I Could Be Your Avoidant Partner…
If you like this, I make music too: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6nFTyqoEfocfQ2JQBkXTDh?si=5ByUcC3cQdqpL8QBxinX7A&utm_source=copy-link
Hi there. It’s me. Your avoidant partner, or ex… maybe even that person you’re not sure if they are your ex or not.
Or actually, I could be any of those people. I’ve had numerous professionals tell me that my attachment style is avoidant. They’ve all put their own personal spin on which flavor of avoidant I probably have, but… I am an avoidant attacher.
I see a lot of accounts here talking about being the person who is trying to cope with a partner who is avoidantly attached. There’s a couple of other accounts that are pretty obviously low-effort/coaching sales funnels claiming to be the avoidant.
I’m going to pre-warn everybody that I’m not selling anything which means… I have zero motivation to tell you what I think you want to hear. I’m going to talk about what I’m pretty sure you want to talk about. But I have no reason to tell you lies that lead you into a funnel so you will give me money. I’m not even making ad revenue off of this article, honestly. So you’re going to get the truth. But if you are in a fragile emotional place, this may not be the day to read this article.
As with any good content writer, I have put the thing that I suspect is most valuable and that most people are actually interested in at the very bottom, so… scroll if you don’t feel like reading everything.
But there seems to be very little authentic content on the Internet right now about what’s going on with actual human beings who experience avoidant attachment as their own attachment style. So I thought I would volunteer myself as tribute.
Hope this is helpful in understanding the person you love who may be an avoidant attacher and deciding if you want to continue that connection or not. Also, as a note, I have written this article with the perspective that you are likely dealing with somebody who is either already in therapy and doing the best they can or not willing to go to therapy. Basically: I’m not allowing “they should just go to therapy and then everything would be fine” to be a factor in this article. That may or might not be true for avoidant-attaching people of various types. But what is definitely true is that you cannot control if an avoidant person other than yourself goes to therapy or if that therapy will help them. So I’m trying to give you information that will be helpful in the context of the decisions you can make and the things that you do control.
Let’s begin.
The quiet: maintaining control. But of who?
Unquestionably, the biggest complaint leveled at people with avoidant attachment styles is that they go quiet, give their partners the silent treatment, or disappear from communication for long periods of time. And yeah, this is distressing. It’s really hard when the person you love just vanishes out of your reality for a while. It provokes anxiety, fear, and, to a certain extent, trauma. And for people who have abandonment issues, this stomps all over that wound.
The popular myth is that people with avoidant attachment styles go quiet because they are trying to control you, give you the cold shoulder, and maintain a position of power over you. Coaches will endlessly say that you need to follow a certain script in order to break the silence and regain the power in the relationship. And here’s the interesting thing: I’ve listened to all of those scripts and I’ve never yet heard one that would’ve worked on me.
As someone with an avoidant attachment style, I frequently have had times where I went completely silent on romantic partners, and even platonic friends. These periods of time could range from a few hours to several weeks. And there were things that could be said to me to get me to reengage. But the coaches’ scripts always fall short of the mark because the coaches are approaching this problem from the perspective of control and power pointed from the avoidant towards their partner.
The reality is, they’ve got it pointed the wrong direction. As an avoidant, I didn’t go silent to control other people. I went silent to control myself.
My emotions, my anxiety, my perception of the situation… When that was spiraling out of control, that’s when I went quiet. When I was overwhelmed mentally and emotionally and likely to start making decisions based on what somebody else wanted from me rather than what I wanted for myself… that’s when I backed away.
It was always because I had a sense that my internal barometer was compromised and I needed to regain balance. I wasn’t trying to manipulate my partner. I was trying to make sure that anything I did or said was fully under my control and not happening under the influence of somebody else. I wanted to maintain my autonomy and be authentically myself, and show up intentionally rather than by default.
So what would have gotten me to come back and communicate? “Hey, I don’t know if you need a little break or something. But until I hear otherwise, I’m going to assume you don’t want to continue this relationship. Let me know if I’m reading that wrong.”
