Why Long Distance, Unavailable People Feel Like Your True Love

Nearly everyone who reaches out here to the Crappy Childhood Fairy describes having been invisible or misunderstood by their caregivers. Whether through neglect, substance use, mental illness, or death, that missing attention — the thing that helps you form a stable sense of self — can leave a person stuck in years or even decades of hollow relationships. People then search desperately for genuine love while simultaneously sabotaging that very search by attaching to partners who are fundamentally unable to love them back. Those attachments keep changing shape: in one relationship the problem looks like one thing, in the next it looks like something else, but the longing for real connection remains. The remedy is to recognize these futile attachments for what they are, if you can summon the courage to do so.
Today’s letter comes from a woman who asks to be called Judith. She writes: “Hi Anna — I grew up in a deeply dysfunctional household. My mother was an overt narcissist: glamorous, demanding, always criticizing. My father was a covert narcissist, emotionally distant. My feelings were regularly dismissed, met with rage, or treated with harsh judgment. I was repeatedly told I was ‘too sensitive,’ ‘too smart for my own good,’ or simply ‘too much.’”
Judith goes on to say things got worse when she was five and a half, when a newborn brother became gravely ill. Her parents’ attention shifted entirely to him, and the neglect she already felt turned into a sense of abandonment. Much of her childhood memory consists of crying alone in empty schoolyards or hiding for hours, hoping someone would come and look for her — and no one did. For a while her dog was her only comfort, until her mother gave the dog away while Judith was on a field trip because “he was too much.” She never had a chance to say goodbye.
She coped by becoming an overachiever: perfect grades, flawless performance in everything except her weight and appearance, which her mother always found inadequate. She followed the career path her father wanted and achieved considerable success, yet remained unfulfilled. As the siblings grew, trauma took different forms: one brother became a drug addict, another an alcoholic, and a sister turned into a cruel and volatile person. In her late twenties Judith suffered a serious bout of meningitis — ironically the same illness her brother had had as a baby — but unlike him, no one in the family stood by her. That was the breaking point; at thirty she moved overseas to begin anew.
After several heartbreaks, she met the man who became her husband when she was forty. She didn’t feel the electric chemistry she’d experienced in earlier relationships, but she believed she was making a healthy, conscious choice: he seemed like a decent man, and she hoped they could grow together. After the birth of their first daughter, however, things started to fall apart. His severe ADHD, emotional distance, likely autism spectrum traits, and cultural differences — she’s American, he’s Middle Eastern and the child of Holocaust survivors — combined with her deep need for connection to create a perfect storm of disconnection and chaos. For almost a decade she became the fixer in their marriage: managing his depression and ADHD while working as the main breadwinner, handling childcare and carrying the emotional labor of the household. She felt profoundly lonely and burned out. Eventually they agreed to separate for the children’s sake; the divorce is amicable, the kids are doing well, but Judith is still emotionally processing the past.
Around a year and a half ago she began working closely with her boss. They developed both a strong professional and personal rapport. He is the first person in years who seems to truly see her and appreciates qualities her ex belittled. His warmth, empathy, and encouragement have been a striking contrast to the coldness she experienced at home. Over time their friendship deepened; despite efforts to keep things professional, their conversations naturally moved into intimate territory — sharing feelings, struggles, and hopes. He is married, however, and his situation is complicated: his wife also struggles with depression and ADHD, and he has expressed doubts about their future. There has been no explicit declaration of romantic feelings between them, but the connection feels mutual and meaningful. After intense conversations they both pull back to reset professional boundaries, only to drift into deeper talk again later.
Judith confesses she finds herself daydreaming about him constantly and imagining a future, even though she knows the prospects are unrealistic: he’s married, they’re from different religious and cultural backgrounds, she’s ten years older, she’s done having children, and they live in different countries. Emotionally the bond is potent and hard to release. She’s an optimist and wants to believe anything is possible, which fuels her hope that something might someday happen. She feels foolish for letting him occupy so much of her mind, and has tried to reframe him as a model of the qualities she wants in a future partner, but the emotional pull remains. She doesn’t want to betray her values, yet recognizes how vulnerable she is in this attachment. She’s debating whether to skip an upcoming conference — a big professional opportunity — to avoid seeing him. She asks for advice on how to get over him, to find a genuine relationship with someone available and present, and to stop wasting energy on another person’s husband.”
Many letters follow this same arc: present suffering tied to attachments to people who are, in multiple ways, inappropriate or unavailable, and a childhood story of absent or narcissistic parents at the root. The pattern is familiar: being dismissed, harshly judged, and told that one’s feelings or temperament are “too much” interferes with the healthy development of identity. The child’s needs are seen as an imposition on the parents’ freedom, so the child learns to hide, to hope someone will rescue them, or to perform perfectly in order to earn conditional attention. When a new sibling gets seriously ill, parents understandably shift focus, but for a child who was already starved for care, that withdrawal can cement a sense of abandonment. The toys, pets, and comforts that once helped — like a dog — can become symbols of how the child themselves were treated.
