Three days after returning from what should have been a dream European vacation, Natalie sat in her apartment surrounded by unpacked bags and a grief she never saw coming. Her phone still held photos from those vibrant cities, right alongside four years of memories with Ryan. The man who had been her emotional anchor through every crisis the last four years had just told her it was over – for good this time.
What made this ending particularly devastating wasn’t just losing Ryan, but losing the future she had carefully woven in her mind. Every time they’d reunited after their on-and-off periods, that future had seemed more possible, more real.
In the aftermath of the breakup, she found herself replaying their relationship like a movie she could somehow edit… She worried to herself: If only she hadn’t asked for more quality time together…If only she could have been more comfortable with his need for independence…If only she could find the right words now to convince him to try one more time.
“The most painful part,” she shared with me in our first session, her voice catching, “is that whenever anything difficult happens in my life, my first instinct is still to call him. I almost want to run to him for comfort about our own breakup! How messed up is that?”
What Natalie was experiencing went deeper than typical breakup pain. Like many women with a history of anxious attachment relationship patterns, she wasn’t just grieving Ryan – she was grieving the HOPE of feeling secure in this relationship (even if she spent years in a painful pattern of trying to “earn” that love and security from him time and time again).
Her childhood experiences had taught her that love was conditional, that she needed to be “perfect” and/or agreeable to be worthy of staying with. Now, watching Ryan seemingly switch off his feelings overnight, all those early wounds were bleeding fresh.
When she first reached out for support, Natalie was caught in what I call the ‘conviction spiral’ – believing that if she could just make Ryan understand how much she cared, how hard she had tried, he would realize their connection was worth fighting for. And she was replaying that tape over and over in her mind.
But as we began our work together, she would discover something far more valuable than winning him back: the path to healing her relationship with herself.
The Unique Pain of Grieving a Love That ‘Could Have Been’
When you have patterns of anxious attachment in your relationship experiences, grieving a relationship that held profound potential but never fully actualized creates a distinctive kind of heartache. This isn’t just about losing a partner – it can feel like losing an entire future you’ve carefully constructed in your mind, one that felt tantalizingly within reach.
For women like Natalie, this grief intertwines with deep-seated attachment patterns in ways that can feel overwhelming. Our attachment system, designed to keep us connected to those we love, works overtime when we have an anxious attachment style, and it especially gets kicked into high gear when we are in a relationship with someone who is avoidant or unavailable (either emotionally or physically). It is extremely triggering.
When a relationship ends, especially one that has been on-and-off, you might find yourself in a state of constant yearning and hypervigilance, desperately searching for ways to restore the connection.
While the roots of attachment patterns often trace back to childhood experiences that are best explored with a therapist, relationship coaching can help you understand how these patterns show up in your present-day relationships and what to do about them.
When Natalie first came to me, she was caught in a cycle of feeling ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’ – a common experience for women expressing patterns of anxious attachment in their relationships. Through our coaching work, we focused not on the origins of these feelings, but on recognizing them in real-time and developing new and healthy ways to respond.
The anxiously attached mind excels at creating detailed visions of what could have been. You might find yourself replaying conversations, imagining alternative endings, or focusing on those moments when everything felt perfect.
These aren’t just daydreams – they’re attempts to maintain a connection that once provided a sense of safety and belonging (if even intermittently).
When Ryan ended things, Natalie wasn’t just losing him – it was like she was losing the version of herself she felt she could be with him, the future life and family she had imagined, and the deep emotional connection she had experienced in their best moments.
This form of grief becomes particularly complex because it often involves mourning something that never fully existed in its imagined form. The relationship you’re grieving isn’t just the real one with its complicated dynamics and unmet needs – it’s also the idealized version that lived in your hopes and dreams.
This creates a unique form of disorientation, where you’re simultaneously grieving what was, what could have been, and who you believed you could become in that relationship.
I intimately understand this unique form of grief from my own journey. When my four-year relationship ended after discovering my partner’s infidelity, I wasn’t just mourning the actual relationship – I was grieving the future I had carefully constructed in my mind. I had spent years believing that if I just loved hard enough or changed myself enough, I could transform our tumultuous connection into the secure partnership I desperately wanted.