That would get me every time. Sometimes what it got was me to formally break up with the person. More often what it got was clarification that I would be back and they would then establish expectations and boundaries. The other person being willing to let go rather than pursue put me in a binary head space: respond and stay connected or don’t and lose them. The math got way simpler.
Now, this does *not* eliminate the need for space. And if it happens repeatedly, it will cause your avoidant to break things off. But as an opening salvo negotiations, this is both reasonable safe and effective.
The dismissals: refusing boundary expansion
Another accusation leveled at those who attach avoidantly is that we will frequently dismiss other people’s feelings, thoughts, and needs. Being on the receiving end of this is obviously pretty tough. You expressed a desire, an emotion, a hope for the future, a request for support, or any of a number of other emotionally charged communications… and your partner shuts the conversation down as quickly as possible. That’s hurtful. It feels like you’re being rejected, punished for feeling, treated as though your experience doesn’t matter and the person doesn’t care about you.
But as with all things with avoidant people, the reality is a lot more complicated than that. Most of the time, when coaches talk about how to handle this, they suggest that the avoidant lacks empathy and that you should try to point out that their behavior demonstrates this lack. They also frequently recommend fairly harsh verbal beatdowns of the avoidant to guilt them into going back to whatever conversation/need/expression they just opted out of.
The problem with that advice is that it doesn’t even attempt to address the cause of the dismissal. It treats it like it’s somehow about the avoidant person’s ego, and that that ego just needs to be broken into some pieces before it will be functional for the purposes of the partner.
In reality, when avoidants like me are dismissing something, it’s actually a specific tactic to avoid expanding boundaries that we have already established and do not wish to move. I will admit, it’s not always the best or most mature way to do this. But it is usually specifically us trying to say, “We have a boundary in this area already. I don’t want to move that boundary.”
If we were better communicators, it would frequently look like:
“No, I’m not comfortable talking about your childhood trauma. I think you should go talk to someone else about that. Would it be helpful if I assisted you in researching some therapists? Maybe a spiritual advisor could help?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about moving in together right now. I don’t feel that we know each other well enough for me to even entertain that suggestion. But if you would like, we can talk about the ways we could move towards that goal.”
“No, I do not have the emotional capacity to help you deal with your rough day today. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I genuinely have no spoons for this. Can I support you in some other way than listening to you talk about it?”
It isn’t that we don’t care about you. It’s that we are extremely afraid of having boundaries expanded beyond our emotional capacity and without our consent. A lot of us have trauma around being people’s emotional surrogates specifically, and for me personally, I also had a good bit of trauma around people who spiraled up rather than down when they vented.
On a realistic level, this means that most of the time, the support that you need is something we will be able to provide eventually, but not now. And for some people, this may mean we are not an acceptable partner.
But if you still want to make it work with your avoidant after realizing this, try inviting us into conversations about our capacity and alternative ways we can support you either preventatively or in real time.
The push-pull: maintaining attraction
Oh boy. This one’s rough. A very classic thing that people say about avoidant attachment-style partners is that they create a sense of push and pull, hot and cold, back-and-forth. There’s no stability. It’s always up and then down, swinging like a pendulum, never finding a nice middle ground.
Coaches will tell you that this is a narcissistic attempt to keep you off balance and make sure you are unstable and cannot advocate for yourself. It actually couldn’t be farther from that.
But just because it’s not a narcissistic abuse tactic does not mean that it’s healthy.
The Venn diagram of people who have an avoidant attaching style and some degree of history with disorganized attachment is a near circle. The Venn diagram of people with avoidant attachment style and serious emotional trauma is an actual circle.
For a lot of us, we are not neurologically capable of feeling interested in you if things become… peaceful. We don’t usually swing full into disorganized territory where actual chaos and destruction are perceived as a sign of safety and emotional bonding. Instead, we swing back-and-forth between distance and closeness. We want to be all up in your business, knowing every single detail about your life, talking to you for nine hours on the phone, wrapped around you and literally physically sitting on top of you for 48 hours and then… not talk to you for a week.