Becoming an overachiever, pleasing a parent with career choices, or adapting one’s outward life to meet someone else’s expectations often leaves a person disconnected from an inner center. Without a developed sense of self — preferences, boundaries, unconditional love — it’s easy to either idealize someone as the savior who will finally “find” you, or to shape yourself around another’s needs. Secure attachment and balanced relationship choices typically arise when someone has been allowed to develop a stable self and feel cared for unconditionally, enabling clearer perception of a partner’s strengths and limitations. Many who experienced neglect as children struggle to make rational choices in relationships until they heal and consciously cultivate new skills.
Marriage choices made under the pressure of earlier heartbreaks can also lead to settling: repeated rejections and broken hearts erode confidence, and the resulting self-doubt can make “taking whatever you can get” feel like the safer option. Choosing a partner without strong chemistry but with the hope of growing into something shared is not necessarily foolish, but if a partner has traits like significant emotional distance, executive dysfunction, or difficulty with emotional attunement — and one partner tends toward anxious attachment — the dynamic can become a classic anxious-avoidant cycle. One partner’s emotional intensity pushes, the other withdraws; the anxious partner escalates expression to be heard, which often triggers the avoidant partner to shut down, widening the gap. That pattern can sometimes be managed if both people are willing and able to meet in the middle: the avoidant partner learning to tolerate emotional closeness by using phrases like “I need a minute” instead of disappearing, and the anxious partner lowering the intensity of their expression and cultivating tolerance for pauses and space. Communication that’s calmer and more measured often gets through where raised, dramatic bursts do not.
It’s also important to own one’s contribution to the relationship dynamics rather than only saying, “I chose wrong.” Self-reflection about patterns and choices is essential for change. In Judith’s case, the friend/boss relationship took on an outsized emotional role because it offered what was missing in her marriage: warmth, appreciation, recognition. That kind of emotional refuge can quickly become an emotional affair, especially if it involves confiding about marital unhappiness and forming an intimate bond outside the marital context. Even absent an explicit sexual relationship, giving someone the bulk of one’s emotional energy — the confidences, the fantasies, the longing — is a betrayal of the spouse’s expectation of being the primary recipient of that intimacy. The fact that the other person’s wife struggles with depression and ADHD does not justify taking emotional refuge with someone else; she, too, deserves not to have her partnership secretly undermined.
The dynamic is often mutual: people who are admired and adored benefit from that attention. It’s tempting to tell oneself that when a partner is unloving, the adoring person would be better — that happiness lies just beyond a swap. Yet in reality everyone has flaws, and idealized pictures rarely survive the everyday mess, smells, and moods of real life. It’s easy to present an alluring, curated version of oneself from a distance or in brief interactions; that curated version can become the object of longing while the full, complicated person remains unseen. This is part of how fantasy relationships get built.
Given the situation’s realities — he is married, lives in a different country, they come from different cultural and religious backgrounds, there’s an age gap, and she’s finished having children — the connection is mostly a fantasy that fills a void rather than a practical path forward. If the highest priority is to stop causing harm and to recover the possibility of true intimacy with an available partner, the most effective steps are clear boundaries and a break in contact. Ideally, a brief, respectful message would state that continued communication can’t continue because it’s not appropriate and that it’s time to step away. If contact persists, blocking may be necessary — not as punishment, but as a way to remove a powerful trigger and stop sacrificing one’s present life for a fantasy. In practical terms, changing jobs to avoid ongoing proximity to a boss who is the source of the attachment is often the cleanest way to eliminate temptation, even though it’s a significant sacrifice professionally. Skipping the conference may feel like a hard call, but it could prevent relapse into obsessive thinking.
Recovery also requires turning energy back toward the life that exists now: the children, personal growth, health, friendships, and the work of rebuilding a sense of self. Spending emotional energy on a fantasy is similar to an addiction — it solves the immediate discomfort but damages other parts of life. The countermeasure is disciplined practice: limit thoughts and fantasies about the person, refuse to narrate them repeatedly, and allow only small, controlled windows for processing those feelings. One practical tool is a focused daily writing ritual designed to empty fearful, resentful, or longing thoughts onto the page. That kind of routine — a structured way to name and release feelings — can help peel away the excess so what remains is clearer, more essential feeling rather than ongoing, repetitive rumination. There’s a free introductory course called the Daily Practice that teaches this technique; it’s available in the free tools section on the Crappy Childhood Fairy website and linked in the description under videos. It takes about an hour to learn and can make a big difference during hard transitions.
Finally, clarify what “great love” would actually look like for you so you stop shrinking or reshaping yourself to fit whoever shows kindness. Make a list of the qualities you truly want in an available partner — someone emotionally present, not married or entangled with an ex, kind, intelligent, stable, and aligned with your life goals — and prepare yourself for that relationship actively instead of waiting to be rescued by one glorified person. There are practical steps to prepare for a healthier partnership; a free download that outlines them is available on the site.
If the aim is honest, reciprocal love, begin by bringing attention and energy home: stop the secret devotion to someone else, set firm boundaries, and invest in healing practices that build a stable sense of self and clearer decision-making. When emotional energy is redirected into healing and present relationships, the likelihood of finding a real, available partner increases. See the resources on the site for guidance, practice the writing exercises, and keep moving forward.