Those dreams of what our love could become had become so real to me that losing them felt like losing a part of my identity. The most painful realization wasn’t just that he had betrayed me, but that I had to let go of this idealized version of both him and our relationship that I had clung to for so long. Walking away meant acknowledging that the relationship I had invested so much hope in existed more in my imagination than in reality.
The Science of Healing: Understanding Your Grieving Body and Mind
Now as a relationship coach and educator, I help women navigate this present-moment experience of grief and attachment anxiety, while recognizing that deeper healing work might also benefit from therapeutic support. Together, we focus on practical strategies for managing attachment anxiety, building emotional resilience, and creating a new vision for the future – a sense of confidence and security that isn’t dependent on any particular relationship working out.
What many people don’t realize is that relationship grief isn’t just emotional – it’s physical. Research shows that our bodies register the pain of losing a significant relationship in the same neural pathways as physical injury. When Natalie felt that visceral ache in her chest thinking about Ryan, it wasn’t just metaphorical pain – her body was responding to a very real emotional wound.
Understanding this biological reality helps explain why you can’t simply ‘think’ your way out of relationship grief. Just as you wouldn’t expect a broken bone to heal overnight, your attachment system needs time and proper care to recover from this loss. But unlike a physical injury, we often deny ourselves the grace and patience needed for emotional healing.
In my coaching work with clients, we focus on three essential aspects of healing:
First, we address the physical and emotional nurturing your system needs right now. This isn’t about self-improvement or ‘getting over it’ – it’s about treating yourself with the same compassion you’d offer someone recovering from surgery.
This might mean scheduling regular massages, preparing nourishing meals, or creating daily rituals that help you feel held and supported. In other words, you focus on meeting your own needs and paying attention to yourself in a way that you likely weren’t when you were in a relationship.
Second, we work on redirecting your attachment needs in healthy ways. When you’re used to turning to your partner for emotional regulation, their absence creates a void that can feel unbearable.
Together, we explore ways to meet these needs through other connections – trusted friends, family, or even developing a stronger relationship with yourself. This isn’t about replacing what was lost, but about expanding your sources of emotional support.
Third, we practice interrupting the cycle of painful rumination that keeps you stuck. This is where many women get trapped – replaying conversations, analyzing past events, or imagining alternative scenarios.
While reflection can be valuable, there’s a crucial difference between processing and ruminating. In our work together, we focus on transforming those ‘why’ questions that keep you stuck into ‘what’ questions that move you forward:
Instead of ‘Why didn’t he try harder?’
We ask ‘What did this situation reveal about my needs?’
Instead of ‘Why wasn’t I enough?’
We explore ‘What values matter most to me in relationships?’
This shift from judgment to curiosity, from past to present, opens up new possibilities for healing and growth. It’s about creating space for both grief and growth to coexist.
What makes this journey particularly challenging for women with anxious attachment patterns is that the very person you’d normally turn to for comfort is now the source of your pain. This is why having support that understands both the science of attachment and the practical steps toward healing can make such a profound difference.
Falling in Love with Potential: The Anxious Attachment Trap
One of the most painful aspects of Natalie’s journey wasn’t just losing Ryan – it was realizing how much of her love had been invested in potential rather than reality. Like many women who experience patterns of anxious attachment in their relationships, she had become deeply attached to who Ryan could become and the relationship they could have, rather than what was actually unfolding between them.
This tendency to romanticize and attach to potential isn’t random. When you express patterns of anxious attachment, you’re very attuned to moments of connection and possibility. Those peak moments – the deep conversations, the passionate reunions, the promises of change – can feel so real and so promising that they overshadow the consistent patterns of unmet needs and misalignment.
“I kept focusing on how perfect things could be if only he’d commit more fully,” Natalie shared. “But I was so focused on that potential that I wasn’t really seeing how my basic needs for consistency and emotional availability weren’t being met in the present.”
This attachment to potential often stems from early experiences where love felt conditional or inconsistent. The glimpses of what “could be” become a lifeline, much like a child holding onto rare moments of connection with an unavailable parent.
But as adults, this pattern can keep us invested in relationships that don’t actually meet our fundamental needs.
