3 Clues You're Attracted To Emotionally Unavailable People

If you keep chasing a connection with someone who won't open up, spotting the signs early can help you finally break the cycle.

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | June 25, 2025

Over time, through experiences, repeated patterns and relationships that never seemed to work, you may have come to recognize something — you have a type. And more often than not, that type is someone who cannot or will not love you back in the way you expect them to.

It's easy to believe you're simply attracted to passion or go all in for the ones you love. The chase, after all, feels familiar. It keeps you engaged, gives you purpose and allows you to imagine that with just enough effort, something will finally click.

But if you pause, upon deeper reflection, you may notice an uncomfortable truth. Sometimes, the pursuit isn't about love at all.

Sometimes, it's a defense against really being seen or known. Because to be loved fully, reliably and without reserve, can feel more vulnerable than pursuing someone who is always just out of reach.

I know that's a hard pill to swallow. It calls into question the very narratives we've used to make sense of our relationship patterns, but it's worth reflecting on.

Here are three signs you might be unconsciously resisting the very love you say you want.

1. Their Unavailability Feels Like Home

People are not always drawn to what's emotionally safe, but rather to what they deem emotionally familiar. If someone grew up in an environment where caregiving was inconsistent, connection was conditional, intermittent or unavailable, they start to equate uncertainty with love.

That's why when your partner pulls away, you cling harder; when they go silent, you grow anxious and double your efforts at communication or when they give you crumbs of affection, it feels like "something real."

This is not a conscious choice. It's a subconscious attachment template formed in your childhood.

A 2015 review published in Frontiers in Psychology outlines how early attachment experiences shape what we later perceive as emotionally "normal." Gradually, individuals raised in unhealthy environments become conditioned to confuse intimacy and connection with uncertainty, unpredictability or even anxiety.

With disorganized attachment, often resulting from abuse, trauma or neglect, this presents a paradox: the child desires closeness yet reacts in fear or confusion when offered it.

The study also points out that low childhood emotional availability can influence the way an individual participates in adult relationships. If steady attunement was never demonstrated, true emotional presence might seem strange or even threatening.

Additionally, researchers discovered that even when children are placed in safe and loving settings, like with responsive adoptive parents, some of them naturally shunned connection. Not because the caregiver was unkind but because emotional safety wasn't what they had been conditioned to anticipate.

2. You're Avoiding Vulnerability

If you're attracted to emotionally unavailable partners, it's perhaps less about love and more about avoiding the pain of actual intimacy. Genuine relationships demand that two people connect fully, compromise, inspect their own motives and face their insecurities.

This takes a degree of honesty that can be intimidating. To really bond, you have to be open about not just your best qualities but the vulnerable aspects of yourself that you might wish to hide. Sharing them with someone else involves a risk of rejection. However, this is also the path to true intimacy and growth — there are no shortcuts.

So instead, you might be attracted to the emotionally unavailable. They enjoy your accessibility but avoid commitment. They offer vague commitments of "someday" but do nothing more. You are left in a hot and cold relationship, yearning for more but also grateful deep down that you don't have to deal with what would occur if someone actually got to see all of you.

A 2007 study in Personal Relationships confirms this. When individuals were less committed, they were more emotionally reactive to their partner's flaws. Instead of moving into connection, they withdrew using emotional distance as a defense.

On the other hand, those who were committed held firm even in the face of uncertainty, indicating that intimacy is not about flawless perfection. It's about being present and staying open when things get real.

3. You're Trying To Prove Your Worth

One core belief behind people chasing after emotionally unavailable partners is a doubt in their own self-worth. They may think, "If I can get them — this distant, inconsistent, emotionally walled-off person — to love me… then maybe I'll finally be enough."

This isn't a conscious pursuit. It's a deeply embedded pattern that can be traced back to one's childhood. If your parents withheld love and treated it like an award you had to earn through effort or being worthy of affection, the belief may have solidified that nothing is freely given — you have to earn it.

So now, in adulthood, you may seek relationships that echo that same pattern, where love must be earned, fought for or proven. This often translates into you doing all the emotional labor between the two of you.

A 2020 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology analyzed data from over 46,000 participants and found that self-esteem and social relationships are deeply intertwined, forming a feedback loop across the lifespan.

In other words, the way we feel about ourselves shapes the kinds of relationships we pursue and tolerate. And the quality of those relationships, in turn, reinforces or erodes that self-worth.

This can create a self-defeating cycle. If we constantly find ourselves in connections where we feel unseen, unchosen or emotionally neglected, over time we may begin to internalize that experience. Not consciously, but in the subtle ways we start to believe we have to earn closeness or prove we're worthy of care.

The study also found that this pattern holds true across life stages and relationship types, meaning it's not just something we grow out of. If unaddressed, it can follow us into every phase of connection — until we begin to disrupt the cycle ourselves.

Remember, you cannot fix or change someone else's emotional availability, but you can fix the parts of you that are drawn to this dynamic. Becoming aware of this pattern is the crucial first step. Begin to explore what you truly want from relationships, and don't settle for anything less moving forward.

Want to explore this further? Take the science-backed Anxious Attachment Scale to see how your attachment style might be shaping your current relationship dynamics.

A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes.com, here.