Under my skin

I suffer from a common love malady: I tend to fall for men who don't want me. Men who withhold their affection or are unable to express affection; who are fundamentally unavailable to me. Much has been written on the phenomenon of the emotionally unavailable male... I'm not going to wax poetic on that one.... the question for me is why me? Why do I do it? What draws me to these people.

My therapist and I have concluded that the roots lay in my first intimate relationship: the relationship with my mother. The hypothesis is that she was fundamentally unavailable to me in some important way and thus the unavailable seems 'normal' to me; attractive to me. Unavailable, in my weird little psyche, is a defining characteristic of love.


To make things even more annoying, for some reason most of the men that actually express desire for me are severly wounded and problematic people. They drink too much, are under achievers, and are angry with the world and ultimately act in abusive ways.

I probably scare the living hell out of your average healthy emotionally available man. I think I tend to the intense; and that can be pretty intimidating I guess. For example: here is a short and not overly poetic poem written during one of my many unrequited crushes:

I've got you under my skin.
I'm fucked up!
I want to scream.
I want you in my bed.
You have me body and soul (probably)
yet.... you don't want me.

If a thousand ants where crawling under my skin it would not torment me more.

Pretty INTENSE! Sounds like something a sixteen year old would write doesn't it?

I have these infatuations relatively often. I see something in 'us'. And they don't. Does this happen to all of us? or just me? Perhaps I've never managed to mature when it comes to intimate relationships.