Five Ways to Handle an Avoidant Partner

Is it ever worth trying to shore up a relationship with someone who exhibits traits associated with what psychologists term ‘avoidance’, in other words, with someone who is extremely reticent about displaying and receiving affection and who seems in many ways better suited to a life alone than in a couple?

Let’s assume, for the purposes of this essay (and in full knowledge that there are plenty of cases where this won’t apply), that the answer might be a tentative ‘yes’; that there is here no risk of outright abuse and that the person under consideration is kind and responsive enough for their difficulties to merit a degree of patience and exploration. How then might we try to get a relationship with them onto a better footing? Five ideas present themselves:

1. Understand their diagnosis

Part of the difficulty of handling an avoidant person lies in being clear exactly what the issue with them might be. It can be extremely tempting to mistake avoidant behaviour for two things: hatred towards us. And, a related conclusion, evidence that there is something wrong with us. If we side with either of these two (hugely painful) interpretations, we will never be able to get beyond offended hurt on the one hand and self-contempt on the other. We may have to hold on to the thought that the partner is afflicted by a well-charted psychological condition that existed long before we came on the scene, that makes no reference to anything about us and that though it may frustrate us, is not deliberately aimed at causing us harm. The reason that our partner is the way they are is that somewhere in their early lives, as in the early lives of every avoidant person (a category that may comprise as many as 25% of the population), there will have been a very unfulfilling and painful bond with a primary caregiver or parent, there will have been neglect, violence or humiliation and from this, a powerful impression will have been formed: ‘Relationships with others are dangerous’. And: ‘I can only be substantially safe when I am alone; others cannot meet my needs.’ 

2. The avoidant person is terrified

The avoidant wants love as much as any of us; they are simply too terrified to tolerate it when it arrives. At its approach, they fear that their carefully built defences against others will be stripped from them and that they will be hurt by someone once more as they were in their infancy. If we can keep this in mind, we can look at much of what the avoidant person does through a more tolerant lens: they have gone into the next room not because they are bored by us but because they are at some level apprehensive of, and drained by us. They are spending so much time with their friends not because they don’t want us, but because they are afraid that their dependence on us exposes them to untenable risks. The behaviour may continue to be sub-optimal, its interpretation may dampen the worst of its effects. 

3. Self-awareness

There is an enormous difference between an avoidant person who knows that they are such a thing and one who angrily refuses any suggestion of their diagnosis. Insight may not stop the behaviour entirely but it can encourage the sufferer to explain what they are doing, to apologise for the consequences and to take measures to alter themselves. Once a person can say ‘I’m so sorry that I’m avoidant, I will try to watch myself and take this to therapy,’ an important part of the battle is won. 

4. Helping them feel less engulfed

We know that someone who has suffered a trauma to their digestive system will not be able to eat too much too soon. We need, in handling avoidants, to apply some of the same logic around emotional nourishment. We may need to cut our love for them up into small pieces. We may need to shield them from the full glare of our affection. We may need not to send them too many messages. We may have to emphasise our more independent moods. We might have to deploy humour to get a paradox across, ‘I know this is going to worry you, but I’m afraid I love you a lot…’

5. The problem is mutual

However, what will ultimately help us to deal with an avoidant partner is for us to confront a highly provocative truth about ourselves: they are not the only ones with a problem. We aren’t here by coincidence. We could have left them politely after the first date, when we will almost certainly – at an unconscious level – have first sensed their issue. We didn’t have to fall in love; we didn’t have to keep coming back. If we did, it’s because there is something in us that keeps wanting to be here. It may look as though they are unwell, and we are wholly healthy, because they are refusing love and we have a rich ability to offer it to them. But the underlying reality is different. If we offer love to people who don’t seem to much want it, if our deepest attractions are for people who can’t easily absorb our affections, then we are not too well either. We too must be scared of reciprocity, we too must be avoiding the intensity and vulnerability of a properly functioning relationship, most likely because in our childhoods, one of our parents was avoidant. It may look as if we are enthusiasts of tenderness, but we have in the end merely offshored out own incapacities; we are pointing to someone else’s problem in lieu of reflecting on our own more camouflaged version. If we were approached by someone infinitely warm, kind and present (as we probably have been a few times in our lives), we would in all likelihood run for the hills and exhibit all the reticence, fear and evasiveness we complain of in our partner. 

Once we know this of ourselves, we can move into a position of greater sympathy. We’re dealing with a joint issue that simply displays its most visible signs in them; but both of us are in truth emotionally compromised. Both of us are scared, we’ve just handled the fear slightly differently: they by spending a lot of time alone, we – not coincidentally but more subtly – by falling in love with someone who needs to spend a lot of time alone. 

We can take mutual responsibility for our tattered condition, stop name calling, and move hand in hand towards one day being able to meet the ecstasies and terrors of love with greater trust and hope.