To us, going back-and-forth feels like the stoking of a fire: we’re familiar with the cycle, so we can run through the acceleration, the deceleration, the emotional pivot, and then accelerate back up again. It’s sort of like having romantic bipolar disorder. Katy Perry’s lyric “someone call the doctor, got a case of a love bipolar: you’re hot then you’re cold, you’re yes then you’re no…” Yeah. We’re doing that on purpose. Because that’s what feels like love to us.
Maybe more importantly: that’s what feels attractive to us. We think it’s hot. We don’t find peace hot.
And just to be worse: we don’t think you being upset about it is hot either. That goes in the camp of things to dismiss and side step.
We want the variation and to be in charge of when and how it happens.
This whole stable, peaceful, regular communication, “I love you” every single day type of a thing… that feels like a trap. That feels like someone is going to wake up one morning and go, “Ha ha, all of that was a lie! Stab!”
This is where I think you should ignore the coaches completely but also, don’t put up with the behavior. For me, this behavior only ever stopped when my partner took serious and straightforward steps to stabilize, regulate, and balance the overall emotional tone.
When they went out of their way to make sure that every single interaction I had with them had the same emotional stability, not necessarily the same emotion but the same stability and clarity… that was when the hot and cold stopped feeling necessary and I was able to dig deeper for attraction. They showed me that I wasn’t allowed to dictate, but that they had the control and balance in themselves to be transparent and hold my interest.
This one will take time and patience and, honestly, if you are not in the place of deep emotional stability with an excellent support network, you’re probably not in a position to do this for an avoidant.
The roster: we do it for safety, not ego
Oh, how the coaches love to harp on this one. “Your avoidant has a roster of people that they go to. When you start to demand accountability from them, they just ditch you and go to the next person who won’t ask anything from them! It feeds their ego and makes them feel important without having to ever actually put any real effort in.”
Yeah… that’s wrong. Utterly wrong. It has nothing to do with our ego. We’re not trying to get something for nothing. We’re not keeping an extra person on standby for when we get tired of you. That’s not the point.
Avoidant people have a roster because we hold one fundamental belief about human beings. Human beings are too much.
You are too much for us. Everyone is too much for us. And we assume we are also too much for other people.
We assume that you get sick of us, just like we get sick of you. And it’s not the “I’m sick of you, I’m done with you” type of sick… It’s the “I love you, but if I have to hear your voice again today I’m going to scream” type of sick. We assume that you feel about us exactly that way because we experience that feeling about you.
We get overwhelmed, overloaded, and overstimulated with a specific connection. And we make the backwards assumption that other people are having the same human experience.
Because of that, we try to rotate ourselves through a few different people. And contrary to the coaches’ malignant opinions: this is not always a sexual or even romantic roster. It’s more often a platonic roster made out of a combination of family, colleagues, and friends. We can be perfectly exclusive with you, but also bow out of the connection when we get overloaded, assuming that you also need a break. And then we go to our friend from work who always wants to talk about that weird hobby we have, or our mom who’s always willing to listen to whatever is going on with our mental health, or our best friend who’s always down to go and get tacos and ask no questions at 3 o’clock in the morning…
And after we have that experience with them, we assume they are also tired of us, just like we assumed you were, just like we are now tired of them… and we move on to the next person.
The roster is not a reflection of ego or a desire to be unfaithful. It is a reflection of the fact that most of us have very limited capacity for the amount of anxiety we feel in any given human interaction or connection. We, usually incorrectly, assume that everybody has this problem.
We’re not trying to abandon you: we’re trying to give you space so you don’t hate us.
This is the part where I’m not sure how to give advice because truthfully… while I don’t think infidelity or even most forms of non-monogamy are healthy or acceptable… I do think people need to have friends and connections outside of a romantic relationship, and that should not only be considered healthy but also normal. I don’t actually think you should try to intervene in your avoidant partner’s roster. You probably need to establish boundaries about what kind of people and connections can be on that roster if your avoidant wants to have a relationship with you. But realistically, their capacity for connecting with you will increase over time, and time and consistency are the only things that will increase it. There is no shortcut.
