#218: Why You're Attracted to Unavailable People
On Attachment
Stephanie Rigg
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
In this episode, we explore the deeper patterns that make emotionally unavailable partners feel so familiar — even when you want something different.
Rather than framing this as a personal flaw or something you’re “doing wrong,” this conversation explores the deeper emotional and relational patterns that make certain dynamics feel familiar, magnetic, or even safe on a nervous-system level.
I walk through five core reasons this dynamic tends to repeat:
- Low self-worth: When love feels like something you need to earn, you may be drawn to people who require effort.
- Inconsistent early relationships: If connection was unpredictable growing up, inconsistency can feel like “home.”
- Hope, potential, and the saviour role: Why focusing on who someone could be keeps you invested long after the relationship stops feeling good.
- Intermittent reinforcement: How sporadic affection creates an addictive cycle that’s hard to break.
- Your own emotional unavailability: The surprising ways pursuing unavailable people can protect you from deeper vulnerability.
This episode offers a compassionate look at why these patterns form — and what it takes to move toward relationships that feel mutual, steady, and emotionally safe.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. |
| 0:19.8 | I'm your host, relationship coach Stephanie Rigg, |
| 0:23.1 | and I'm really glad you're here. |
| 0:29.4 | Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. |
| 0:33.3 | In today's episode, we are talking about why it is that you might find yourself attracted to |
| 0:38.8 | or attracting, and we'll talk about that distinction, emotionally unavailable partners. |
| 0:43.5 | So for a lot of people, you will relate to this experience of finding yourself time and |
| 0:50.3 | time again in dynamics that have a similar look and feel to them with partners who are |
| 0:56.9 | sometimes there, sometimes not, maybe they open up a bit and then they pull away and you find |
| 1:02.6 | yourself so attracted to and attached to these people, notwithstanding the fact that those dynamics |
| 1:10.1 | can also drive you crazy and leave you feeling |
| 1:13.1 | really triggered, really activated and really anxious. And yet, as much as we can consciously, |
| 1:20.1 | cognitively, say we don't want that, there's a part of us that obviously does want that or |
| 1:24.9 | at least feels comfortable or safe in that because we keep |
| 1:29.2 | coming up against it. Now, I've covered aspects of this before on the podcast. If you go back |
| 1:34.1 | to episode 204 on why you keep repeating the same relationship patterns, aspects of that |
| 1:40.2 | will be covered today. But I want to really dig into specifically five reasons why it is |
| 1:45.8 | that you might be drawn to emotionally unavailable people, even though that's the opposite |
| 1:52.0 | of what you say you want. And of course, there can be some frustration in that when we keep experiencing |
| 1:58.0 | things that feel so counter to what we desire. |
| 2:02.6 | And yet, of course, that is so much of this work is understanding the subconscious |
| 2:07.4 | drivers of our relationship patterns, our behaviors, our choices, the people that we are |
... |
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