I remember the quality of my mum’s voice that day.

I sat at the kitchen table as she was knelt opposite me, eyes raised to meet mine. This felt important. Her voice was careful, like it was carrying something fragile and she was testing the strength of each word as she spoke it, making sure it didn’t shatter. And then she said it.

“I’m sorry about your dad, Harry. He just doesn’t… like you.”

I was about 10. She wasn’t being cruel. She said it out of kindness, as a mitigation for the ordinary cruelties she’d watched with her own eyes, and I have never once blamed her for it.

I had picked up his hobbies, one after another, and often became better at them than he was. Cycling. Languages. The building and fixing. That was the thing he couldn’t forgive, though neither of us had the words for it then. He was warm with my older sister and not with me, and my mother had watched all of it.

But something reorganised itself in me that afternoon. An assumption about what I could expect from the people closest to me quietly collapsed and rebuilt itself around a new set of rules. That love was not guaranteed. That the people who are supposed to choose you might not. That connection was something you earn, and monitor, and fight to keep hold of.

By then I’d already spent years trying to earn love from my dad, something he was never equipped to give. Somewhere in that trying, I learned that love lay just out of reach for me. That the right response to emotional distance was to chase it. What formed that afternoon has a name: anxious attachment, which isn’t the behaviour itself, but the thing driving it.

Anxious attachment might be new to you. It forms when a connection isn’t reliable, so you learn to watch it constantly. You might picture a kind of clinging worry. It isn’t worry – it’s hunger.

This is how it works.

You’ve sent a message to your partner. Nothing important, something light, and you know it was fine because you read it four times before you sent it. That was 90 minutes ago. You are still carrying on with your day, working or talking to whoever you’re with. But some part of you has left the room and is standing by a door, waiting.

It doesn’t feel like fear. Fear would make you back away. This anxiety makes you move towards this perceived rejection, constantly, and the moving towards is the whole problem. You experience it as something being taken back that you had this morning. A fracture has opened up in you and it is the shape of one person: them. Which is when their attention stops being a pleasure and becomes sustenance. You’re not enjoying it any more. You’re running on it. You have to have it to get through the day.

Unreliable attention feeds this need. It gives you a problem to solve, and solving it produces relief so strong it’s easy to mistake it for love. It’s not the person you become addicted to, but the relief. Which is why so many people find the ones who make them feel calm are the ones they can’t seem to want. Over and over again.

Some people manage insecurity by building a version of themselves to put in front of it. A construction, the way you might have a work persona that bears no resemblance to who you are at home. That’s how I handled relationships for years. Appearing assured – easy company, unbothered, the man who didn’t need much. Then going through the last exchange line by line in the car afterwards, working out what the pause meant.

I didn’t stop this behaviour because I found a technique. I stopped because I hit the bottom and splatted rather than bounced, and lay in the wreckage of myself long enough to have no option left but to change. Not by trying harder to be secure. Trying harder is the problem. The difficult truth is that searching for emotional succour in someone else is often our own self-avoidance. Thanks to that hotpot created in my formative years, I believed I loved harder than most. That I suffered more. That my heart was somehow more fragile, and more painful when it shattered.

It wasn’t, of course. I just had no reference for the difference between painful poetic intensity and love. So many of us build a personality on top of that simple mistake, then spend a lifetime pursuing or protecting entirely the wrong thing. Be very clear about what it is you’re actually chasing. Not who, what. The relief? The proof? The moment of being chosen? It seems simplistic, but once you can see that clearly, you’ll shake off the belief that it can only come from one person.

Then be brutally honest about the person. Inconsistency isn’t some mysterious cloak thrown over a perfect partner. It’s usually a fault, a failing. Someone being hard to reach isn’t evidence they’re worth reaching, it’s information about how available they are.

What works, though, isn’t willpower. My own repeated failings in relationships prove just that. You break free from this pattern when you can no longer stand who you’ve turned into. When you read things back and they no longer feel like longing, but shame. When the shame is finally louder than the wanting. There’s nothing noble about it. It isn’t even a decision. It’s self revulsion, and it works.

Then there’s the boring part, which nobody wants and everybody needs. Consistent caring feels boring when you’re not used to it. Someone who just cares, no drama, no pull, no ache, and no relief when they finally answer, because there was never a wait. Once you can see that security doesn’t need you to monitor it constantly. If you learned young that love is earned, being handed it without a bill feels wrong. It feels like a mistake they’ll notice eventually. So, you have to sit in that nothing long enough to stop reading it as absence. That takes months, and it’s the actual work.

My mother is gone now. Cancer took her at the age I am today, and I think about that sentence of hers more than she could have imagined when she said it. She was right, and I immediately knew the courage and kindness it took for her to tell me. What neither of us knew was that I’d spend the next 40 years dealing with it.