Why You Can't Stop Chasing Someone Who Keeps Pulling Away

Love bombing, the anxious-avoidant cycle, and what your brain is actually trying to do

You didn't fall for a person.

You fell for a feeling.

That's the part that makes this relationship so hard to leave — and so hard to stop repeating. If you've ever found yourself obsessively checking your phone, rehearsing conversations, or lying awake trying to figure out what you did wrong — this one is for you.

It didn't start as a chase. It started as a flood.

What Love Bombing Actually Does to Your Brain

It starts with intensity.

Constant contact. Grand gestures. I've never felt this way. You're the one. Where have you been my whole life?

It feels like intimacy. It isn't.

Love bombing is what happens when someone overwhelms you with affection, attention, and the intoxicating sense of being chosen — all before you really know them. We're talking about texting constantly from day one. Talking about the future after two weeks.

Being told you're different from everyone else they've ever met. Plans, declarations, maybe even the word love — faster than any of it could possibly be earned.

It feels amazing. That's the point.

Real intimacy builds slowly because it has to. Trust requires time and evidence — it can't be downloaded in two weeks of nonstop texting. What love bombing creates isn't genuine connection. It's a chemistry event — a flood, not a feeling. The brain floods with dopamine. It registers overwhelming stimulation as profound closeness. You feel seen, chosen, safe — sometimes for the first time in your life.

The person doing the love bombing isn’t always doing it on purpose. For some people, this is simply the only way they know how to do intimacy. They learned early that love is something you perform — loudly, urgently, before the other person has a chance to leave. The intensity isn’t a trick. It’s a wound wearing the costume of affection. Some early research has begun exploring love bombing as a manipulation pattern in romantic relationships — documenting how it operates and how those on the receiving end experience it (Batool et al., 2022; Beri, 2024). The deeper roots — patterns that form long before anyone chooses them — show up in my clinical work over and over.

That doesn't make it harmless. But it does make it human.

By the time the intensity fades — and it always fades, because no one can sustain that level of performance — the other person is already bonded.

Not to a person. To a feeling.

That distinction is everything. It's the setup for everything that comes next.

So Close You Could Almost Taste It

Think about Wile E. Coyote — the cartoon character who spends his entire existence in obsessive pursuit of the Road Runner, a bird he can never quite catch. Most people assume he's just hungry. But here's the thing: there's food everywhere. He could eat something else. He doesn't. Because it was never really about hunger. It was about that specific thing he could almost taste — and then couldn't. The wanting became the point. The chase became the meal.

Now he can't stop.

Not because the Road Runner is so extraordinary. Because his brain is locked onto getting back to something it was never actually given. He could almost taste it. The chase is just his brain trying to close that distance.

This is exactly what the withdrawal from love bombing produces. The person who got flooded is now chasing a feeling that was manufactured — a facsimile of intimacy, close enough to the real thing that their brain couldn't tell the difference. The uncertainty is agonizing — not because they're weak, but because what they almost had felt profound. The almost is the cruelest part.

So they chase. Because chasing at least gives the anxiety somewhere to go.

The person on the other side — the one who pulled away — isn’t doing it to be cruel. Closeness started to feel like exposure. Distance is the only thing that’s ever made them feel safe. Their body learned early that being known is dangerous. So they run.

Then something strange happens. The moment the chaser backs off, the runner feels their own abandonment wound activate. They come back. The chaser gets just enough relief to stay.

The cycle locks in.

I call this the come here, go away dynamic. One person is always chasing. The other is always running. The cruel irony is that both people are doing exactly what their brains and bodies learned to do in order to feel safe — they just landed on opposite presentations of the same wound.

The roles aren't fixed either.

Think of it like Pac-Man. Most of the time he's running from the ghosts — terrified, reactive, just trying to survive. Then he hits a power pellet and suddenly he's the one chasing. Same maze. Same characters. Completely reversed dynamic. The pellet always wears off. Faster and faster with each level — the window of power gets shorter, the chasing more desperate before everything flips back.

