If Someone Is Miserable In A Relationship But Can't Seem To Leave, It's Usually For These 5 Reasons
Nicolás Villalobos | Unsplash There’s a particular kind of attachment that doesn’t feel calm, steady, or safe, yet it’s incredibly hard to walk away from. It’s not the relationship where someone shows up consistently, communicates clearly, and chooses you without hesitation. It’s the one where the connection comes and goes; where intimacy appears one day, then vanishes the next. Where you feel almost chosen, but never fully. Often, it's one where you are miserable in the relationship but cannot seem to leave.
You realize you're chasing them for crumbs. For many people, especially those with a history of emotional inconsistency or abandonment, emotional unavailability doesn’t just hurt; it starts to feel like you're hooked on it.
If someone is miserable in a relationship but can't seem to leave, it's usually for these 5 reasons
1. Inconsistent connection hijacks the nervous system
Emotionally unavailable relationships often follow a pattern psychologists call intermittent reinforcement, the same mechanism that makes gambling addictive.
You don’t know when warmth will return. You don’t know when you’ll feel close again. So your nervous system stays hyper-focused, scanning for signs of reconnection.
Research shows that unpredictable rewards create stronger attachment than consistent ones. When affection is inconsistent, the brain releases more dopamine during moments of connection, not because the connection is healthier, but because it’s scarce. Your body starts confusing relief with love. And that's where the withdrawal feelings come in. At a certain point, you're actually chasing the relief from painful feelings of being loved intermittently, not the person.
2. Emotional distance creates illusion, not intimacy
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When someone can’t fully show up emotionally, your mind fills in the gaps. You imagine what could be. You replay the moments when they were open. You cling to who they were at the beginning, or who they seemed capable of being.
Unavailable partners often feel deeply intimate because the relationship lives partially in fantasy. And fantasy, unlike reality, never has to confront disappointment, limits, or sustained effort. What feels like chemistry is often unresolved longing paired with imagination.
3. Longing can feel safer than being chosen
For people who learned early that closeness was unstable or conditional, full emotional availability can feel unfamiliar, even threatening or just “off”.
Longing for someone unavailable, rather than being securely loved, allows you to:
- Stay emotionally vigilant
- Avoid fully relaxing into vulnerability
- Maintain control through hope rather than risk disappointment through reality
Longing keeps the nervous system activated. And an activated nervous system can confuse anxiety as passion and mistake that feeling as love. Availability requires leaning in to love and being loved and co-regulating in less dramatic ways. This can feel unsafe if calm was never modeled as love. So the body reaches for what feels familiar, not what feels nourishing.
4. Rejection turns inward when ambiguity is the norm
Relationships with emotionally unavailable partners rarely end cleanly. The gap in their emotional capacity becomes exposed, as does their inability to communicate clearly about their emotions. Even when you’re taking risks to ask the hard questions and risk vulnerability, they simply can’t meet you there.
Again and again, you’ll see them unable to have difficult conversations without shutting down, withdrawing, or giving you vague and ambiguous answers. They may disappear only to try a casual “reset” with you by reaching out sideways or orbiting (i.e., "liking" your Instagram stories but not reaching out to you directly). The mixed signals continue.
There’s no clear “no” from them, but no clear yes, either. No final conversation. No moment where grief can land. Instead, the bond lingers, half alive, half gone.
And without clarity, the mind searches for meaning:
- What did I do wrong?
- If I were different, would they choose me?
- Why wasn’t I enough?
This is where rejection becomes self-rejection. Not because it’s true, but because ambiguity and constantly not knowing where you stand with someone gives pain nowhere else to go.
5. Walking away can feel like withdrawal — because it is
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Leaving an emotionally unavailable partner isn’t just emotional loss. It’s your nervous system in withdrawal.
You’re losing:
- A primary source of regulation
- A rhythm of contact and anticipation
- The hope that sustained you
This is why “just move on” advice feels impossible. Your body isn’t grieving a person alone; it’s grieving a pattern of connection your system relied on to feel okay. And shame often follows: Why can’t I let go when I know better? Because knowing something cognitively doesn’t calm an activated attachment system.
What healing actually looks like
Healing from this pattern doesn’t begin with forcing yourself to detach faster, date sooner, or stop caring. It begins with naming the cost of staying attached to someone who cannot meet you fully.
It looks like learning to tolerate the discomfort of consistency. Letting calm feel unfamiliar without assuming it’s wrong. And slowly teaching your nervous system that connection doesn’t have to hurt to be real.
You are not weak for staying. You are not broken for struggling to leave. You are responding exactly as a dysregulated nervous system does when love and uncertainty become intertwined. And with support, awareness, and self-compassion, this pattern can loosen its grip. Not by disappearing. But by choosing yourself, gently, again and again.
Stephanie Lazzara is an ICF-certified Professional life coach based in NYC. She empowers women to learn new skills for empowered dating and relationships.
