Are you turning off your best options? Do you find the things that you express interest in often don’t seem to want you back? Are you somehow repelling the very life you say you want?
That relationship you crave—the one that feels like mutual ease and deep pull. The clients who just email after watching a video or reading an essay asking where to pay. The friend who lights up when they see you walk in. Do those experiences feel out of reach?
Like you’re always the one admiring from afar, wanting from a distance?
What if it’s not that the life you want is rejecting you—but that you’re unknowingly turning it off?
When Life Doesn’t Want You Back
In the first article of this series, we talked about how most people spend their lives chasing things they don’t actually want. In the second article, we named the arena—the space where desire is found through embodied, messy experimentation. It’s not theoretical. It’s felt. It’s real. It requires your full participation.
My entire body of work and support system is about helping people enter their real life and stay in the discomfort of it long enough for change to spark.
But what happens when you do show up? When you try, when you risk, when you step in with vulnerability and clarity—and still, nothing clicks?
You’re dating, and no one wants a second date. You’re building a business, and no one is buying. You’re initiating friendships, and they fizzle.
That’s the moment most people crumble. Maybe the numb out. Or get bitter, which their electronic devices make so easy. Or spiral deeper into self-fixing through just one more communication framework.
I know that moment. Intimately.
When Healing Becomes Another Costume
After my divorce, and even in the quiet years leading up to it, I decided that something inside me must be broken. My life story echoed back to me that I was unchosen. My father vanished when I was a baby. My relationships followed suit in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
And, like so many others, I took it to therapy. The chaos of my childhood, the freeze response, the old rage—I did the work. I followed the thread of trauma until I could name every part of my inner child’s unmet needs. I stared into the EMDR light and moved the darkest chapters down to a “2”. I did everything right.
But the harder truth? None of that explained why people still weren’t seeing me as someone they wanted to build with. I could psychoanalyze myself into the ground. I could heal. I could show up regulated and raw.
And still, my best life options weren’t choosing me back.
When the Messy Ones Get Everything You Want
This is where it gets uncomfortable. Because we all know people who’ve never touched a therapy book in their life and still seem to have it all. The guy who doesn’t meditate but has a devoted wife and a fulfilling job to match his drinking problem and sub par personality. The woman who skipped the shadow work and somehow gets showered with love, support, and ease. Everyone seems to ignore that fact that she’s extraordinarily difficult to actually be around and hyper judgmental.
They’re not more healed. They’re not more conscious.
They just haven’t built their lives around defensiveness, performance, or survival.
They aren’t turning their light off or grasping at fantasy.
The Subtle Ways We Block What We Want
When I started coaching and leading embodiment sessions, I saw this pattern everywhere.
People followed all the “right” advice—on dating, on sales, on branding—but nothing stuck. Their relationships started but never deepened. Their launches flopped. Their friendships stayed polite.
They were doing all the right things, but the signal they were sending out was: I’m not really available.
I watched women follow dating rules perfectly, getting fun dates or short flings—but no enduring pull. Never real connection. I watched entrepreneurs repeat selling scripts that generated clicks and follows but not paying clients.
The problem wasn’t effort. The problem was energy.
You can’t attract a real connection when you’re still hiding what you want. You can’t be magnetic when you’re apologizing for your needs, or wrapping yourself in the version of you that’s easier to love.
And most tragically? You can’t create a life that wants you back when you secretly believe you don’t deserve one.
The Roles We Play That Turn Us Invisible
After divorce, I dipped into serial dating. I flirted with the rules. I attracted men who were impressive, performative, unavailable. I stopped saying I wanted anything too domestic—meals, holidays, Sunday coffees. I got the successful masculine man attention. But while it impressed others, it didn’t light me up.
The men who actually make great partners? They were impressed by me, but they didn’t choose me. I didn’t feel like a real option.
I felt like a storm, not a home.
People who aren’t trying to impress you are alienated when you are in an earning energy. I wouldn’t have understood that sentence three years ago.
Even with women—those deep soul-friend connections I longed for—I didn’t realize I was wearing armor. After losing most of my couple-friend circle in the divorce, I took on the role I felt I’d been assigned. The cool, uncaring single woman. The free one. The unbothered one. I thought it would make me feel free. It made me unknowable.
I wasn’t drawing in people who could see me. I wasn’t visible to my best matches.
The Life That Wants You Back
Desire can’t grow where we’re still hiding. And pleasure? It doesn’t land without others.
You don’t make money alone. You don’t experience love alone. Everything you want—connection, wealth, warmth—comes through other people in some way.
Life is just one big relationship.
And in relationships, it’s not enough to know what you want. You have to be someone people want to give it to.
That doesn’t mean performing. It means revealing. It means looking at your life and asking: Am I a good match for what I say I want? Or am I still shaped by the coping strategies that once kept me safe, but now keep me stuck?
People who marry you, who buy from you, who hire you, who stay—they respond to something real. Something relaxed. Something revealed. They don’t fall for the most polished version of you.
They fall for the one who’s finally done hiding.
Let the Mirror Teach You
Here’s what helped me: noticing who was getting the life I wanted.
Not to compare. But to get curious.
Who landed the job I thought I should have? Who is partnered in a way that actually looks joyful and sustainable? What do they give and receive in those dynamics?
Where do I shrink away from that kind of vulnerability?
And maybe most painfully—have I shaped myself into someone who’s easy to work with, date, or manage… but impossible to love?
When the Life You Want Isn’t Reaching for You—Reach Deeper
I now know that desire isn't just about what turns me on. It’s about what inspires others to move toward me. What makes them want to give, to join, to co-create.
Not out of pity. Not out of admiration.
But because they feel seen, too.
That mutual "yes"—that full-body pull toward each other—that’s the thing.
And I had to become the version of me who could receive it.
So moving into essay three we need to think about ways we might be turning off what we really want. Imagine we look at our truth, get right with our bodies and get into the messy arena of life… only to realize that our best matches are now rejecting us.
Not just sometimes, but all of the time.
Read the past desire posts: Week 1; Week 2; Week 3, Week 4; Week 5; Week 6
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.