We don’t fall in love with strangers. We fall in love with patterns. With familiarity. With nervous systems that feel like home even when home was everything BUT love.
Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Forgets
You can have a checklist and know exactly what healthy love should look like- kind, consistent, emotionally available. You can read every self-help book, follow every therapist, and still find yourself drawn to someone whose silence feels achingly familiar.
This is your nervous system betraying you in the most heartbreaking way possible. The thing is, your brain doesn’t wire itself for happiness, but it wires itself for survival.
This is the oldest reflex we have. And if survival once meant chasing after a parent’s attention, earning love through performance, or walking on eggshells to keep the peace, then that’s what your body will recognize as normal.
Why Healthy Love Feels Wrong
What if you met a person who ignores you? Your body will remember when love looked like having to earn someone’s attention. Or if you meet someone who dumps their chaos on you, or keeps you guessing? You mistake unpredictability for excitement because your nervous system was trained to carry weight that wasn’t yours.
This is why the healthy person feels wrong. Not boring, WRONG.
Your body doesn’t know what to do with someone who doesn’t trigger your hypervigilance. So ultimately, when someone shows up consistently, your nervous system stays calm, and your brain interprets this as ‘no chemistry.’
This revelation is not to say that you have bad taste. You have a nervous system that does exactly what someone trained it to do: seek what it knows, even if what it knows might slowly kill you.
