Afraid of Love…? When Past Wounds Become Present Walls

My last real relationship ended in 2013. We had met in 2007, made it exclusive in 2008 and in 2009 we moved in together and if I’m honest, I’ve never been the same since, in some ways I guess. It crashed and burned in marriage counseling, her idea, and then her exit. Later I found out she had already started seeing someone at work, something I had suspected earlier, and eventually accepted. That betrayal left a deep mark, and I didn’t realize how much it shaped me until years later.

On the surface, I moved on fine. I’m charming, I meet women easily, and they equally fall for me just as quickly. But staying? That’s the part I must confess I’ve never quite managed. I catch myself looking for flaws, magnifying small things into dealbreakers, pulling away before anything real can take root. It’s like some part of me decided never again, never fall that hard, never lose control. And while that sounds like self-protection, but in truth it’s self-sabotage.

Love PTSD Is Real (Even If the Textbooks Don’t Call It That)

Psychologists don’t have a neat label called “love PTSD” in the manuals, but they do talk about relationship trauma. When a relationship ends painfully, through betrayal, abandonment, or even just a slow erosion of trust, the nervous system learns a lesson: intimacy equals danger.

That’s why people who’ve been burned often act out patterns that look confusing from the outside. They want love, but when they start to feel it, panic sneaks in. The body remembers how bad it felt last time. So they guard, test, pull away, or find flaws. Sometimes they convince themselves they’re just being “picky” or “having standards.” Other times they can’t even see the sabotage, they just keep finding themselves single and wondering why nothing sticks.

I know this dance because I’ve done it. I’ve mastered it. Hmm

The First Relationships We Ever Knew

Romantic love doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The way we show up with partners is often a continuation of the way we learned or didn’t learn to connect with our parents.

My mother is my rock and everything I have, but most of my childhood was spent in boarding school while she lived on another continent. We talked more on the phone than we ever did in person. That distance carved an emotional template: I could crave closeness, but always brace for hurt and absence. Later, in relationships with women, I sometimes noticed echoes of that same tension, confusion, guardedness, and a deep fear of being misunderstood or abandoned.

And it’s not just me. Many women wrestle with the shadow of their fathers. A father who was absent, abusive, dismissive, or even just emotionally unavailable leaves a wound that often replays in adult relationships. The same goes for men and their mothers. These parental dynamics are the first blueprints of intimacy. If those foundations are shaky, the structures we try to build in adulthood can crack under the same pressures.

The point is simple but sobering: the first love stories we inherit aren’t from movies or books, they’re from our parents. And if those stories were filled with chaos, absence, or pain, they don’t just disappear. They sneak into our adult relationships, shaping how we love, how we fight, and how we protect ourselves.

The Lists We Make to Protect Ourselves

Here’s where it gets tricky. A lot of us disguise trauma as expectations. Women create mile-long lists for what a man must be: taller than six feet, super rich, emotionally intelligent, spiritual but not weird, confident but not arrogant, family-oriented, ambitious, faithful, funny, the list goes on. Men do the same: she has to be gorgeous, nurturing, respectful, career-minded but not too busy, affectionate, loyal, supportive, independent but still makes time.

Standards are healthy. But sometimes these lists aren’t really standards, they’re shields. They’re impossible filters that guarantee no one gets close enough to hurt us again. The irony is, these protective walls double as cages. We think we’re keeping the wrong ones out, but we’re also locking ourselves in.

Vulnerability: The Thing We Fear, The Thing We Need

The cruel paradox of love is that, it cannot be experienced without vulnerability. To open yourself to love is to risk heartbreak. To guard yourself against heartbreak is to guarantee loneliness.

After my breakup, I spent years on guard duty, more subconscious than conscious to be honest. Everything that hurt in that relationship became a lesson I carried forward, often without realizing it. I once came across a saying online that struck me: “People come into your life to be a blessing or a lesson.” I added my own twist to it: “Either is beneficial to your growth as a person.” It was a profound realization that shifted how I looked at pain. But the truth is, my guarding made me more watchful than available. I analyzed, protected and withheld. I thought it made me strong, and in some ways it did. Yet in the end, all it did was leave me empty. An emotionally detached man will never be satisfied by any number of women, just as a guarded, fearful woman will never find fulfillment in any number of men.

And yes, it’s terrifying. Because what if you give someone your heart and they mishandle it? But what if you never give it at all? Then you’re not avoiding pain, you’re living it daily, drip by drip, in the absence of intimacy.

Healing Starts With Awareness

So here’s the invitation, check your patterns and be brutally honest with yourself because if you can’t be, how can you ever be honest with someone else? Are you ghosting when things get too close? Do you find yourself over-analyzing every small flaw in someone new? Are you making lists so long that no human being could possibly qualify?

These aren’t signs of “high standards,” but of old wounds still steering the ship. And the first step to healing isn’t finding the perfect partner, it’s recognizing when you’ve become your own biggest obstacle.

Love isn’t for the fearless. It’s for the brave. And bravery isn’t the absence of fear, it’s the decision to open anyway, scars and all.