Here’s the tell. The exits cluster at the same stage almost every time, regardless of who the person actually is. That’s not what incompatibility looks like — incompatibility is specific to the person. A pattern that fires at the same depth of intimacy no matter who’s standing in front of it isn’t about any of them. It’s a trigger, and the thing triggering it is depth itself, not any particular partner’s shortcomings.

The story — “I just haven’t found the right person” — is comfortable because it keeps the problem external and keeps the supply of hope renewable. Every new beginning gets to feel like evidence that the right one might finally be different, without ever having to test the harder hypothesis: that the charge you’re chasing is specifically the charge of the beginning, and that what comes after — being actually known, actually seen without the flattering edit new attention gives everyone — is the part you’ve never let yourself find out whether you can tolerate.

What it’s costing you is the entire back half of intimacy, indefinitely, in exchange for an endless front half. Being wanted by someone who doesn’t fully know you yet is real, and it’s also the shallowest kind of being wanted there is — it doesn’t survive contact with your actual, unedited self, because it’s never been tested against it. You’ve arranged your life so it never has to be.

The harder truth: it’s very likely not that you haven’t met the right person. It’s that you leave, reliably, right around the point where staying would require finding out whether someone could want the parts of you that aren’t running on new-relationship electricity — and some part of you would rather keep that question open forever than risk a real answer.

Here’s what’s available if you’re willing to look at this directly: the next time the familiar restlessness shows up right on schedule, instead of treating it as data about the person, treat it as data about the pattern — and stay one beat longer than instinct wants to. Not forever, not against real incompatibility if that’s what it actually is. Just long enough to find out if what you’ve been calling “not the right person” was actually “not yet known,” which is a very different, and considerably more answerable, problem.