And in the meantime… we need that roster. And frankly… so do you. You should have one too.
The compartments: consciously side-stepping interdependence
One more thing that is a little less common as an accusation but still comes up is that avoidants are experts at over-compartmentalizing things. They have different buckets for everyone and everything in their lives. And when you are on the receiving end of being put into a bucket, that can feel very frustrating. It’s like your avoidant has designated you as “romantic partner,” and that means that you are excluded from all other categories including, but not limited to, platonic friend, family member, work colleague, fellow hobby enthusiast… The intense narrowing of your role feels like they are trying to limit the amount of emotional impact you have in their lives.
And this is where the coaches are actually dead right.
Yes. That’s exactly what the avoidant is trying to do. We are trying to put you into an easy-to-understand, easily defined, easily contained box. We don’t like messy things. We don’t like things that spill over into other categories without permission. We don’t like having to figure out how to treat you like a lover on Friday and a best friend on Saturday and a work colleague on Monday morning. This is not a thing we enjoy.
And the coaches suggest, rightfully, the way to handle this is simply to be very clear that you want to be in other categories. And I actually agree with most of the advice in this area.
People who communicated to me that they wanted to be in other parts of my life, that they wanted to share in my family connections, that they wanted me to see them as a friend, not just a sexual partner, that they valued my professional opinion, not just my romantic connection… Those are the people who wound up having the most meaningful connections with me.
But the important thing was, they had to go first. They had to initiate that conversation. Realistically, I was never going to do that because, to me, asking somebody to get out of those boxes is not too stressful for me but feels unfair to them.
The other half of compartmentalization is a deep fear of inadequacy. When we avoidant people are trying to compartmentalize you, it’s because we are trying to limit the potential for interdependence. Any human relationship comes with a certain amount of interdependence, but if you limit the scope of that relationship to a very narrow role, you limit the risk of multiple points of dependency.
This simultaneously lowers our risk of relying on you in multiple places and having more points of failure on your side… but also lowers the risk of you relying on us in multiple areas and us having multiple places where we might fail you. We are deeply afraid that we will fail you. We recognize that we have very limited capacity in certain areas, and may be outright emotionally handicapped in others. We don’t want you to depend on us and then us be unable to hold up our end of the deal and something awful happen to you either practically or emotionally. Genuinely… we don’t want that.
So when you ask to move from one compartment into another, be prepared to get turned down. And be prepared to say, “OK. But just so you know, that’s what I want. I’m not gonna wait forever. But let’s revisit that in a little while, OK? And if you have something that would make it feel safe for me to do this, let me know.”
That’s the only way to escape the one-box setting. Realistically, we need to do this for you if we want the relationship to grow. We also need to be confident that you really want the relationship to grow and that you are willing to work with us on how risky that feels.
The non-monogamy: retaining sexual power
This is really tough, but we have to talk about how prevalent non-monogamy is with avoidant people. And I count myself on this list. I practiced various types of non-monogamy for years because I was, largely, extremely avoidant in all areas related to sex and romance.
Get Avion Blackstone’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
And yes, that is a big part of the reason I was involved in non-monogamy at all.
When you are the person who loves an avoidant who is insisting on non-monogamy, you will go through a range of emotions and attempted explanations. We are likely going to tell you that it’s because “no person is enough for another person” or “I’m bisexual and I have to have both genders” or “I just never could see myself being limited to just one love”… or some other non-monogamy politically correct nonsense.
And because there is an entire community behind us saying that all of that is probably legitimate, you are likely to actually believe it and give taking us at our word a try. And then you will immediately run face-first into the fact that we absolutely hate it if you are non-monogamous. Uno reverse.
So what’s going on here besides just being hypocritical and impossible? Well, for one thing, most of us are not actually being hypocritical. What we’re being is bad communicators, or more specifically, liars.
There are two lies of omission that avoidant people usually “tell” when they are refusing to be monogamous with you.