A Practical Tool: The Reality Check Framework
One of the most powerful tools I share with my clients is what I call the Reality Check Framework. Instead of getting lost in the ‘what-ifs’ and ‘if-onlys,’ this framework helps you stay grounded in what’s actually happening in your relationship right now.
Here’s how to start using it today:
1. Get Clear on Your Requirements
These are your non-negotiables – the fundamental things you need for a relationship to work. They’re not preferences or wishes, but actual requirements for your wellbeing. For example:
- Consistent communication
- Shared vision for the future
- Mutual commitment to growth
- Emotional availability
2. Identify Your Functional Needs
These are the practical, day-to-day needs that make a relationship work for you, such as:
- How often do you need to spend time together?
- What kind of communication feels good between visits?
- How do you need to be included in each other’s lives?
3. Name Your Emotional Needs
These are what you need to feel secure, valued, and loved, for example:
- How do you need your partner to show up during difficult times?
- What helps you feel emotionally safe?
- How do you need affection to be expressed?
The power of this framework is in regularly checking in with yourself about whether these needs and requirements are being met consistently, not just in moments of peak connection.
For women who are currently healing from a breakup, this framework offers clarity about what was actually missing in the relationship, helping to loosen the grip of ‘what-if’ thinking.
For those who are dating, it becomes a powerful screening tool, helping you assess potential partners based on reality rather than possibility.
I want to emphasize: Your needs aren’t ‘too much.’ They’re valid guidelines for creating relationships that actually work for you, rather than relationships you have to constantly convince yourself COULD work someday.
When we’re grieving a relationship that could have been, much of what we’re actually grieving is the potential we invested in so heavily. We grieve not just the real moments we shared, but all the imagined futures we crafted in our minds.
This makes the grief particularly complex and sticky – because potential feels infinite, and therefore the loss can feel infinite too.
Understanding this dynamic is crucial for healing. When you find yourself caught in the undertow of grief, and worrying about ‘but what if things had been different?’ or ‘what if they change and come back?’, the Reality Check Framework becomes your anchor to the present moment.
Instead of getting lost in the maze of potential, you can ground yourself in the REALITY of what actually was. Yes, there were beautiful moments. Yes, there was real connection. And also – it’s important to be real with yourself about whether your core needs and requirements were being met. Maybe your emotional needs weren’t being consistently honored. Maybe your functional needs were often dismissed as ‘too much.’
This is not to diminish the love you shared or the genuine possibilities that existed. Rather, it’s about holding both truths: that something real and meaningful was lost, AND that what you’re grieving could be more about potential than reality.
This understanding doesn’t make the grief disappear, but it does make it more manageable. It helps you direct your healing energy toward accepting what was, rather than endlessly mourning what could have been.
It’s Not Your Fault: Understanding the Bigger Picture
As you grieve the relationship that could have been, you might find yourself shouldering all the blame. ‘If only I hadn’t been so ‘needy.’’ ‘If only I had been more independent.’ ‘If only I had been better at hiding my feelings.’
Let me stop you right there – There’s a much bigger picture we need to acknowledge and that isn’t being talked about enough in the dating world.
From generations before us and from childhood women are bombarded with messages that shape how we view love, relationships, and our role in them. Think about it:
- Disney princesses whose entire stories revolve around “being chosen” by a prince
- Rom-coms where the female protagonist’s persistence and belief in love eventually wins over the reluctant hero
- The constant narrative that women need to be ‘cool,’ ‘low maintenance,’ and never ‘too much’ (hello corporate America)
- The celebration of women who ‘stand by their man’ through countless and egregious disappointments
- The idea that with enough love, patience, and understanding, we can transform any partner into their best potential
This pressure on women can be even more extreme in countries like the Philippines (and the diaspora), where divorce remains illegal and cultural expectations demand women keep their families intact regardless of circumstances – effectively trapping many in unhappy or even abusive marriages under the guise of preserving family values and fulfilling their duty as wives and mothers. Growing up in a Filipino family, these beliefs were deeply embedded in my unconscious through generations of conditioning.
These are powerful and persistent social narratives, norms, and sources of conditioning that particularly impact those of us with anxious attachment styles – and reinforce painful patterns.
