trace the roots of my disorganisation to my childhood. Disorganised attachment is thought to arise when we learn that love is both something we need and something we should fear.

As a child and teenager, I was introverted but plagued by psychic wounds. I was a closeted boy who believed his world would fall apart if someone knew who he really was, and self-criticism laced with shame was how I stayed silent. I think this is where my fear of hurting others comes from. A part of me still fears I am inherently bad and unworthy.

To my mother's credit, she was loving and did all she could for our family, but the care she showed often rang hollow against my own judgments: “She can’t love you, she doesn’t know who you are”, my unconscious response would be. I couldn’t let love in, even when it was being shown to me.

On the flip side, my personal struggles meant I did truly need love. I needed someone to tell me it would all be OK and that I’d have nothing to fear. Instead, I dealt with my problems alone — or rather, dissociated from them entirely by daydreaming or sleeping my days away, or burying my head in a book.

I couldn’t “deal” with my problems, this is to say. I was just a kid. My attempts to deny my reality only led to more problems later on, and I began to suffer. I feel this is where my belief that I can’t hold onto someone’s love comes from. How can you hold someone else when you can’t hold yourself?

All of this is to say, I spent the formative years of my life living between two fears: being alone and judging myself, and being seen and judged by others.

Now, as an adult, my romantic comfort zone seems to be somewhere between connection and disconnection. A juxteposition, I’m more comfortable in the middle: You can want me, but don’t get too close, as you’ll trigger my fear of intimacy. If you’re aloof or treat me unwell, you can trigger my desire for connection, but only if you keep me at arm’s length. Let me in, and I’ll pull away.

Both the drive to love and the drive to push love away can be unhealthy, depending on how activated one is at a given time. One says, “You need connection because being alone is unsafe”, and the other says, “Pull away, intimacy is threatening your safety”.

Fundamentally, one breeds codependence and the other hyperindependence; I’m either overconnecting or underconnecting with others and myself.

Gosh, it feels like a mess writing all this out.

Forgiveness and Hope

I didn’t want this article to be entirely doom and gloom, but I wanted to be honest with you about something I deal with.

Some days, like that day speaking to my therapist, my worries can get the best of me, and I feel lost — like I don’t know which way is up or which is down; what is right or wrong; what love is or isn’t. Writing to you helps me unravel all my complicated feelings.

I do think I need to practice forgiveness for my past mistakes. When I judge myself harshly for the past, I reinforce the unconscious belief I have that I can’t hold or accept love, and I mirror how I learned to cope as a kid: by berating myself into silence and avoidance.

My therapist reminded me that we are all doing our best and none of us is immune to sabotage or hurting someone’s feelings. When my thoughts go to that place of self-criticism, I remind myself of this. I’m not perfect, and I can forgive myself.

Moreover, I can see how my fear of intimacy is its own self-fulfilling prophecy. I will be triggered by intimacy regardless, and it’s something I need to be ready for. I need not fear my fear.

Finally, I think I’m resistant to love right now because I’m trying to be more intimate with myself. I’m having the same reaction that I do when someone else cares for me, only I’m not allowing my resistance to stop me from looking within.

If anyone is reading this and feels similarly, the fact that you can recognise these patterns is tremendous. Many don’t.

Once you’ve done that, you can start turning that awareness into action - which is what I’m doing now.

Where I’m At Now

I look back on my childhood and see a kid who couldn’t develop a healthy sense of self because his environment  wouldn’t allow it.

Now that I’m older, I have the autonomy and a growing sense of courage to explore avenues that align my life with who I’m coming to believe I am.

And the move I’m about to embark on is a massive step for me on this journey.

I think that as I continue learning how to hold myself and all my messy, complicated feelings, I’ll be able to hold someone else’s love and express mine.

That might not be for some time, but it’s a journey, after all.

To be continued! Thank you so much for reading.