The first lie is that we will not confess to you that we are very afraid of having our sexual power taken away. We frequently see sex itself as a symbol of personal power. Many of us have had people use it against us either to control our behavior or to just flat-out abuse us. Many of us have gone through a lot of shaming or religious trauma related to sex and sexuality. Handing over the commitment to only be sexual with one person feels like we are giving that person control over our life. It literally produces the same amount of panic as if we were to give you a button that you could push to instantly kill us whenever you wanted. But very importantly, it’s just the fact that you have that power that scares us. It’s not about wanting to keep that power to ourselves: it’s about being afraid someone else will abuse it.
And that leads us into the second lie of omission. A lot of us will tell you we want to be non-monogamous because we are so bisexual, mega-sexual, multisexual, mega-romantic… whatever. And in reality… we aren’t. We’re head over heels obsessed with just you and only you, both sexually and romantically. But we find that level of obsession terrifying, and we don’t yet trust you to have that kind of power over us. So we try to lead you to believe that that obsession does not exist. Many of us would quite literally rather die than go to bed with someone else but you. Some of us will fake it just because we’re really committed to the bit. But at the end of the day, the truth is that we are doing everything in our power to prevent you from knowing that we are hopelessly hung up on you.
We do not trust you with the amount of power you would know you had over us if you understood how important to us you are both romantically and sexually.
So what’s the fix? Coaches will tell you to practice non-monogamy with us. I actually think that’s a terrible idea. If you say, “Great, let’s be non-monogamous,” what we hear is, “Oh… They actually do want other people. That makes them even less safe for me to ever truly commit to.” Which is why we absolutely hate it when you actually go out and do the non-monogamy thing.
Oh, and if you say yes to being non-monogamous, then we will perform non-monogamy. Not actually being non-monogamous… just… make it look like we really, really, really love dating other people and have tons of partners and are having such a great fucking time. We will put on a show. It’s frequently a show we hate… but it’s armor.
Every once in a while, there is an avoidant who genuinely is non-monogamous, polyamorous, or has a difficult time making up their mind between more than one person. But those are actually the exception, not the rule for us.
So what should you do? Refuse.
Just refuse. Point blank. Tell us straight up that if we want to be in a sexual, romantic relationship with you, it’s going to have to be exclusive. Tell us you understand that monogamy is a big commitment and it can be scary, but that you’re willing to work through it with us. And then back it up. If we won’t agree, walk away.
I can’t 100% guarantee every avoidant will chase you if you do this, but… I chased every single time someone did it to me. Every time I ever tried it on someone else, they chased. And every time I’ve ever seen somebody not involved with me do it… the avoidant chased.
So I’m pretty confident that if you are looking to move things towards monogamy, just pull it out into the open and acknowledge that you know this is a big act of trust and responsibility, and then refuse to be non-monogamous. Address our concerns, but make it clear this is not an acceptable way to address them.
The slowest burn: we have a tiered idea of intimacy, not a category system.
Continuing our list of things that avoidant-attaching partners are frequently accused of and sometimes guilty of: having the very slowest of burns when it comes to making progress in a relationship. This one I completely understand. There is a sort of “normal” range for moving relationships forward. It’s actually been pretty well studied, and you can go dig up the research on that with a couple of Google searches, but… many people who are partnered to an avoidant feel like they are somehow on the slow boat from frozen molasses town when it comes to making concrete forward motion in a relationship with their partner. And this is anxiety-provoking for all kinds of reasons.
Why won’t they make it official? Why won’t they put a label on it? Well, now that we’ve had a label on it for five years, why won’t they move in? But we’ve been living together for a decade. I think we could start planning the wedding now…
I get it. It’s infuriating and often feels inexplicable because everything else in the relationship will seem to be going well and yet there’s no forward momentum.
And dating coaches will say this is where you need to throw down ultimatums, give timelines, and choose yourself if the avoidant doesn’t meet your timelines.
And this is where I will come in and say… I stand with them on that advice. And also… your avoidant is going to dump you.
The slow movement of relationship progress for avoidant attachers is usually attributed to them being afraid, lacking capacity to love, and just wanting to keep their options open. And while I will not say that none of that can apply, it’s usually something a little bit more concrete and weirder.
Most of us avoidant attachers have a different idea of the system by which two people go from strangers to life partners. If you’ve read any articles about the “relationship escalator,” or if you wanna Google that really quick, it will probably inform a little bit about what I’m about to say here.
Avoidants don’t typically see the relationship escalator as a straight line, which drives people practicing traditional monogamous relationships crazy. But they also don’t see relationships as being freeform, having no agenda or shape, and just being “as the spirit moves us,” which tends to drive the non-monogamy crowd crazy.
Instead, most avoidants that I know, and myself also, see relationships more like a winding train route. There is forward momentum. There is a goal. And usually that goal is some form of life partnership with the right person. But we want extended periods of time to test particular aspects of the relationship during a range of conditions, and many of those conditions take a long time to occur naturally.
Your avoidant wants to see what you are like when you’re in great mental health and terrible mental health. They want to see what you’re like when you’re having family troubles, when you and they have to do a tedious and boring task together, how you react to the waitress who got your order wrong.
And very importantly: we want to see that you have a consistent set of reactions across all of these experiences. Not that you react to your mom yelling at you the same way you react to the waitress getting your order wrong. Instead, we want to see that every time your mom yells at you, you respond roughly the same way. And every time the waitress gets your order wrong, you have the same reaction.
We are looking for consistency over time. We actually tend to have less of a problem with someone who screams at the waitress for a bad order and more of a problem with someone who screams at one waitress and is polite to a different one. We are combing through your behavior, long-term, looking for inconsistencies and instability.
If we see that you are very solid, very secure, very regular… even if you are consistently awful… we will move you to the next stage of the relationship after we feel we have thoroughly vetted that. We feel like we know what we’re dealing with.
And this is where I go back to saying I think the coaches have the right advice. There is no shortcut through this particular train ride with us. Every avoidant has their own list of things that they need to see and their own threshold for how often and how intensely they need to see them.
Could we work on this in therapy? Yes. Will we? No.
And especially if you are somebody who wants to have children, or has goals for your life that involve a partner by a certain time, an avoidant is probably gonna be a bad match for you. And if you try to give us ultimatums about time, we will determine that you and us are not a match and we will let you go.
The ‘Not In Love’ policy: avoiding your hidden self
I told you I saved the most important one for the bottom of the page. So here it is. No, I’m not even sorry about the clickbait. It was very small clickbait.
Avoidant attachers are legendary for avoiding falling in love, being in love, expressing love, and verbalizing love. You get stupid things out of us like, “Of course I love you. I’m just not in love with you yet.” Or even worse things like, “I’m madly in love with you. But I need to wait until I’m less in love with you before I can commit to you.”
That should drive any sane person wild with aggravation. Trust me, it drives avoidant people crazy too, and we are living on the inside of it.
Coaches don’t actually have a lot of useful information about this other than to just say we are lying when we say we have feelings for you, or that we’re lying when we say we don’t have feelings for you, or just generally that we are lying about everything. And then they recommend tips on how to manipulate us.
Don’t do that. I’m gonna tell you the one and only thing you actually need to know about avoidants and, honestly… this may solve every single other problem above if you can get this piece right.
The biggest fear that every avoidant has, bigger than any other, is that once we are truly emotionally bound to you, where we feel that you are our soulmate, the person we cannot live without, the life partner, the better half… this is the one big lifetime love… we are afraid that as soon as we actually let you know that that’s how we feel… you’re gonna turn into a whole different person.
And this is why most of us are avoidant in the first place.
Most of us who are avoidant attachers had a parent who did this on some level. They acted one way under certain conditions and then would radically change under others. Some of us have previous experience with romantic relationships where there was a night-and-day/Jekyll-and-Hyde thing going on. Many of us grew up in households where there was addiction or violence that would break out randomly from people who otherwise seemed safe.
