There is a version of you that fell in love with someone who could not love you back, and you called it fate. This may have happened in the past, and you're completely over it, or you're going through it right now. Regardless, keep reading because understanding what happened will be your superpower.
You called it chemistry. You called it destiny, twin flame, the universe testing you before it gave you the real thing. What you did not call it, because no one taught you that, is almost an addiction in your shadow to being abandoned, something Anna Runkle refers to as the eroticisation of abandonment. A nervous system trained, early and without your consent, to read withdrawal as intimacy and consistency as boredom. It's the rise and fall in oxytocin and dopamine that makes the highs so high and the lows so low.
If you grew up without enough love, you got very good at imagining love where there was none. Most of my clients tell me that they felt love because their physical needs were met, that they saw their parents (usually fathers) go out, hustle, come home with the bread and butter and spoil their daughters rotten. Then, they will talk about love languages and how to give, oblivious to the fact that they received one love language (giving gifts) but were deprived of others. Maybe they weren't given enough affectionate touch, or were deprived of words of affirmation by emotionally absent or avoidant parents.
To compensate, children begin to imagine love in places where they feel it is absent. This could be through imaginary friends, daydreaming, or having a transitional object such as a teddy bear or a favourite blanket. It's a skill built to survive a house where affection came and went like weather. A parent who was your best friend on Tuesday and a stranger by Thursday. A parent who loved you so much, until the thing they loved more came back around. You learned to live for the Tuesday version. You learned to treat the Thursday version as a puzzle you could solve if you were just good enough, quiet enough, pretty enough, patient enough.
This is a trauma bond. It is what happens when approval and withdrawal are switched on and off by the same hand. Hot, then cold, then hot again, and your body starts to believe the tightening of your grip is love working. A person with a secure attachment feels the cold and walks away. You felt the cold and gripped harder, because somewhere underneath language, underneath memory, you learned that love is a thing that leaves and your job is to be good enough to make it stay.
And so you built your whole romantic life on a fantasy of what if. What if I say the right thing? What if they are thinking about me right now? What if this time is different? An addiction with a person's name on it instead of a substance, and like any addiction, an entire industry exists to feed it. Psychics who will tell you he is coming back. Content that will tell you this is your twin flame and pain is proof of destiny. All of it selling you hope where there is no hope, and even where there is hope, no one stops to ask why you would want a man who has to be convinced.
Here is the question nobody asked you early enough. Not whether they're thinking about you. Not how do I get them back.
The question is: can they be with you, and will they be with you? That is the whole test. Not chemistry. Not how much you feel when they pull away. Whether they are free, whether they are willing, whether there is nothing standing between you and a real yes. Everything else is decoration on a house with no foundation.
I want you to sit with something harder now. The chase you keep mistaking for love is not really about the person you are chasing. It is about the ghost behind them. The parent who came and went. The one who taught your nervous system that love is a door that opens and shuts, and your worth is measured by how long you can stand in the doorway waiting. You are bonded to a ghost, and this person happens to be wearing the ghost's coat.
Despite having criticisms of Freud, he was right when he said we are formed before language, before memory, by the hands that first held us or failed to. The Sufis said something older and larger. That the soul knew a love before it ever entered a body, a nearness to its Source (Allah) it can never fully forget, and every ache you feel for the wrong person is your nafs mistaking a substitute for the original.
Wa nafakhtu fihi min ruhi. A part of Allah's soul was breathed into you before you had a mother or a father to disappoint you. Before the hot and cold. Before the alcoholic hand or the love addict's forgetting. There was a nearness that asked nothing of you and withheld nothing from you. You have been chasing a memory of that nearness through people your whole life, and it is not your fault that you keep handing that ancient ache to men who cannot carry it. They were never built to hold what only the Divine can hold. No human was.
This is not permission to keep waiting on someone unavailable while you call it spiritual. This is the opposite. Tawakkul is not passive hoping that a man who is entangled, who is married, who has made himself clear that he cannot be with you, will suddenly transform. You must release your grip on the outcome of who he may be, because you trust the One who assigns qadr more than you trust your own desperate arithmetic. I am a strong believer that your self-concept creates your reality (I wouldn't be in this work if I didn't believe this), but if you're fixing your self-concept to hyperfixate on a person more efficiently, you're not doing the work you need to do at all. If Allah does not change our condition until we change ourselves, we need to fix our self-concept to understand ourselves better and to find blocks within the Nafs (ego/lower self) that bring us closer to Allah and give us access to the power of instant manifestation. From that higher place, you might not even want him, or he could feel your vibration rise and meet you where you are. The only way you can surrender the outcome for the highest to come back is to focus your intention on God instead of one of His creations. No matter how tall this man is.
You do not heal a wound shaped like a ghost by finding a better ghost. You heal it by turning, finally, toward the one Source that was never hot and cold. That never loved you Tuesday and forgot you Thursday. That has never once, not for a single instant since He breathed into you. This is not a metaphor to make you feel better. Something has to prove to your body that it does not, and only the Uncreated can prove that without ever once failing the test.
When you finally sit across from someone who is simply steady, who says 'I see you, and I am not going anywhere' and means it with his whole mind, body and heart, you may feel nothing. You may feel the flat, grey absence of a chase to run. This is not a sign he is wrong for you. It is withdrawal. You are coming off a substance, and the substance was the not knowing. This is where what is good for you doesn't feel exciting, give you butterflies, or even somewhat sexy.
Before you can recognise a stable love, you have to survive the boredom of one, because your body has been trained to call peace nothing happening and call chaos chemistry. This is the inside work no one wants to do because it requires admitting the chase was never about him. It was about a childhood that taught you longing is the only proof love is real. This is the same with money, opportunities, and other parts of life where you may feel an unconscious need to 'win' an uphill battle and stop yourself from losing everything you have. This survival cycle is exhilarating and addictive.
The Sufis have a word for the heart that has been polished enough to see clearly again. Qalb, from the root that means to turn, to flip, because the heart in its raw state keeps flipping toward whatever glitters instead of what is good. Tazkiyah, the purification, is slow, unglamorous work. It looks like ending the strange half-relationships you kept around for the validation. It looks like telling the truth to people who liked you more than you liked them, kindly, and meaning it. It looks like sitting with the withdrawal instead of numbing it with a new almost.
And on the other side of that work, if you are patient, it is not a man who chases you either. It is a nearness that was always available and that you were too busy running from ghosts to notice. Most people use God to escape themselves. This work uses God to find you, and once He finds you, you no longer need anyone else to prove you are worth staying for.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash