Is Love Really Supposed to Look Like This?
- Griffin Oakley
- Jul 31
- 7 min read
You swore the next one would be different.
Different person. Different type, even. Then six months in, there you are again. Same fight you always have. Same silence. Same feeling of reaching for someone who won't reach back, or backing away from someone who won't stop reaching.
Different face. Same relationship.
You're not choosing badly on purpose. You're running a picture of love you drew a long time ago, in the first place you ever saw two people supposed to love each other.
You Learned It by Watching
Nobody handed you a definition of love when you were a kid.
You learned it the way you learned everything else back then. You watched. You watched the people who raised you, and you took notes you didn't know you were taking.
How they talked to each other. How they fought, or didn't. Who left the room. Who followed. What came right before a door slammed, and what came after. Whether "I love you" showed up with conditions attached.
That's not a figure of speech. It's how kids learn most of what they know about being a person, by copying the grown-ups in front of them. Psychologists call it social learning. You called it growing up.
This part isn't a hunch, either. In a study that followed nearly two hundred kids from seventh grade into their early twenties, the warmth their family showed predicted how they treated their own partners eight years on. A separate line of research tracking two generations found that relationship instability itself tends to pass down the family line. The pattern is real enough that researchers have traced it across generations.
Whatever love looked like in your house got filed, quietly, under the word love. Not the dictionary version. The version you actually saw.
The studies show it happens. I see what it looks like.
It Wasn't Always Loud
Here's where people expect the part about yelling.
Sometimes it was yelling. Love meant heat, so now a calm relationship feels dead to you. You find someone to fight with, because the fighting is how you know somebody still cares.
Plenty of the time it was quiet, and that's the part nobody talks about. Love meant two people in the same house who never really touched, so now you find someone to be lonely next to. Love meant one parent always halfway out the door, so you pick people who keep one foot in the hall. Love meant nobody got their own life, no closed doors, no separate anything, so you find someone to disappear into.
One framework for how relational styles carry across generations puts it this way: the way of relating you grew up inside gets learned as normal, then repurposed later, loud version or quiet version.
Loud or quiet, it all got the same label. It all got filed under love.
The exact shape matters less than this: it became your shape. The one your body knows on sight when you walk into a room.
It Reads as Love Because It's What You Saw
You have a measuring stick for love. You didn't pick it out. It got built in your childhood house, out of whatever was lying around in there.
So you meet someone steady, someone who says what they mean and does what they said, and your measuring stick reads it as nothing. Flat. No spark.
Then you meet someone who keeps you guessing, and that one registers. That one has the right texture. Your whole body leans in and calls it chemistry.
It isn't chemistry. It's recognition. Your old picture of love just found somebody who knows the part.
You Don't Just Pick It. You Become It.
The picture runs two ways.
It picks who you're drawn to, sure. It also shapes who you turn into once you're in the room with them.
If love meant earning, you don't just find people who make you earn it. You earn. All the time. You over-give. You over-explain. You shrink yourself down into something easy to keep.
If love meant taking care of someone who should have been taking care of you, you go find the person who needs saving. Then you save. That's the role you know by heart. That's where it feels like love is happening.
You don't only spot the shape out in the world. You bend yourself into it.
You Don't Just Accept It. You Build It.
This is the part that stings a little.
Say you actually end up with the steady one. The calm one. The one who doesn't keep you guessing.
Your body doesn't settle. It gets suspicious. Calm doesn't read as safe in there. It reads as wrong, as the quiet before something goes bad.
So you poke. You test. You start the fight over nothing in particular. You push until they finally hand you the reaction the old picture always promised was coming.
When they do, some part of you relaxes. There it is. Now it feels like love.
You didn't find the chaos that time. You built it. A person will do a surprising amount of work to get back to what they know, even when what they know hurts.
The Part Where You Go Looking for It
Most people miss this part about themselves.
You don't only fall into the old pattern by accident. Some part of you goes hunting for it.
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, put words to this all the way back in 1920. He described how people can unconsciously repeat painful patterns, not because they want suffering, but because the mind keeps returning to unfinished experiences.