They teach us to:
- Value potential over reality
- See ourselves as responsible for our partner’s growth
- Interpret emotional labor as love (whew! This was a big one for me. I spent YEARS doing this)
- View our own needs as obstacles to overcome
When Natalie kept hoping Ryan would change, kept believing that her love and patience could transform their relationship, she wasn’t just acting from her attachment patterns, she was following a script that society had written for her long before she met him.
Even modern dating culture reinforces these patterns. Social media shows us carefully curated ‘relationship goals’ that keep us attached to idealized versions of love. Dating apps promote the idea that the perfect partner is just one swipe away, keeping us unconsciously chasing potential rather than reality.
Breaking Free from the Conditioning
Recognizing this social conditioning is crucial for healing, because it helps you understand that your tendency to attach to potential or your relationship anxiety isn’t a personal failure – it’s a natural response to messages you’ve been receiving your entire life.
Gonna say this louder for the people in the back:
Your tendency to attach to potential and your relationship anxiety isn’t a personal failure – it’s a natural response to messages you’ve been receiving your entire life.
The pain you’re feeling isn’t just about losing a relationship; it’s also the pain of challenging an entire framework you’ve been given for understanding love and relationships – handed down over generations.
This understanding doesn’t make the grief disappear, but it does help redirect it.
Instead of grieving your perceived failures or shortcomings, you can begin to grieve:
- The time spent trying to meet impossible standards
- The energy invested in trying to be ‘less than’ who you really are
- The authentic needs you pushed aside to be ‘more acceptable or likable or worthy’
- The reality you couldn’t see because you were so conditioned to focus on potential
This grief is different – it’s transformative rather than depleting.
It’s grief that leads to awakening rather than self-blame.
As one client put it: “Once I saw how much of my pain came from trying to fit into a mold society created, I could finally start creating my own definition of love.'”
A Personal Revolution: From Inner Work to Collective Liberation
When you begin to question these deeply ingrained patterns – the tendency to prioritize potential over reality, to minimize your needs, to pour endless emotional labor into “fixing” relationships – you’re doing personal healing work AND taking steps to dismantle oppressive norms.
Every time you honor your needs instead of dismissing them, every time you choose reality over fairy-tale potential, every time you decide that your worth isn’t dependent on your ability to change/fix/rescue someone else, you’re challenging centuries of conditioning that has kept women emotionally and psychologically tethered to unfulfilling relationships.
This is why grieving the relationship that could have been isn’t just about processing a personal loss.
It’s about grieving and then releasing the old stories that taught us that our needs are “too much.”
It’s about recognizing that our tendency to attach to possibility over reality isn’t a personal failing, but a learned survival strategy in a world that has historically required women to be masters of subverting their needs in order to gain connection and belonging.
When you do this work, you’re contributing to a collective awakening and you’re helping to create a world where future generations of women won’t have to unlearn these painful patterns.
From Grieving to Growing
As we’ve explored, grieving a relationship that could have been is particularly challenging when you have patterns of anxious attachment in your relationships. The attachment to potential, the physical pain of loss, the complex web of past and present wounds – it can feel overwhelming to navigate alone. And truthfully, you shouldn’t have to.
This is where focused relationship coaching can make a profound difference. While friends and family might tell you to “just move on” or “you deserve better,” healing requires more than well-meaning advice. It benefits from a structured approach that honors both your grief and your growth potential.
In my coaching practice, I work specifically with women who find themselves caught in this painful space between what was and what could have been. Together, we:
- Develop personalized strategies for managing attachment anxiety during the healing process
- Create new patterns of self-trust to replace the cycle of self-doubt
- Build a clear vision of what you actually need in relationships, not just what you’ve been willing to accept
If you find yourself relating to Natalie’s story – caught between grieving what was lost and holding onto what could have been – know that there is a path forward. While this kind of deep emotional work can benefit from therapeutic support for processing past wounds, relationship coaching offers practical, present-focused strategies for moving through grief and into growth.
I invite you to book a complimentary consultation call where we can:
- Explore where you are in your healing journey
- Identify what’s keeping you stuck in the grief of ‘what could have been’
- Discuss how working together might support your path forward
Your capacity to love deeply is a strength. Let’s work together to channel that strength into creating the life and love you deserve, one that supports you in engaging in relationships in healthy and sustainable ways and that’s grounded in your truth.
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