After Thanksgiving dinner this year, sitting across from my sister and her husband, something landed in me that I hadn’t fully named before.
I watched the way they moved around each other — the subtle ease, the quiet partnership, the shared language that only years of safety can build. And suddenly, without warning, a question surfaced that I couldn’t dodge anymore:
Why has long-term love always felt so far out of reach for me?
I’m fifty years old.
And I can count on one hand the number of serious relationships I’ve had in my life.
Sure, I dated.
A lot, once upon a time.
But none of my longer relationships ever lasted more than about ten months.
Not even with my children’s mothers. (My kids are half-siblings)
And for over a decade now… I haven’t dated at all.
For years I told myself it was about freedom.
My autonomy.
My independence.
Looking back now, that explanation feels… incomplete.
Because the truth is:
I was already a father.
I didn’t exactly have full autonomy to begin with.
So what was I really afraid of losing?
Not Freedom — Myself
What I understand now is that I wasn’t afraid of commitment in the way people usually mean it.
I was afraid of disappearing.
In my childhood, closeness came with a cost:
- loss of choice
- loss of privacy
- loss of emotional safety
- loss of identity
Love didn’t feel like connection.
It felt like enmeshment — like being absorbed into someone else’s emotional gravity.
So later, when romantic relationships started to deepen — when permanence entered the picture — my nervous system didn’t think:
“This is intimacy.”
It thought:
“This is the door that locks behind me.”
And without even knowing why, I would leave.
Not because I didn’t care.
But because some ancient part of me believed caring meant captivity.
The One That Still Echoes
There’s one relationship that still carries a particular kind of ache.
I was twenty-eight.
She was eighteen.
Yes, there was an age gap — and now, with the clarity I have, I can see how developmentally mismatched we truly were.
But back then, she was wonderful to me.
Warm.
Alive.
Hopeful.
Light in a way I didn’t yet know how to be.
We fell fast.
Got engaged within six months.
Lived together for a short time.
And then… she left two months shy of the altar.
At that point in my life, I was:
- freshly out of legal trouble
- locked out of my career field because of that record
- carrying deep depression
- disconnected from my identity
- and still trapped in survival mode
I didn’t drag her down on purpose.
But I didn’t yet have the internal resources to rise with her, either.
What I mourn most now isn’t just her.
It’s the version of me that almost believed in a different future — before the weight of my life collapsed back in around him.
The Relationship I Ended Without Knowing Why
Another relationship ended in a way that still stings in a quieter, subtler way.
My son and I were sharing expenses w/ my mother at the time.
Things were going well.
She had even moved in with us.
And one day — without a clear reason I could articulate — I ended it.
She didn’t have anywhere to go at the time, so for a short while longer she continued sleeping on my sofa.
During that stretch, she started seeing someone else — the man who would later become her husband.
One night, I could hear them together in the next room.
And I felt regret.
For a long time, that regret felt like proof that I had sabotaged something good.
Now I see it differently.
That decision wasn’t my adult mind making a clean choice.
It was my nervous system hitting an emergency exit I didn’t even know I was running toward.
What Autonomy Really Meant
When I say now that I was afraid of losing my autonomy, what I really mean is this:
I was afraid of being:
- swallowed
- controlled
- needed in ways that erased me
- responsible for another adult’s emotional survival
- trapped in someone else’s dysregulation
That fear didn’t come from those women.
It came from my first attachment system.
I learned very early that closeness meant:
- being recruited into someone else’s emotional storms
- being responsible for moods I didn’t create
- being punished for having my own inner life
So I mistook intimacy for danger.
And danger for wisdom.
Why the Pattern Was Invisible to Me for So Long
For most of my adult life, I explained my relationship history with neat, socially acceptable language:
- “Bad timing.”
- “Career stress.”
- “Wrong stage of life.”
- “I’m just independent.”
- “I value my freedom.”
All of that sounds reasonable.
None of it touches the real wound.
The real truth is this:
I didn’t yet have a template for safe, non-extractive love.
So when something good appeared, my body had no frame of reference for how to stay.
Why I Stopped Dating Altogether
About a decade ago, I simply stopped trying.
Not out of bitterness.
Not out of hatred.
Not even out of despair.
It was quieter than that.
Long before the DNA bombshell, before I even had the language for it, something in me said:
“I can’t build a real bond until I know who I am.”
That wasn’t avoidance.
That was incubation.
It was the slow, unseen dismantling of an identity built around survival instead of choice.
The Fear That Still Lives Here
Here’s the part that still catches in my chest:
If I imagine being in a relationship now, the thing that frightens me most isn’t losing freedom.
It’s being seen.
Fully.
My trauma.
My history.
My scars.
Because the deepest wound isn’t rejection.
It’s being fully known… and still left.
That’s the rupture that echoes longest in the nervous system.
What I’m Learning to Believe Instead
The right person won’t fall in love in spite of my history.
They’ll fall in love with:
- my self-awareness
- my boundaries
- my tenderness
- my sobriety
- my honesty
- my refusal to hand my unhealed wounds to someone else
They’ll meet the man I am now — not the boy I had to be when survival ran the show.
What I Know Now
I didn’t choose freedom over love.
I chose self-preservation over reenactment — long before I had words for either.
And now?
For the first time in my life…
I’m not running from intimacy.
I’m learning to approach it with my eyes wide open.
That’s new.
And for now…
That’s enough.
