I Found Reasons to End Every Good Relationship at the Same Point

The pattern was precise enough, looking back, to have been almost deliberate - though it was not deliberate in any conscious sense. Each relationship followed a similar arc: an engaged and genuine beginning, a period of deepening that felt good in the moment, and then - at around the three to five month mark, when the relationship was moving from early stage into something more genuinely committed - a specific restlessness that I had always interpreted as evidence that the relationship was wrong, and that I acted on by ending things.

The reasons I gave myself were each individually plausible. In the first relationship she was too settled in her ways. In the second he did not share enough of my ambitions. In the third there was a compatibility issue around where we each wanted to live. Each reason was real enough to serve as justification.

What I did not notice until I was 28 and had been through this sequence three times was the timing - that the reason always arrived at exactly the same developmental point, which is the point at which the relationship would have required a genuine and irreversible vulnerability if it were to continue.

I had been ending things not when they had failed but when they were about to succeed, and the success was what I was actually afraid of. The pattern became visible to me through a conversation with a close friend in Pune who had watched all three relationships and who pointed out, with the accumulated patience of someone who had been waiting for me to be ready to hear this, that I seemed to leave every relationship at the moment it got real.

I resisted the observation and then, over the following weeks, could not shake it because it was accurate. What I found in therapy at 29, which I had not previously connected to my relationship pattern, was a very old and specific fear of abandonment - the expectation that the person who was becoming important would eventually leave, and the self-protective logic of leaving first before that could happen.

The relationships I had ended had not been wrong for me. I had been preventing them from being right. At 30 I am in a relationship that has passed the five-month mark and the eight-month mark and is continuing. I have not manufactured a reason to leave. I am still here.