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title: "A Lack Of Purpose Leads To Romantic Obsessions" url: "https://ixcarus.substack.com/p/a-lack-of-purpose-leads-to-romantic" tags: [Love] type: Article

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A Lack Of Purpose Leads To Romantic Obsessions

Why romantic obsession is almost never about love and almost always about a purpose-shaped hole in someone's life

i’ve noticed something strange.

people have never had more freedom to choose who they date. more options, more access, more tools designed specifically to help them find someone.

and yet they seem more anxious about relationships than at any point i can remember.

people obsess over dating app and finding their person.

some will stay with people they know are fundamentally wrong for them, and they’ll know it the whole time, and they’ll stay anyway.

i’ve written before about why modern relationships collapse after six months. but something i haven’t dug into is a different question.

not why relationships fail but why certain people are so consumed by needing one in the first place.

and don’t get me wrong. the healthy desire for connection is perfectly normal.

but i’m talking about the people who make romantic pursuit the organizing principle of their entire life. every conversation, social move, and even decision filtered through whether it helps them get closer to being with someone.

i’ve been around groups of guys where the only topic was girls. similarly groups of girls where the only topic was boys.

and look, i’m not here to police or judge anyone’s conversations, talk about whatever you want.

but if the majority of your conversations with the people around you are about finding romantic validation, it’s worth asking what’s underneath that.

because i don’t think it’s actually about love.

we spend years trying to convince the world to love us while spending almost no time learning how to relate to ourselves.

with time every compliment fades. every achievement becomes the new baseline. every relationship eventually stops feeling new.

if your sense of worth depends on those external inputs, you’ll spend your whole life chasing the next hit of validation with diminishing returns each time.

i think the answer to the romantic obsession question has less to do with love and more to do with purpose.

it’s quiet in my room tonight.

calm ambient lighting. vanilla candle lit, the smoke rising in slow swirls filling the room with something warm. rain ticking against the window like a clock.

no caffeine today, taking my monthly reset from it.

let’s get into this.

THE MEANING VACUUM

"You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with."_ — Wayne Dyer

humans need meaning the way they need food and water.

but here’s what is interesting.

the sources of meaning available to people have changed dramatically over the last few centuries, but the need itself hasn’t shrunk at all.

think about what life looked like in, say, 1370 or something like that.

you’re born into a blacksmith’s family in a small english town. before you’re old enough to have an existential crisis about your purpose, your purpose has already been decided. you will learn the craft from your father.

you will make tools for the soldiers, horseshoes for the farmers, blades for the kitchen.

your entire existence is structured around a trade that feeds your family and serves your community.

you wake up every morning with a clear answer to the question what am i for.

or take religious life a few centuries later. a young woman enters a convent in 1650. every hour of her day is structured by liturgy, prayer, service, community.

her life has meaning that was handed to her and confirmed by everyone around her, by god, by her community, by the entire architecture of the society she lives in. there’s no vacuum or need for any searching.

or zoom out further and think about what community used to mean. people lived in villages where everyone knew everyone.

you knew your neighbours by name, knew their children, knew their problems, helped with their harvests. there was a social fabric that held people with a density modern life has almost entirely lost.

now people live in apartment buildings for years without knowing a single name on their floor. the infrastructure of belonging that used to be automatic has mostly dissolved.

the shift happened gradually and then all at once.

religion weakened. the extended family scattered. trades became jobs became careers became gig work. villages became cities where everyone is anonymous.

the tight communal structures that gave previous generations a ready-made sense of place and purpose mostly don’t exist anymore.

and the need for meaning didn’t go anywhere but the brain found a substitute.

for a lot of people, the romantic relationship became the new religion. the new source of identity and purpose and belonging all at once.

instead of asking what am i building, people nowadays are asking “who will complete me.”

and that is question that can never be answered.

YOUR BRAIN IS BUILDING A MODEL OF YOUR WORTH RIGHT NOW

there’s something happening in your mind constantly that most people are completely unaware of.

psychologists call it the self-concept. the internal model of who you are.

basically it is a network of beliefs, memories, expectations, and evaluations that your brain is running continuously to produce an answer to the question: what am i worth?

this model is being updated all the time based on what happens to you, how people treat you, what you achieve, what you fail at, and crucially, what you tell yourself about all of the above.

and here’s where the romantic obsession connects directly to this.

when the self-concept is weak, when someone’s internal model of their own worth is genuinely low, the brain is operating in a kind of deficit.

it knows something is missing and it knows the valuation is below what it should be.

and it will look for external inputs to fill that gap.

which take us into the next part.

THE 30% PROBLEM

"Until you get comfortable with being alone, you'll never know if you're choosing someone out of love or loneliness." — Mandy Hale

think about this for a second.

imagine you genuinely value yourself at about 30%.

most people would never say that out loud. but underneath, in the actual operational model the brain is running (the self concept), you’ve assigned yourself a 30% worth rating.

then someone comes into your life who treats you like you’re worth 50%.

it feels incredible. overwhelming, almost. like finally being seen. like finally being given what you’ve been starving for.

and you will chase that feeling with everything you have.

this person might not even love you but because they value you more than you value yourself. they’re temporarily filling a gap you never learned to fill.

and the gap feels so relieved to have something in it that it interprets the relief as love.

but here’s the thing. they’re still only at 50%.

you’re capable of 100%. you just haven’t experienced it so you don’t know it’s missing.

when i was younger i hadn’t built any real relationship with myself yet.