In real life the levels are the cycles. Each time the dynamic repeats, the window of peace gets shorter. The reunion feels briefer. The chasing gets more desperate. Both people are more reactive, more exhausted — spinning faster toward the same inevitable flip.

The moment the chaser finally stops — exhausted, done, out of road — the runner notices they're no longer being chased. They feel the distance. They panic. Suddenly they find themselves turned around and they're the ones chasing. Not because they decided to. Because their brains were on autopilot.

Same cycle. Same wound. Opposite presentation.

Which is why some people find themselves the chaser in one relationship and the runner in the next, depending entirely on who's in the room. It isn't about personality. It's about which response this particular person's brain activates, in this particular dynamic. Attachment theory makes this explicit: which role someone plays in a dynamic isn't fixed — it shifts depending on context and the attachment pattern of their partner (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016).

The roles feel personal. They aren't. They're just the maze.

Emotionally focused therapy treats this chase-and-run pattern — pursue and withdraw — as a central dynamic in distressed relationships. In theory, attachment anxiety maps onto the pursuing role and avoidance onto withdrawal. In practice, gender norms shape who gets cast in which role (Huerta et al., 2023). A separate dyadic study of 175 couples found that avoidant attachment was linked to lower relationship satisfaction, with withdrawal-style conflict patterns mediating the connection (Bretaña et al., 2022).

Why It Keeps Going — and Why It Feels So Alive

Here's the part that surprises people: this dynamic often feels more intense than functional relationships. More consuming. More real.

That's not a coincidence. It's neurochemistry.

This is intermittent reinforcement — the same mechanism that makes slot machines work. A consistent, available, genuinely loving relationship doesn't light up the brain the same way. Predictable love can feel almost flat to a brain that was wired to expect chaos and unpredictability. The uncertainty — will I get closeness or distance today — becomes the drug. The not-knowing keeps the whole system running.

The same dynamic shows up at the far, deliberate end of the spectrum — coercive control — where research on trauma bonding finds that alternating cruelty and care manufactures attachments that don't break easily (Lesiak & Gelsthorpe, 2025). The cycle I'm describing usually isn't engineered on purpose. But it runs on the same fuel. The occasional moments of reunion feel like oxygen after being held underwater — not because the relationship is healthy, but because the brain has been conditioned to treat relief as profound safety.

One distinction matters here. A body that learned to love like this is carrying a wound. Someone who deliberately uses the cycle to control you — monitoring you, cutting you off from the people in your life, making you afraid — is doing something different. That's abuse, not attachment. It doesn't get resolved by understanding it together, and you don't owe it your patience. If that's what you recognize, reaching out to a domestic abuse resource or a therapist is the next step.

For most people in this cycle, it doesn't go that far. But the brain still goes looking for relief.

This is why when the relationship stops delivering, you reach for something else. Alcohol. Food. Work. Spending money we don't have. Scrolling until 2am. Jumping immediately into the next relationship before the last one is even cold. The specific thing doesn't matter as much as the function — it's all doing the same job. Taking the edge off a nervous system that never learned to just be still.

What the Chase Is Actually Avoiding

Genuine intimacy requires stillness.

Being still means being seen. Being seen means trusting that what someone finds won't be used against you. Neither person in this cycle has that trust. So they build something that looks like intimacy — consuming, all-encompassing, the kind of relationship that becomes your entire personality — but is actually a very sophisticated defense against it.

The chaser isn't chasing the person. They're chasing proof that they won't be abandoned. The pursuit is anxiety management, not love.

The runner isn't rejecting the person. They're protecting themselves from the vulnerability of being known. The distance is self-protection, not indifference.

Attachment research describes two opposite strategies for managing the same underlying terror of intimacy. Anxious attachment scans for rejection constantly, then chases — pursuit is how that brain tries to keep abandonment from happening. Avoidant attachment shuts the need for closeness down, then withdraws — distance is how that nervous system protects against being known and trapped (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016). Research on couples shows how those patterns play out between two real partners (Rodriguez et al., 2021).