In my work I call these original wounds. You find the person who can hand you the exact old ache, the one you grew up with, and then, quietly, you set out to make it come out different this round. To finally get the distant one to stay. To finally get the angry one to soften. To finally be enough for someone who was never going to think you were.
The trouble is you picked that person because they can't. That's the thing that made them feel like home.
So it ends the way it always ends. You walk away more sure than ever that this is just how love goes.
A Boundary Can Feel Like the Opposite of Love
If you grew up where love meant no space between people, boundaries feel wrong in both directions.
Setting one feels cold. Almost cruel, like you're pulling love away from someone who needs it.
Having one set on you feels like being shoved out into the hall.
A boundary is neither of those. It's a line that says here's me, there's you. The old picture reads that line as a loss, because in your house, tangled was what closeness meant.
If you've ever kept chasing someone who keeps pulling away, that's this same picture wearing one specific outfit.
There's Grief in Seeing It
Once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it. That comes with a grief nobody warns you about.
There's grief for the love you didn't get. The steady, safe, no-conditions kind you deserved as a kid and didn't receive. Naming the picture means feeling that hole for real, maybe for the first time.
There's also grief for what the picture cost you. The good people you couldn't feel anything for. The steady ones you burned down because the calm made your skin crawl. The years you spent chasing an ending that was never coming.
That grief isn't a wrong turn. It's part of the work. You don't have to rush it.
You Can't See It Alone
Here's the cruel math of it. The thing that's warped is the same thing you'd use to check whether it's warped.
So this rarely gets sorted out by yourself. It usually takes an outside set of eyes. A friend who says they treat you badly and you keep defending them. A partner who stays calm when your old picture swore they'd blow, until some part of you slowly starts to believe them. A therapist who names the pattern out loud while you're standing in the middle of it, unable to find the edges.
You can't read the label from inside the jar.
It's Not the End of the Story
One last thing, because I don't want you closing this convinced you're stuck.
A picture like this isn't a life sentence. It's what runs on its own, in the background, when you're not paying attention.
The studies that follow people for twenty years and longer find that how we love holds fairly steady, and still leaves room to change. Researchers argue about how much, so nobody honest oversells it. But in the people I've watched change, two things keep showing up. A safe bond with someone outside the old mold. Getting better at catching your own pattern instead of just living inside it.
Read those two again. A relationship that doesn't go the way your picture predicted. Naming the thing you do. That's this whole piece.
You didn't do anything wrong. You learned a shape early, in a place you didn't choose, before you had any say in it. That shape kept you close to the people you needed back then. It made sense then.
It doesn't have to run the show now.
You're allowed to learn a new one.
Want new posts when they go up? Stay curious.
Griffin Oakley, MS, NCC, LMHC, LPC
Founder & Therapist, Curious Mind Counseling
📞 971-365-3642
About the Author
Griffin is a licensed telehealth therapist and the founder of Curious Mind Counseling, serving Oregon and Florida. His work focuses on complex trauma, attachment, and identity — the patterns people learn young and repeat without meaning to. He helps people see the shape they were taught to call love, and decide whether it still fits.
References
Amato, P. R., & DeBoer, D. D. (2001). The transmission of marital instability across generations: Relationship skills or commitment to marriage? Journal of Marriage and Family, 63(4), 1038–1051. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2001.01038.x
Conger, R. D., Cui, M., Bryant, C. M., & Elder, G. H. (2000). Competence in early adult romantic relationships: A developmental perspective on family influences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(2), 224–237. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.2.224
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 7–64). Hogarth Press.
Roisman, G. L., Padrón, E., Sroufe, L. A., & Egeland, B. (2002). Earned-secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect. Child Development, 73(4), 1204–1219. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00467
Taccini, F., Rossi, A. A., & Mannarini, S. (2021). Intergenerational transmission of relational styles: Current considerations. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 672961. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672961
Waters, E., Merrick, S., Treboux, D., Crowell, J., & Albersheim, L. (2000). Attachment security in infancy and early adulthood: A twenty-year longitudinal study. Child Development, 71(3), 684–689. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00176