no developed sense of what i valued, what i stood for, what i was building. and when someone showed up and offered attention or affection i felt it disproportionately.

i fell harder than the situation warranted. got more attached than was healthy. misread the intensity of my own response as evidence of deep connection when a lot of it was just my nervous system responding to the relief of external validation.

i’m not ashamed of that. it’s honestly just what happens when the internal foundation isn’t built yet. you outsource to whatever there is.

people pleasers are doing the same thing at a more chronic level.

the constant adjusting to what they think others want and the exhaustion of performing a version of themselves calibrated entirely to other people’s approval.

that’s someone running on borrowed worth because they haven’t built their own supply.

the neurological mechanism is simple. the brain’s reward circuitry, dopamine, oxytocin, the whole social bonding system, responds powerfully to approval and connection.

when internal self-worth is low, the contrast between the deficit state and the approval state is enormous. the hit is bigger.

which means the dependency becomes stronger. which means the fear of losing the source becomes more intense.

which is why people stay in relationships they know are wrong for them.

the relationship is giving them the only source of worth they currently have access to. and taking that away, even if it’s the healthy choice, feels like annihilation.

WHY PURPOSE PROTECTS YOU

here’s where it all ties together.

when your life contains something you’re building. a mission. real goals. work that means something to you, personal growth that has nothing to do with whether anyone is watching.

a relationship stops being the foundation and becomes an addition to your life.

the question shifts from “will this person save me?” to “does this person belong in the life i’m already building?”

that is a completely different question and it produces completely different relationships.

the person with purpose doesn’t need their partner to provide identity, self-worth, meaning, or happiness.

those things already exist independently.

the relationship adds to something rather than being the something.

which means they can choose more clearly and stay for the right reasons rather than the desperate ones.

and they stop being attracted to the intensity of the deficit-filling dynamic because they don’t have the deficit anymore.

the people who need relationships the least tend to have the healthiest ones because they’re not asking a partner to perform impossible tasks.

they’re not walking into a relationship expecting it to provide identity, purpose, self-worth, and meaning simultaneously.

those things already exist in their life. the relationship just gets to be a relationship.

the people most consumed by romantic obsession are usually the ones most in need of something that a relationship cannot actually deliver, which is a reason to exist that they can feel in themselves.

no partner can give you that. at least not in a way that doesn’t eventually either burn them out or produce a suffocating dependency that erodes whatever genuine connection existed.

HOW TO ACTUALLY BUILD SELF LOVE

self love gets talked about like it’s a feeling you have to generate.

like you sit down one day and decide to feel good about yourself and then you do.

that’s not how it works. i wish it did

just like everything else, self love is built through action.

specifically through the accumulation of evidence that you can trust yourself. that you’ll show up for yourself and you’ll do the hard thing even when you don’t want to.

which means discipline is one of the highest forms of self love that exists.

think about what’s actually happening when you go for a run you don’t want to go on.

you are doing something for future you that current you is resisting. you’re choosing the version of yourself thirty minutes from now over the version sitting on the couch right now.

that’s love expressed through action rather than feeling.

i don’t want to get up and run. i do it anyway. and the version of me that finishes it, tired and flooded with endorphins, is grateful every single time.

that gratitude is directed inward. toward the version of me that made the call thirty minutes earlier.

that’s what self love actually looks like.

choosing your future self over your present comfort, repeatedly, until the evidence accumulates into genuine self-respect.

here’s what that looks like practically.

keep promises to yourself.

the quickest way to erode self-trust is to consistently break commitments you make to yourself.

you said you’d wake up at 7. you slept until 9.

you said you’d go to the gym. you didn’t.

each broken promise is a small data point that tells your subconscious you can’t be relied upon.

and you can’t love someone you don’t trust.

start small. make a commitment small enough that you actually keep it. then make slightly bigger ones. the trust builds through the evidence.

spend time alone deliberately.

sitting with yourself without filling every quiet moment with a screen or a distraction.

learning what you actually think about things when nobody’s opinion is influencing yours.

building a relationship with your own mind.

most people are genuinely strangers to themselves because they’ve never spent the time.

build something that has nothing to do with anyone watching.

a skill. a project. a physical capacity. something where the feedback loop is entirely between you and the thing itself.

this is one of the most reliable ways to build genuine self-worth because the evidence is unambiguous. you either did it or you didn’t.

no one else’s opinion changes that.

treat your body like you love it before you feel like you do.

sleep properly. eat things that make you feel good. move daily. drink water.

just do it. the actions precede the feeling. you behave your way into the emotional state rather than waiting for the emotional state to motivate the behaviour.

the running example is the simplest version of all of this.

you don’t want to go. you go anyway. you finish. future you is grateful.

that exchange, that small act of choosing your future self over your current resistance, repeated enough times, becomes the foundation of a relationship with yourself that no external source of validation can replicate or threaten.

build that first.

everything else gets easier when it’s in place.

THE BOTTOM LINE

a relationship can enrich a life. support it. transform it.

it cannot replace one.

the more empty someone feels internally, the more tempting it becomes to use romance as a substitute for meaning.

and it works, briefly. the relief is real and the feeling of being seen by someone else is real.

but it’s borrowed.

and borrowed worth has to be constantly renewed from the source, which makes you dependent on the source, which is when dependency starts getting mistaken for love.

if you build a life worth living, love becomes something that adds to it.

if you don’t, love becomes the thing you’re trying to build a life around.

and the structure doesn’t hold.

build the life first.

the right person is a big piece in a puzzle. not the whole puzzle.