I want to talk about something that changed the way I understand love.

Because for a long time, I thought I just had a bad picker.

I thought I kept choosing the wrong people.

But the truth is, it wasn’t my mind choosing my partners.

It was my nervous system.

Your nervous system is shaped in childhood.

Before you have language.

Before you have logic.

It learns what feels safe, what feels familiar, and what feels like home.

And here’s the hard part.

Safe doesn’t always mean healthy.

Safe means recognizable.

If you grew up in a home where love was inconsistent, your nervous system learned to stay alert.

If affection came and went, you learned to wait.

If you had to earn attention, you learned to perform.

If emotions were unpredictable, you learned to monitor the room.

So later in life, when you meet someone who creates that same emotional atmosphere, your body lights up.

Not because it’s good for you.

But because it feels known.

That anxiety you call chemistry?

That intensity you call passion?

Often, that’s your nervous system recognizing a pattern it already survived.

Calm can feel boring when your childhood was chaos.

Consistency can feel suspicious when love was conditional.

And peace can feel unfamiliar when your nervous system was trained to stay in fight or flight.

So we don’t fall in love with people who treat us well.

We fall in love with people who activate what we already know how to navigate.

Your body chooses what it thinks it can survive.

This is why we stay in relationships that hurt us longer than we should.

Because leaving doesn’t just feel like losing a person.

It feels like losing a strategy that once kept us connected to love.

As children, we couldn’t leave.

We adapted.

We learned to chase.

We learned to wait.

We learned to shrink or overgive or stay quiet.

And as adults, those adaptations show up as attraction.

We’re not chasing the person.

We’re chasing the feeling of finally getting what we didn’t receive the first time.

We believe, somewhere deep inside, that if this person chooses us, it will rewrite the original wound.

That this time, we’ll be enough.

This time, they’ll stay.

This time, love won’t leave.

But healing doesn’t come from repeating the wound.

It comes from recognizing it.

When you understand that your nervous system is driving attraction, you stop shaming yourself for past choices.

You stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?”

And you start asking, “What did my body learn to expect?”

The goal isn’t to never feel activated.

The goal is to learn the difference between familiar and safe.

Because real love doesn’t keep your nervous system in survival mode.

It doesn’t make you prove your worth.

It doesn’t feel like a chase.

Real love feels steady.

And at first, that can feel uncomfortable.

But discomfort doesn’t mean danger.

Sometimes it means you’re learning something new.

And that’s where the pattern begins to change.