We are absolutely, objectively terrified that the instant we let you know that we can’t emotionally afford to bail on this relationship… you’re going to say, “Oh, thank God, I can quit pretending to be a good person now.” And then out will come all the mental illness you didn’t tell us about, all of the deceit, bad behavior, selfishness, abusive tendencies, jealousy, controlling tactics, coercion, and anger.
This is the thing we are absolutely the most afraid of in relationships: you are going to switch it up.
And here’s the thing… most people do switch it up a bit once a relationship becomes stabilized emotionally. And that would even be in the category of normal.
But because of the trauma most of us carry, we are also hypervigilant to any deviation in people’s behavior and tend to interpret it as something lethal to the relationship.
Do we go from having sex 8 times a week to 5 times a month? Science says that’s normal. But our brain says that’s because you stopped caring about us and you’re not attracted to us anymore.
Did you get comfortable farting around us because you’ve known us for five years? Science says that’s normal. Anecdotes also say that’s normal. Our brain says that’s because you’ve lost respect for us and don’t care to be courteous to us anymore.
I could go on with endless examples, but I think you see where this is headed.
We are hypersensitive to tiny changes. Consistency is the thing we are looking for. Even the smallest deviations feel like an existential threat.
But the problem is that human beings do have natural deviations, and it has nothing to do with the quality of their romantic relationships. Sometimes people are just having a bad day. A certain amount of relaxation in relationships is normal. And occasionally, it’s not even a real deviation, just a pattern your avoidant didn’t notice before.
So if you want us to say I love you, and be vulnerable to you, and let you know that you are the only person on earth who really holds our heart… you’re probably going to have to get us into some kind of therapy.
No, not necessarily traditional therapy, although that might be a good idea too. But on a realistic level, there’s going to have to be some deliberate work done to desensitize us to small adjustments both to our environment and the behavior of our partner.
Multiple studies have shown that people with avoidant attachment disorders are every bit as anxious, and usually more so, than anxious attachers. The problem is not that we don’t care and not that we don’t notice. It’s the exact opposite.
The nerves are really raw. The vulnerability feels incredibly dangerous. The danger is not actually real. And that means that the healing has to come from desensitization.
And… desensitization is a long, consistent, difficult, nonlinear healing process. Your avoidant may not have the patience to go through it. You may not have the patience to wait for them while they go through it. And neither one of you may be stable enough to do it right now. And that might just be the reality.
But if you can desensitize us, as my partner of now nearly a decade has taken time to do with me, the rewards can be profound.
In summary: time heals most but not all wounds
I feel a little bit sad writing this article because I realize what I have just essentially said to many people, especially people who are highly anxious, is that their relationship with an avoidant partner is going to fail.
And realistically, that is the truth. Relationships with avoidants are very difficult. And to be blunt, you do probably deserve better than you’re receiving currently.
But just because you deserve better does not mean that the person you love is capable of doing better.
And I think the big question, if you are somebody who loves an avoidant attacher, is this: do you have time and stability to bankroll the formation of this relationship?
This is going to be slow. It’s going to be hard. For you, it will probably be lonely. Is the reward at the end worth it? Maybe. Only you can really decide that.
But what the reward is not is guaranteed.
Time heals most wounds. But it also forms a lot of wounds.
If you give your avoidant enough time, and you stay consistent and solid, and you commit to the process, you will probably succeed in building a meaningful relationship with them, one that meets or exceeds your needs.
But you have to decide how much damage you can take during that process. Not everybody is equipped to wait 10 years to move from dating exclusively to commitment. And that’s not an unrealistic timeframe for an avoidant. There can be real health and mental health costs to choosing to stay in a situation with an avoidant partner.
You’re the only person who can decide if it’s worth it; if they are worth it.
Personally, even as an avoidant-attaching person myself, I do recommend choosing yourself. If you know you’re not going to be able to live a happy life without this person by your side, then yeah. It’s probably worth it for you to stick it out. But if it’s any other answer than that… you should write that breakup letter.
I am sorry.
And I wish I had better solutions for you.
But I do hope this helps some people know what they’re dealing with, and maybe some realize if they are wasting their time.
