You keep choosing partners who echo a parent

Come, let us look at this with tenderness, for the pattern is old and was not your choosing. The familiar feels like love because it feels like home — we are drawn not to what is good for us but to what is familiar, and a parent set the first shape of love, so the unavailable and the withholding now feel like love precisely because they feel like home; familiar and good are not the same, and the pull is recognition, not rightness. You are trying to win an old love through a new person — choosing warmth that must be earned so that this time you might finally earn it and prove you were lovable, but the new person cannot resolve the old wound, and choosing them to try only repeats the ache, for the love you seek was owed long ago by someone else. And learn to feel the difference between familiar and good — not forcing yourself toward people you feel nothing for, but retraining what love feels like, naming the old charge when it comes and giving a steadier, available love time to become the new home, even when its calm feels flat at first. Whose way of loving does the familiar pull remind you of?