Why do people scared to get in relationships?

The story of  love failure is one most of us can tell, and the question, "Why do relationships fail?” wonders around in our heads. The answer for most of us can be found within ourselves. Whether we realise it or not, most of us are afraid of really being in love or getting in a relationship. While our fears may manifest themselves in different ways or show themselves at different stages of a relationship with someone, we all harbor defenses that we believe on some particular level it will protect us from getting hurt again and again. These defenses may offer us a fake illusion of safety or fake self defense mechanism, but they keep us from attaining the closeness we desire. So what runs our fears of getting in a relationship or should I say falling in love ? What keeps us from finding and keeping the love we always want?

1. Real love makes us feel vulnerable.

A new relationship is uncharted and unknown territory, and most of us have natural fears of the unknown. Letting ourselves fall in love means taking a real and uncalculated risk. We are placing a great amount of trust in another person, allowing them to affect us, to take part in our life which makes us feel exposed and vulnerable. Our core defenses are challenged here. Any habits we have long had that allow us to feel self-focused or self-contained start to fall slowly by the wayside. We tend to believe that the more we care, the more we can get hurt, the more we expect, the more we get disappointed.

 2. New love stirs up past wounds.

When we get into a relationship, we are rarely fully aware of how we have been affected by our history. The ways we got hurt in past relationships, starting from our childhood, have a strong impact on how we perceive the people we get close with as well as how we act in our romantic relationships. Old, negative memories may make us wary of opening ourselves up to someone new. We may divert away from intimacy, because it stirs up old wounds of hurt, anger, loss, rejection or failure. “when you long for something, like love, it becomes associated with pain,” the pain you felt when not having it in the past.

3. Love challenges an old identity.

Most of us struggle with feelings of being unlovable. We have trouble feeling our own value and believing anyone could really care for us and our feeling. We all have a “critical inner voice” which acts like a cruel coach inside our heads that keeps telling us we are worthless or undeserving of happiness. This coach inside us is shaped from painful childhood past experiences and critical attitudes we were exposed to early in life as well as feelings that our parents had about themselves.

While these attitudes can be hurtful, over time, they have become engrained in us. As adults, we may fail to see them as enemy, instead accepting their destructive point of view as our own point of view. These critical thoughts or called as “inner voices” are often harmful and unpleasant, but they’re also comfortable in their familiarity. When another person sees us differently from our voices, loving and appreciating us, we may actually start to feel uncomfortable and defensive, as it challenges these long-held points of identification about ourselves.

4. Relationships tend to break your connection to your family.

Relationships are the ultimate symbol of growing or developing identity. They represent beginning our own lives as an independent individuals. This development can also represent a parting from our family creating a gap to be precise. Much like breaking from an old identity, this separation isn’t physical. It does not mean we will be literally giving up our family, but rather letting go on an emotional level, no longer feeling like a kid, attached to our family all the time and differentiating from the more negative dynamics that haunted our early relationships and shaped our current identity.

Most relationships bring up quite a number of challenges. Getting to know our fears of intimacy in relationships and how they react towards our behavior is an important step to having a long term and fulfilling relationship. These fears can be masked by various justifications and fake defense machanisms in ourselves for why things aren’t working ou. But we may be surprised to learn about all of the ways that we self-sabotage when we get close to someone. By getting to know ourselves, we give ourselves the best chance of finding and maintaining lasting relationship.