Fear of abandonment: loving someone while waiting for them to leave

He came home on time. He texted when he said he would. That morning he had reached across the pillow and squeezed her hand before either of them said a word — and still, by noon, Priya was reading his last message five times trying to decide what he had meant by "okay."

Not whether he was upset. Whether this was the beginning of him slowly pulling away.

He had not pulled away. He had said "okay" because she had asked if he wanted dal for dinner.

This is the thing nobody talks about when they talk about fear of abandonment — it does not require a reason. It sits inside a perfectly good marriage, on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, and it spins anyway. He is kind. He is present.

He has never threatened to leave. And yet somewhere in her nervous system there is always a quiet countdown, a vigil she keeps without meaning to. The anxiety is not about him. It never was.

Before anything else, I want to name what this fear is not. It is not the same as jealousy — that is a different animal entirely. Jealousy is usually sparked by something a partner does: coming home late, a name on the phone, a shift in energy that trips a specific wire.

Fear of abandonment runs underneath all of that. It does not need a trigger from outside.

It is the older conviction that love is borrowed, not owned; that the good thing you have is always about to be recalled. A partner can be completely transparent, completely devoted, and this fear will still find its footing. That is how you know it belongs to you, not to them.

Most of the time, this fear has a sentence underneath it that the woman herself has not fully heard. In my work, when I sit with someone exhausted from this vigil — checking his tone, watching his mood, reading signs that aren't there — what we find underneath is usually some version of "I am not enough to keep someone."

That sentence almost never arrived in adulthood. It came earlier. A parent who left, or who stayed but was never really there.

A childhood where love felt conditional — you got it when you were good, you lost it when you weren't. An early relationship that ended without explanation and left a story in its wake: I must have not been enough.

The adult mind takes that old story and runs it forward into every relationship. Not because the current relationship deserves suspicion, but because the nervous system is still living in the old house.

NLP anchoring is one of the most practical tools for this particular fear, and I use it often in sessions. An anchor is a physical cue — a breath, a hand pressed to a specific point, a word you say to yourself — that you train your body to associate with a calmer, truer state.

On its own, it does not change the story underneath. But it interrupts the spiral at the point where it is still a flutter, before it becomes a full narrative about your marriage being secretly in trouble. When Priya notices the tightening in her chest as she re-reads that message, the anchor gives her a pause just long enough to ask: is this present-tense information, or is this the old fear visiting? Most of the time, once the question is asked clearly, she already knows the answer.

The inner-voice work goes deeper. What I mean by inner-voice work is sitting with the sentence underneath the fear — "I am not enough to keep someone" — and actually examining it. Not arguing with it. Not telling yourself to stop.

Examining it: where did I first hear this? Whose voice is it in? What was the evidence that produced this conclusion — and is that evidence still relevant now?

This is slower work, often done across several sessions, and it is tender. But it is the work that actually moves the needle, because you are not managing the fear any more. You are addressing the belief that produces it.

One thing a couple I worked with found incredibly useful: she told him. Not in the middle of an anxious moment, but on a calm evening, she said: "I want you to know that sometimes I get worried you are pulling away, even when nothing is wrong. It is an old fear of mine. It is not about you."

He did not need to solve it or perform extra reassurance on demand. But knowing it existed meant that the next time she went quiet after dinner, he could gently ask "is this one of those times?" and she could say yes or no. They turned a private vigil into something shared. That act of naming took so much weight off her.

The Indian cultural layer on this fear is real and worth naming. There is a strand in how many of us were raised — especially women — that says "nazar lag jaayegi." Good things are fragile; joy should be held quietly, because celebrating too loudly will cost you. This is not superstition exactly, but cultural memory.

Applied to a marriage, it becomes a constant low-level waiting for the other shoe to drop. If you recognise that pattern in yourself: that belief protected someone once, in a context where it made sense. It does not have to run your marriage now.

The fear shrinks when the present-tense relationship is made real and specific. Not in big declarations, but in small daily acknowledgements of what is actually here. He brought you tea without being asked. He remembered to call the plumber.

He laughed at your observation about the neighbour's dog. These are not small things — they are the texture of a present-tense love that the vigil keeps erasing, because the vigil only looks forward into the threat, never backward into the evidence.

The practice I often suggest is simple: at the end of the day, before sleep, name three things that were actually true today. Not affirmations about how your relationship is good. Actual moments. This is the Gratitude pillar of the Activate Your Inner GPS™ method in its most intimate form — not gratitude as a spiritual aspiration, but as a discipline of noticing what is already here so the fearful mind cannot rewrite the whole day from its own script.

You are not too sensitive for this. You are not broken for feeling it. Fear of abandonment is one of the most common threads I see in the women I work with — more common than jealousy, more common than anger, and more quietly exhausting than either. It is also one of the most moveable, once it is named and traced back to where it actually lives.

If you are carrying this vigil and you are tired of it, a 1:1 Clarity Call with me is a good place to start. We will not judge the fear or try to argue you out of it. We will look at it honestly, find the sentence underneath, and begin to loosen its hold — gently, and at your pace.