Some people live in a house for years without unpacking the suitcase.
It is there, under the bed. It is not in the way. Nobody sees it. But every morning, without thinking about it, that person knows exactly where it is and how long it would take to close it.
You have been seeing someone for a few months. It is going well. It is going really well. And then one ordinary afternoon, with nothing having happened, the urge to be alone shows up. The sense that this is getting serious too fast. A mental list of things that never bothered you before and suddenly do.
You did not fight with anyone. Nobody did anything wrong. Something inside you simply remembered the suitcase.
It is not that you do not want it. You want both things
This is the first thing worth separating, because almost nobody separates it.
If you truly did not want a relationship, you would not be reading this. You would be fine. What wears you down is not the not wanting: it is wanting to be with someone and needing to run at the same time, both at once, without being able to fully stay in either.
That is why it does not get solved by deciding. You have already tried deciding, several times.
The two ways of not committing
There is a visible version and one that is almost invisible.
The one who leaves. You end it when things settle. You find the flaw right on time. Someone becomes interesting again the moment they are no longer available. Your history is a series of relationships that ended at roughly the same point, each with its own particular and perfectly reasonable explanation.
The one who stays but never arrives. This one is harder to spot, even from the inside. You are still there. Maybe for years. But part of you never fully walked in: you do not make plans more than a few months out, you avoid certain conversations, you keep a parallel life running in your head, and there is a question — is this the person? — that you have carried since the beginning and that has never left.
Underneath, they are the same. One closes the suitcase and leaves; the other keeps it under the bed, just in case.
Some signs
- The better it goes, the more uncomfortable you feel.
- Attraction drops exactly when the other person becomes fully available.
- You need a lot of space, and once you have it, you miss them.
- Their flaws become enormous overnight and then shrink again.
- You postpone every decision that would make the relationship more real: living together, introducing them to your people, talking about two years from now.
- You think a great deal about whether this is the right person, and that thinking never arrives anywhere.
If you recognise four or five of these, it is probably not this relationship. It is something of yours that repeats across all of them.
Why «you have not found the right person» does not explain much
Sometimes it is true. Some couples do not fit, and that is that.
But when the same movement repeats with different people, and the suffocating feeling shows up at roughly the same point in each relationship, what repeats is not the other person. It is you, walking into a house.
And there is a question there that still turns in my head: how much of what we call incompatibility is really incompatibility, and how much is the exact moment when someone came too close?
Looking for the perfect person can be, without you knowing it, the most elegant way of never committing to anyone. There is always something missing. And as long as something is missing, you never have to risk it.
What is often underneath
Every history is different and this does not work as a single explanation. Perhaps in your case it comes from somewhere else. But there is something that comes up often in my consulting room.
For many people, intimacy was not learned as shelter. It was learned as risk. If as a child affection arrived unpredictably — sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on the day the other person was having — or if you watched a relationship break badly up close, or if getting too close to someone once cost you dearly, you may have learned something very sensible: do not rest your whole weight on anyone.
There is another version, quieter: the person who grew up having to take care of an adult’s emotions. There, being close to someone does not feel like company but like a weight that is coming. Committing sounds like being asked, again, for more than you can give.
If something in this resonates, perhaps it is worth looking at. What does tend to be true is that it was not a fault of yours. It was a way of protecting yourself, and at the time it made complete sense. The problem is that those ways of protecting yourself do not switch themselves off when you stop needing them.
The real cost
It is usually told as if the other person paid the whole price. That is not how it works.
When you spend years half-entering every relationship, you get used to being with someone without ever being fully there. Nobody gets to know you whole, because you do not let them. And then something rather cruel happens: you feel lonely inside the relationship, and you read that loneliness as proof that this was not the right person.
The circle closes. And the circle can be opened.
What does help
Stop treating the doubt as information. When «is this the person?» shows up, the answer is not at the end of that thought. You have been looking for it there for years and it does not appear. The useful question is a different one: what was happening just before the doubt arrived? Almost always there had been a moment of closeness.
Look at your body before your head. The urge to run usually announces itself somewhere else first: the chest closing, breathing getting shorter, a sudden need to look at your phone. Noticing it while it happens is what opens the possibility of doing something different.
Stay three minutes longer. You do not need to promise anything enormous. When the urge to create distance arrives — leaving early, cutting the conversation short, going cold — stay slightly longer than your body is asking for. That is where you find out that closeness does not destroy you. It is trained in small doses.
Say out loud what is happening to you. There is a sentence I hear a lot in my consulting room: «I do not know if it is him, or if it is me with anyone». Said in time and out loud, that sentence changes quite a lot: it turns what looked like a verdict on the relationship into something two people can talk about.
Tell space apart from escape. Needing time alone is legitimate and healthy. Using it to disconnect emotionally is another thing. The difference shows in how you come back.
Where therapy comes in
All of the above can be attempted alone, and something does move.
What is hard to do alone is noticing in time, because the movement away is automatic precisely for that reason: it fires before you get there. And because when you are inside it, your reasons for leaving sound excellent. It took me a while to understand that this was the problem, not proof of anything: all of my reasons were good reasons.
In Gestalt therapy this is worked with where it is happening, not as a memory. If while you are telling me something important you change the subject, or start analysing it from the outside, or look towards the window right when things get close, that is happening here, between the two of us, and we can look at it in the moment. The consulting room ends up being a place to practise being near someone without disappearing.
If you want to see how I work, I explain it here: what Gestalt therapy involves. And if the part about doubt that leads nowhere resonated, this one may also help: I can’t stop overthinking everything.
To finish
Committing is not about no longer being afraid. It is about being afraid and staying anyway.
And it is not about signing up forever with the first person who comes along either. Unpacking the suitcase is not promising you will never leave. It is no longer sleeping next to it.
I work with this often, in Gestalt therapy in person in Barcelona and online, in Spanish and English. If you recognised yourself while reading, write to me and we will talk.