Some people describe pulling away exactly when a relationship starts going well, or bracing for something to fall apart even when nothing actually has. Two studies tracing the roots of this pattern back to childhood suggest it isn’t a personal flaw so much as a learned response, one that traces back to specific, documentable experiences early in life.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2004 study by Rebecca Colman and Cathy Spatz Widom, published in Child Abuse and Neglect. The researchers used a prospective cohort design, starting with court-substantiated cases of childhood abuse and neglect from between 1967 and 1971, then matching each case to a non-maltreated control on age, sex, race, and social class. In total, 1,196 participants, 676 with documented maltreatment histories and 520 controls, were interviewed decades later in adulthood, between 1989 and 1995. Adults with childhood abuse or neglect histories showed significantly higher rates of cohabiting rather than marrying, of abruptly leaving partners, and of divorce compared with the matched controls. Women with maltreatment histories were also less likely to report positive perceptions of their current partner or satisfaction with fidelity in the relationship. Because the study tracked real documented cases forward across decades rather than relying on retrospective self-report, it offers unusually strong evidence for a genuine link between early maltreatment and later difficulty trusting and settling into adult intimacy.
A second study helps explain part of the mechanism behind this pattern, even in childhoods that never involved documented abuse or neglect. In a 2023 meta-analysis by Jesse Haines and Nicola Schutte, published in the Journal of Adolescence, the researchers statistically pooled 31 independent samples examining parental conditional regard, meaning parents who gave or withdrew warmth and affection based on whether a child met their expectations. Greater exposure to this kind of conditional affection in childhood was significantly linked to more contingent self-esteem in adulthood, self-worth that rises and falls based on performance, along with more guilt-driven self-regulation and higher depressive symptoms. Critically, it was also linked to measurably lower felt relatedness to other people, meaning children taught that love had to be earned tended to grow into adults who felt less securely connected to the people around them, even without any history of outright abuse.
Together, these two studies suggest that difficulty accepting love as an adult can trace back to at least two distinct childhood roots, one more severe and overt, one quieter and more common. Colman and Widom’s research shows that documented childhood maltreatment carries forward into measurable instability and lower trust in adult intimate relationships, tracked prospectively rather than recalled after the fact. Haines and Schutte’s research shows that even ordinary households where affection was made conditional on good behavior or achievement can produce adults who feel less genuinely connected to others, because they learned early that love came with strings attached. Between the two, the pattern of struggling to simply receive love without bracing for a catch looks like a learned adaptation to real, specific childhood conditions, not a personality flaw or a sign that something is broken in the person experiencing it.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Colman and Widom’s research documents a strong statistical association between childhood maltreatment and later relationship instability, but individual outcomes varied considerably, plenty of people with maltreatment histories in the study did not show these patterns, so it describes an elevated risk rather than a fixed outcome. Haines and Schutte’s meta-analysis is correlational, pooling many different studies and measures of conditional regard, and while the pooled associations were consistent, the underlying studies can’t fully rule out other shared family factors contributing to both the parenting style and the adult outcomes measured.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely useful reframe for anyone who recognizes this pattern in themselves. Difficulty accepting love doesn’t appear to come out of nowhere, it traces back to specific, identifiable childhood conditions, whether overt maltreatment or the quieter lesson that affection had to be earned, which means it’s a learned response to real circumstances rather than evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with the person carrying it.