Matthew Hussey explains why we chase partners who don't value us: low self-esteem makes us equate someone's disinterest with worth. We're often trying to rewrite childhood wounds through romance, mistaking emotional unavailability for desirability while overlooking partners who actually care.
We have this idea that if someone doesn't want us, then they must be valuable. Especially when we don't think we're good enough. When someone likes us, we're suspicious of them. We think there must be something wrong with you if you like me, because I'm not great. So you must not be great. You know, you can't be worth anything if you like me. Let me go and find someone who's worth something. And who do I think is worth something? The person who doesn't notice me, the person who doesn't want me. Because I don't think very highly of myself. So if you don't notice me, you must be pretty cool. You must be on to something. Then we start chasing that because it becomes that idea that if I could just get this person, I would be enough. That would prove that I could be Enough. This person's validation becomes the key that unlocks my confidence, which of course is completely the reverse of what's true. That this person, if this person fell for you, it wouldn't unlock your confidence. All it would do is unlock more insecurity, more anxiety, because now you get that person and you still don't feel good enough and you're spending every waking moment terrified you're going to lose them. and we get attracted to the bad boy, the bad girl, partly because of what we just said, right? If. If we can get this person to fall in love with us, then I'll be somebody. You know, they don't want me. They're hard to wrangle. But if I could, then I'd be good enough. And some of this stuff comes from. from childhood and, you know, there's that idea that we're trying to complete, trying to get closure on some story from our childhood. You know, I didn't get it from my dad, so if I can get it from this person, then it will show that I was good enough for my dad, that I could have had my dad's love. I'm completing a story that never got completed in my mind. We're still allowing some person in our past to play God over our current decisions and trying to give ourselves a sense of finality. But of course, that's when we do that, we forget that those people that we're trying to still win the approval of, they were very flawed human beings and that they're not God. They were just people. They were just people in the same way that this person who's not showing interest in you right now or this person who's the bad boy picking you up, putting you down, you know, whatever, that that's not an indication of value. What it is is an indication of this person either just isn't that into you, or this person isn't looking for something serious right now, or this person is not ready to love the way that a relationship, a true relationship, really demands love, or this person is insecure and needs to have five people on the go at all times because they're trying to fill a hole that they can't fill. We're basing our value on a phase of life or or inadequacy or insecurity or ego that somebody else is in. The irony is that we could have someone who really likes us today and is ready to treat us well and ready to give us a ton of love who was the bad boy five years ago. but has evolved and matured and is now ready to really love. But that person's ready to give us a kind of unironic, unsarcastic, pure love and we go, something's wrong with this. Let me go for this. Let me go for the bad boy. So you start to look for someone who's currently in a bad boy phase. So what happens then is you end up cycling through people your whole life who are always in a certain phase of their life because you're not ready for someone to treat you really well. Even if one, you know, you're like, oh, but I really like someone with an edge. Well, maybe that person was that person, but they've grown up. And so what it really is, is not that, you know, how do I... It's that you're always attracted to people who who have not grown up. You don't see the people, you don't acknowledge the people that have grown up who are past that phase. You're not ready for something more than what you're getting right now. And as soon as you do see something that could resemble good treatment, you don't treat it as valuable because you don't treat yourself as valuable. You're still trying to complete some story you have in your mind of what you're supposed to get and how it's supposed to make you feel.
