The one who chases and the one who pulls away

One of you reaches. The other pulls back. Maybe it starts with a question, or a look, or “can we talk for a second.” One of you moves in and the other moves away, and the closer the first one gets, the further the second one goes, and the further they go, the harder the first one pushes. You’ve run this so many times you could do it half asleep. Some nights you basically do.

From the inside, it feels like proof that the two of you want opposite things out of love. One of you needs closeness. One of you needs room. And no matter how many times you go around, you never seem to land in the same place at the same time.

I want to tell you what I think is going on underneath it, because after years of sitting with couples stuck in exactly this, I’ve come to think almost everyone reads it wrong. Including the two people living inside it.

What looks like a mismatch is a loop

Two incompatible people who made a mistake is the wrong diagnosis. What you are is two people caught in one loop, where every move you make pulls the exact move out of your partner that you least want. Her reaching sets off his need to get away. His pulling away sets off her fear of being left. Round and round. Each of you is doing something that makes complete sense on its own, and put together, the two moves make a trap.

This loop is one of the most heavily documented patterns in couples research. The literature calls it the demand-withdraw pattern, mapped in detail by Andrew Christensen and Christopher Heavey in the early nineties, and Sue Johnson built much of emotionally focused therapy around the same chase-and-retreat cycle. I mention this for one reason: if researchers can describe your marriage without ever meeting you, then what is happening between you is not a verdict on either of you. It is a structure, and structures can be taken apart.

That part might not be news. The next part usually is.

You’ve probably got your own role backwards

You think of yourself as the one who chases, or the one who needs space, as if it were a fixed part of you, like your height. But watch the two of you over an ordinary week, and something strange shows up.

Say it’s his mother, or the thing his mother said at dinner. He goes quiet. He suddenly has email to answer. And you can’t let it go. You follow him from room to room. You need it settled tonight. Classic him, classic you. But now it’s Thursday, and it’s about money, or the kids’ schedule, or whether you’re really spending another weekend with his friends. And watch what happens. Now he’s the one who won’t drop it. He keeps circling back. He wants an answer, now. And you’re the one saying “can we not do this tonight,” heading for the kitchen.

The roles aren’t glued to the people. They flip, depending on who wants something to change. Whoever’s pushing for something different does the chasing. Whoever wants to be left alone does the pulling away. It was never your personality. It was your position in that particular fight. And a position can change. A personality feels like a life sentence.

Why nothing your partner does ever seems to count

So why does it feel so permanent, no matter how hard you try? Because somewhere along the line, you decided who your partner is. He’s cold. She’s needy. Simple, settled, proven a hundred times over. And once that verdict is in, it stops listening to evidence.

Watch what happens the next time your partner breaks the pattern. He does something warm. He asks how your day went and waits for the answer. He stays in the room when every other night he’d have left. And instead of thinking “huh, maybe he’s not so cold after all,” you think: he wants something. Or, that won’t last. Or, he’s only doing it because I’ve been on his case. Or it’s the other way around, and you’re the one who lets it go for once, who doesn’t chase. And instead of noticing, he thinks: she’s finally given up on me. Or, she’s punishing me.

Look at what just happened. Your partner did the exact thing you’ve been begging them to do, and the story you carry about them didn’t move an inch. It reached out, took the evidence, and explained it away. That’s not you being stubborn, or him being blind. It’s what these stories do. They stay alive by eating anything that would prove them wrong. Which means no amount of good behavior gets through the door, because the door was built to keep it out.

This is why the usual advice never works. “Just tell him you appreciate it when he opens up.” You can. He’ll decide you want something. “Just show her you’re trying.” You can. She’ll decide it won’t last. The story is faster than the kindness. It’s got the exception relabeled before either of you finishes the sentence.

The most comfortable sentence in a bad marriage

There’s one more move the mind makes, and it’s the one that locks the door from the inside.

At some point, “I chased him that night” quietly turns into “I’m an anxious person.” “I wanted to be alone after that fight” turns into “I’m just someone who needs a lot of space.” It feels like relief when you say it. Like an explanation. Like it isn’t really your fault, this is just how you’re built, this is your wiring.

And that’s the whole trap. The moment it becomes who you are instead of what you did, it stops being something you can change. “That’s just how I am” might be the most comforting thing you can say to yourself in a marriage that hurts. It’s also the bars of the cage. It hands you an excuse and a life sentence in the same breath, and you can’t keep the comfort without keeping the cage.

So when I tell you this can change, I’m not being kind. I mean it plainly: the thing keeping you stuck isn’t his nature, and it isn’t yours. There’s no cold person and no needy person in this. There are two people who’ve played their positions so long they forgot they were ever positions at all.

You can do this without your partner in the room

This is the part that surprises people most, and it’s why working on this alone is a real path and not a sad backup plan.

You don’t need to fix your partner. You don’t need to talk them into counseling. You don’t even need them willing. Because the loop only runs if both of you keep feeding it. The moment you stop playing your position, the moment you stop being “the needy one” or “the one who shuts down” and start answering what’s in front of you instead of running the same script, your partner’s story about you starts to starve. “She’s just needy” can’t survive you not being needy. “He doesn’t care” can’t survive him not being asked to prove it, over and over, until he goes cold just to get some air.

This is more than fixing your half of a two-part problem. You’re pulling out one of the two poles the whole thing was leaning on. And something that needs two poles to stand can’t stand on one. Change your end, and mean it, and the shape has to move, because the shape was never yours alone to hold up in the first place.

There’s no trick in that. It’s just how these loops are built. It’s also why one person, working seriously on their own end, can move something that two people yelling at each other never could.

When this isn’t the answer

I’ll be straight with you about where this stops working, because you deserve that more than you deserve a pitch.

If you’re with someone who turns everything you do into proof that you’re the problem, where reaching out is “manipulative” and backing off is “you never cared,” and there’s nothing you can do that gets counted in your favor, then you’re not in the loop I’ve been describing. That’s not two people doing their best and getting tangled. It’s something more one-sided, and more serious, and no amount of changing your own end will fix it, because the other end is built to reject whatever you bring. If that’s the situation you’re in, it’s worth naming honestly and talking through with care, and it needs a lot more than “communicate better.”

But most couples aren’t there. Most couples are two decent, tired people who love each other and got caught in a loop that’s grown a little louder every year, each one privately certain it’s the other one’s fault. If that sounds like the two of you, there’s a great deal that can be done. And more of it is in your own hands than anyone has probably told you.

If any of this landed, if you read the part about the story eating the exceptions and thought “that’s us,” or read “that’s just how I am” and felt something go quiet, then you already understand what the work is. It’s learning to see your own position clearly enough to step out of it. Not digging through your childhood for ten years. Not waiting for your partner to finally change. Learning to catch yourself in the act, and choose something different, while it’s happening.

This is most of what I do, with couples and with people working on their own, online, wherever you are. If you want the fuller version of everything above, it’s in The Unforgiven Self, and the sessions are described plainly on the how it works page.

Anxious person, cold person: neither one is you. You’re a person who’s been reaching, or pulling away, for reasons that once made good sense. And you can stop, not because it’s easy, but because none of it was ever who you are. It was only ever what you’ve been doing.