After pushing love away, we convince ourselves we actually want it and aren’t sabotaging anything. Joe says we do this in one of two ways: we decide it’s just not the right person, or we blame — them or ourselves.
His example is a 35-year-old who hasn’t found the love of his life but is sure he just needs to find the right person, citing two good past relationships. When Joe asks what happened to those two, it turns out both partners were significantly younger and at a stage of life with little capacity to commit. “How much are you actually just attracted to people who are unavailable?” The man sees it instantly — he picks relationships that feel good but can never pan out, then calls it circumstance.
“That’s where we convince oh, it’s circumstances. It’s somebody else. It’s I haven’t found the right person yet.”
The blame version sounds like “I’ve been chasing you and you don’t open up” or “I can’t get the love I want because they keep criticizing me.” Both versions keep the attention on the other person or on bad luck, so we never look at the pattern itself — the way we keep selecting for, or recreating, exactly the conditions that guarantee love won’t land.
Related Concepts
- We push away love by chasing it, avoiding it, or fighting
- Emotional avoidance creates the very pattern it fears
- Draw a boundary to get love without the thing it was married to
- Chasing love signals that you don’t deserve it
- We beckon love consciously while pushing it away subconsciously
- We find love when we stop fearing annihilation