The person giving you butterflies might not be giving you butterflies at all. They might just be activating a childhood wound.
Your nervous system was trained early, before you had any words for what was happening to you. If a parent was emotionally unavailable, your system learned that love is reaching for someone who is never fully there. If a caregiver was unpredictable, you learned that love feels like anxiety, like waiting, like bracing.
And then you grow up, and you meet someone who is a little distant, a little hot and cold, maybe playing with your feelings without even knowing it. And your brain lights up and says: I know this. This is familiar. This must be love.
it isn’t love. it’s recognition
It is pattern recognition, your nervous system spotting a shape it learned in a room you barely remember. And it feels enormous, because the pattern was laid down under stress, and stress always feels enormous.
Here is the cruel mechanical fact underneath it: anxiety and excitement run on almost the same hormones. Your body cannot always tell you which one it is having. Psychologists even have a name for the mix-up, cognitive bias misattribution of arousal · the shaky-bridge effect We mislabel where a bodily feeling comes from, reading adrenaline, nerves or fear as attraction to whoever happens to be nearby.
the person you keep friend-zoning
So the calm one, the safe, steady, predictable one, gets filed under boring. Especially if your childhood was not calm. If home was a little chaotic, then chaos is what registers as home, even when home was never actually safe.
Peace, to a nervous system raised on turbulence, reads as nothing happening. As a flat line. As a person with no spark. But that is not an absence of feeling. That is the absence of a threat, and you have simply never been given the chance to feel the difference.
choosing peace on purpose
The most radical thing you can do is pick the person who feels like peace instead of the one who feels like a tornado.
Not because peace is the mature, joyless choice. Because peace is the only ground stable enough to build anything on. A tornado takes all of your attention just to survive. Peace gives you back the room to actually get to know someone, to find the interesting, funny, strange things in them that a state of constant alarm never lets you see.
Peace is not boring. You just haven’t felt it yet, that’s why you don’t recognise it.
