What I Learned From Being the One Who Loved More

The pattern was so consistent that even I, who had excellent reasons ready for each individual case, could not keep explaining it away individually by my late twenties.

In every relationship I had been part of, I was the one more invested - more willing to compromise, more likely to initiate, more anxious when things felt uncertain, more prepared to work harder when things felt difficult.

I told myself this was just who I was: warm, committed, the kind of person who went all in. What I did not ask for a long time was whether the specific people I was choosing were chosen precisely because the dynamic required me to go all in, and whether there was something in that dynamic itself that I was drawn to and replicating.

I had grown up in Sydney in a household with a father who was present but emotionally guarded - loving in practical terms, available in a logistical sense, but not easy to reach emotionally.

The experience of wanting to be closer to someone who maintained a certain distance had been the emotional template of my childhood, and I had, without any conscious intention, spent my twenties recreating it in my romantic life. Every person I had chosen was, in some meaningful way, someone I had to pursue.

The clarity came at 28 in therapy, which I had entered for work-related stress and discovered was, as it often is, actually about something else entirely. My therapist helped me trace the specific feeling I was chasing in new relationships - that electric early period of uncertainty when you do not quite know how the other person feels - back to its origin in a dynamic that was very old and had nothing to do with the people I was currently dating.

Understanding this did not immediately change my instincts. The next person I was attracted to, at 29, was someone warm and consistent and openly interested, and the early stage of that relationship felt quieter than I was used to in a way that I initially misread as lack of chemistry.

I stayed with it anyway, because I knew enough by then to distrust my instincts about what excitement was supposed to feel like. That relationship is the best one I have been in.

The quiet turned out not to be absence of feeling - it was the particular quality of a relationship that does not require you to work to maintain basic security. I had never experienced that before. I had not known it was what I actually needed.