This maps directly onto what Erik Erikson identified as the central developmental conflict of early adulthood: Intimacy versus Isolation (Erikson, 1963). Both people in this cycle are stuck there. Neither has resolved whether closeness is safe. They just landed on opposite coping strategies for surviving the same unanswered question.

When the Chase Finally Stops

This is the part nobody talks about.

When the cycle exhausts itself — when one person stops chasing, or both people simply run out of road — what's left is almost always the same thing.

Two strangers.

They don't know each other. They know the chase version of each other. The chaser knows how to chase. The runner knows how to run. The relationship was built entirely on the dynamic. Remove the dynamic and there is no foundation underneath it — because foundation requires stillness, and stillness was the one thing this relationship could never tolerate.

Wile E. Coyote finally catches the Road Runner. They stand there, completely dumbfounded, with no idea what to do. Then they start trying to destroy each other. Because that, at least, is familiar.

In my clinical experience — working with clients in Oregon and Florida navigating exactly this pattern — what people discover in this moment, sometimes after years, is that they don't even particularly like each other. That the intensity they mistook for love was never really about the person. It was about the hit. The flood at the beginning. The chase that followed. The brief moments of reunion that kept it alive just long enough to start again.

That's a painful thing to realize.

It's also one of the most important.

The Question Worth Sitting With

If you recognized yourself anywhere in this — as the chaser, the runner, or someone who has played both roles in different relationships — the question isn't how do I fix this relationship or is this person right for me.

It's this: what does closeness mean to my brain and body, and when did that get decided?

Because the cycle keeps going — with this person or the next one — until that question gets an honest answer. The pattern doesn't care what the person's name is. It will find a new cast and run the same script.

The work is learning to tolerate the stillness that real intimacy requires. That means understanding your own attachment wiring, understanding where it came from, and slowly building the capacity to be present with another person without your brain treating it as a threat.

That work is available to you. It's what trauma-informed, attachment-focused therapy is specifically designed to do — whether you're in Oregon, Florida, or anywhere in between.

The chase isn't the path to love.

It's the escape route from it.

The exit has always been in the direction you've been running from.

Griffin Oakley, MSCP, NCC, LMHC, LPC

Founder & Therapist, Curious Mind Counseling 🌐 www.curiousmindcounseling.com  📞 971-365-3642 ✉️ info@curiousmindcounseling.com

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 wounds, and the chase-and-run dynamics that keep people stuck in the same painful relationship patterns.

References

Batool, A., Saleem, M., Idrees, S., Naeem, R., & Javed, H. A. (2022). A qualitative exploration of love bombing as a manipulation tactic experienced by females in romantic relationships. 3rd International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities.

Beri, R. (2024). A study on love bombing, narcissism and emotional abuse among young adults in relationship and situationship. International Journal of Interdisciplinary Approaches in Psychology, 2(6).

Bretaña, I., Alonso-Arbiol, I., Recio, P., & Molero, F. (2022). Avoidant attachment, withdrawal-aggression conflict pattern, and relationship satisfaction: A mediational dyadic model. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 794942. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.794942

Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton.

Huerta, P., Edwards, C., Asiimwe, R., PettyJohn, M., VanBoxel, J., Morgan, P., & Wittenborn, A. K. (2023). Exploratory analysis of pursue-withdraw patterns, attachment, and gender among couples in emotionally focused therapy. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 51(1), 57–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/01926187.2022.2129521

Lesiak, M., & Gelsthorpe, L. (2025). The invisible abuser: Attachment, victimization, and perpetrator perception in repeat abuse. Violence Against Women. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012251379423

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Rodriguez, L. M., Coy, A., & Hadden, B. W. (2021). The attachment dynamic: Dyadic patterns of anxiety and avoidance in relationship functioning. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 38(3), 971–994. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407520975858