Why Some High Achievers Are Constantly in Bad Relationships
- Christine Leyva
- Jun 3
- 6 min read
In this guide
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Author bio: Christine Leyva, Ph.D., is the founder of Brave Mind Therapy and a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in OCD, anxiety, and relationship work. Her dissertation research at UT Austin, conducted under Dr. Bill Swann, examined why highly competent people so often end up in self-undermining relationships.
I see a particular kind of patient in my practice. She graduated near the top of her class. She runs a team, or a department, or a company. She has the résumé, the salary, the friends who love her, the confidence to walk into any room. And she's sitting on my couch trying to understand why she keeps ending up with partners who treat her badly.
The story usually starts the same way: "I thought I had high self-esteem. So why does my marriage feel like this?"
For a long time, the field of psychology couldn't really answer that question. Self-esteem was treated as one thing, a single dial that ran from low to high. If you scored high, you were supposed to be doing well. If you were doing badly, you must have scored low. The math was tidy and it was also wrong.
The research that finally explained the pattern
In 1995, two researchers, Romin Tafarodi and Bill Swann, published a paper that split the dial in two. They argued that what we call global self-esteem is actually made of two distinct dimensions:
Self-competence is the agentic side. It's the sense that you're capable, effective, able to make things happen in the world. It builds through mastery, through doing hard things and seeing them work out.
Self-liking is the social-evaluative side. It's the sense that you're a worthy person, likeable, valuable as a human being independent of what you accomplish. It builds through being loved and accepted, especially early on.
The two dimensions correlate moderately, around 0.6, which means they tend to travel together but not always. And it's the "not always" that changes everything.
When you cross the two dimensions, you get four quadrants, and each one describes a meaningfully different relationship with the self. The two quadrants on the diagonal are the interesting ones, the patterns that single-score self-esteem measures completely flatten.
I trained with Bill Swann at UT, and my dissertation focused on one specific quadrant: high self-competence paired with low self-liking. The capable-but-unloved profile. The Stanford students who kept ending up in painful relationships despite being in the top 1% of their cohort by every external metric. The patient in my office who can't understand her own marriage.
It's easier to see this when you can look at it. Each quadrant carries its own internal voice and its own relationship pattern, and most people can find themselves on the map within a few seconds of reading it. The one I want to spend time on is the highlighted quadrant in the bottom right—low self-liking paired with high self-competence. That's the capable-but-unloved profile, and it's the one I see most often in the high-achieving women who walk into my practice wondering why their relationships keep going wrong.
Why "I'm great at things" doesn't protect you
Here's the part that tends to land hard when patients hear it.
If you've built your sense of self primarily on competence, then your worth lives inside your achievements. You feel good about yourself when you perform. You feel okay when you produce. The whole structure stays upright as long as you keep delivering.
What it doesn't give you is the felt sense of being a worthy person when nothing is being produced. It doesn't give you a baseline of "I'm lovable just because I exist." So when a partner is cold, or critical, or dismissive, there's no internal floor to catch you. The competence dimension can't help here, because the wound isn't about whether you're capable. It's about whether you're loveable, and that's a different dimension entirely.
This is why high achievers can have what looks like sky-high self-esteem and still tolerate relationships that would horrify their friends. The part of them that's high isn't the part that's getting hit.
The mechanism: self-verification
The second piece of the puzzle comes from another strand of Bill Swann's work, his theory of self-verification. The theory makes a counterintuitive claim: we don't actually seek out people who think well of us. We seek out people who see us the way we see ourselves.
In Swann's experiments, participants were given fabricated feedback from a stranger, some positive, some negative, and then asked whether they wanted to interact with that person again. People high in self-liking pushed away the negative feedback giver. Of course. But people low in self-liking actively chose to spend more time with the person who had just told them something unflattering. They picked the critic.
There are two reasons this happens, and they both matter clinically.
The first is epistemic. If someone sees you in a way that doesn't match your own view, it feels like they don't really know you. The interaction feels hollow. You want to be with people who see what you see, even when what you see is unflattering, because that's what "being known" feels like to you.
The second is pragmatic. If someone treats you better than you believe you deserve, there's a quiet dread underneath the pleasure of it. They're going to figure it out. They're going to see what I actually am, and then this will be worse than if they'd just seen me clearly from the start. Negative feedback, painful as it is, feels safer. There's nothing to lose.
Put these together and you get a person who's excellent at her job, generous with her friends, sharp and funny and admired, and who keeps ending up with a partner who's cutting, dismissive, or cold. Not because she has bad taste. Because at the level of self-liking, the partner's behavior is confirming something she already believes.
I've lost count of how many patients have leaned forward when I explain this for the first time. As recently as last Friday, someone said, "That's it. That's the thing I couldn't name."
The relief is real because the old framework was making them feel crazy. They knew they weren't low-self-esteem people. They had evidence everywhere they looked. But they also knew something was wrong, and they couldn't reconcile the two. The two-facet model lets both things be true at once. Yes, your self-competence is high. Yes, your self-liking is low. Both of those readings are accurate, and the second one is the one shaping who you let into your life.
What the work looks like
If the wound is in self-liking, the treatment has to be there too. And this is where high achievers run into the hardest part of the work, because the toolkit they've used their whole life doesn't apply.
You can't achieve your way into self-liking. The accomplishments you stack up land on the competence dimension, which is already full. Self-liking grows in an entirely different soil: the experience of being valued for existing, not for producing. For a lot of high-achieving adults, that soil's been undisturbed for decades. There's real grief in noticing that.
The work involves learning to feel like a worthy person on a day you accomplished nothing. Learning to receive warmth without immediately calculating whether you earned it. Learning to notice when a relationship is confirming the old self-view and to tolerate the discomfort of partners who actually see you accurately. That last piece sounds easy and isn't. Being seen well by someone, when you don't see yourself well, is one of the most destabilizing experiences a person can have. The instinct is to flee toward someone who confirms the familiar story.
This is slow work. It's also, in my experience, some of the most worthwhile work a person can do, because it shifts the ground under everything else. The career stays. The competence stays. What changes is who you let close, and how it feels to be there.
If any of this sounds familiar
If you read this and felt something tighten in your chest, that's worth paying attention to. The pattern is specific, and it's common, and the fact that it has a name and a mechanism is good news. It means there's somewhere to put your hand on it.
In a follow-up piece I'll walk through the actual instrument Tafarodi and Swann developed to measure these two dimensions separately, so you can see what scoring high on competence and low on liking actually looks like on paper. For now, the most useful thing might just be the question itself: when you think about how you feel about yourself, can you separate "I'm capable" from "I'm worthy of love"? And if you can, are those two answers the same?
For a lot of the people I work with, they aren't. And once you can see that, everything else starts to make sense.
Source: “Self-Liking and Self-Competence as Dimensions of Global Self-Esteem: Initial Validation of a Measure", by Romin W. Tafarodi and William B. Swann, Jr., University of Texas at Austin
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