Why Do I Always Fall for Emotionally Unavailable People?

The spark is a real signal. It may not be saying what you think it is.

By Simone Pleifer · August 2026 · 5 min read

Think of the person you cannot get out of your head. The one who runs warm and then goes silent. For three days you text until two in the morning, then nothing comes for two weeks, and you go through every message wondering whether you did something wrong.

And then he gets in touch again as if nothing happened, and everything lights up. That exact up and down is what you take to be the special thing between you.

Most people take it as proof. The feeling is huge, so the connection must be huge. There is another explanation, and it fits much better with what happens next.

Does a strong pull mean someone is right for you?

Take the first half of that seriously, because it is well established. When Eastwick and Finkel asked speed daters beforehand what they wanted in a partner, those stated preferences did not predict who they actually desired once they were in the room. A later attempt by Joel, Eastwick and Finkel to predict desire from more than a hundred measured traits failed as well. Eastwick described romantic desire as closer to an earthquake than to a chemical reaction with the right ingredients.

So the pull is not noise, and telling you to ignore it would be poor advice. It is the mechanism, and there is nothing more reliable to put in its place. The open question is what it is measuring in your particular case, because it can grow out of real closeness and out of not knowing, and from the inside those two feel almost identical.

There is one thing that not knowing demonstrably does. It keeps you reaching. Whitchurch, Wilson and Gilbert reported in 2011 that women who did not know how much a man liked them found him most attractive and thought about him the most. When Montoya and colleagues repeated the design in 2015 and measured liking separately from the urge to make contact, the liking effect did not come back. What went up was the motivation to meet and to talk.

That distinction is worth keeping, because it describes your evenings more precisely than the original claim did. Someone who answers you clearly takes up no more room in your head. Someone who leaves you in the dark keeps you writing. After a few weeks you take all that reaching for the size of your feeling, and the size of the feeling for a fact about this person.

Why do I keep falling for emotionally unavailable people?

Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver proposed in 1987 that adult love be understood as attachment, the same kind of bond known from infant research, only among adults. In their questionnaire studies, adults sorted into a few attachment styles in roughly the same proportions as infants. Those styles related to how people described love and what picture they held of themselves and of relationships.

Two limitations belong here. The data come from self-reports, and the line from childhood to adult style is an assumption rather than a proven cause. What is well supported is the description: people carry stable expectations about whether closeness will reliably be there, and those expectations shape which person feels inevitable. If your expectations were built out of effort and doubt, effort and doubt are what your body recognises.

Why do available people feel boring?

Most people do not enjoy saying this out loud, because it sounds like an accusation against themselves. It is not. A nervous system that had to work for closeness got very good at spotting the moment closeness might disappear again, and that alarm is loud. Next to it, someone who is simply reliably kind feels like nothing is happening at all.

There is a physical layer too. Helen Fisher and her team studied ten women and five men who had recently been rejected by someone they still loved. What activated were the regions for reward and craving, not only the ones for sadness, the same ones involved in cocaine craving. Wanting and liking run on different systems. The pull can be enormous while the situation keeps making you unhappy.

Is this limerence or love?

Tennov coined the word in 1979 after interviewing hundreds of people about exactly this state, and what she describes is recognisable from the inside immediately. The thought of this person arrives a hundred times a day, uninvited. Along with it, a sharp need for signs that they want you too. And your whole mood rises or falls with the last small signal.

The difference matters because it changes what you do next. If the feeling is strongest while you know nothing, it is mostly telling you what your attention does when an answer is missing. That is the same pattern as in Why Secret Love Feels More Real.

One caution against reading all of this too harshly. A strong feeling is not a bad sign in itself. Huston and his team followed couples for thirteen years and found that more intense romance early on went together with more happiness later. What separated the couples who divorced was not high intensity at the start but disillusionment, the slow fading of love and of open affection. So the question is never whether you feel too much. It is whether the feeling grows on clarity or on the absence of it.

"The pull tells you who you will choose. What it grows on tells you what you are choosing. How it goes is decided later, by something else entirely."

Simone Pleifer · Journals by Simone

How do you see your own pattern?

Thinking your way out of it does not work, and you do not have to. A pattern only keeps its power while nobody sees it. Four entries across a few weeks are usually enough to make it readable.

These four entries are the four-step method: notice, name, regulate, decide. The full method is in What Is Emotional Clarity Journaling. If the pull arrives as a message after days of silence, Situationship: Why He Keeps Coming Back describes exactly that round, and if the thinking gets loudest at night, How to Stop the 2am Thought Loop is about that hour.

Frequently asked questions

Nothing about you is broken. You adapted to what closeness looked like when you first learned what closeness is. That adaptation worked, which is why it stayed. The price is that today it leads you to people who leave the question open.

You do not have to switch off the pull. You only have to stop treating it as a promise. Write it down four times, look at what happened just before each time, and let the pattern say what it has been saying all along.