Every Distressed Couple Has One Partner Who Is Avoidant.

I have written about thoughts on my own “attachment style” (link), how it differs depending on if I view from the lens of my Mother, father or other relationships and different periods through out them. More often than not, I fall under “secure”.

It also depends on what time frame I’m look at. With my father, it’s moved multiple times between “disorganized” (link) and secure, depending on what period of our relationship. From what I understand, these attachment styles are not concrete or permanent. They ebb and flow depending on environment, circumstance and effort to repair/heal afterwards.

For some reason, Cris was opening wounds and old damaged parts of me I haven’t seen in a long time. Very often, when things were turbulent with us, I would be come “anxiously attached”. This mostly happened when things became difficult. Cris has a tendency to shut down, not talk and hold our relationship hostage. I would chase and try to resolve. She would run even further.

There is a lot more to it than that. This simplification doesn’t take in to account my mental health struggles, my relationship with alcohol or this newly discovered ADHD diagnosis and character traits that likely stem from that. But the basis of our disagreements followed this runner/chaser pattern.

I have deliberately avoided putting Cris in a box of any kind. I know the damage she did to me by trying to “diagnose” me and labelling me a narcissist (link), so I did not want to do the same. But it’s clear as day that when things got difficult, she closed up and ran. The day I ended our relationship, I (way over) reacted to her doing that and she did it for no reason at all (which is why it hurt so fucking much – link).

I came across something today that made me so fucking emotionally reactive, filled with everything from regret, guilt, shame, acceptance, anger, frustration, sadness and this feeling of “holy fuck, why didn’t I see this a year a go”? The worst feeling of them all is regret. Regret because even though I’ve moved on, I know we didn’t have to. Both of us wanted to fight FOR US…..we just weren’t fighting side-by-side anymore.

The piece below was written by relationship therapist and coach, Derek Hart.

I just wanted to paste it here because of how much it felt like I was reading the script from periods of my relationship with Cris.

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The Plight of the Distressed Couple
Every distressed couple has one partner who is avoidant. Every single one.

The avoidant isn’t the villain. They’re the one who learned long ago that shutting down keeps the peace. They learned that silence hurts less than being rejected. They learned that emotional distance feels safer than emotional chaos.

And the anxious partner? They’re not crazy or needy. They’re the one who learned that closeness is survival. That if they don’t fight for the connection, it’ll disappear. That raising their voice, asking one more question, sending one more text, might be the only way to feel loved.

This dynamic, one closing and one chasing, destroys more relationships than betrayal ever will. Because betrayal you can name. You can point at it. But this cycle is invisible. It’s made of confusion, self-blame, and good intentions that slowly turn toxic.

The avoidant partner doesn’t wake up thinking, “I’m going to hurt my partner today.” They wake up hoping for peace. They tell themselves, “If I can just stay calm, if I don’t make it worse, maybe we’ll be okay.” But calmness, when it’s used to protect yourself instead of connect, isn’t calm at all. It’s emotional absence disguised as composure.

And the anxious partner doesn’t wake up thinking, “I’m going to nag, criticize, and overwhelm.” They wake up thinking, “I just want to feel close to you again.” They don’t realize that their push for connection feels like pressure to the avoidant.

So the anxious person says, “Why won’t you talk to me?” and the avoidant hears, “You’re doing it wrong again.” The avoidant says, “Can we just drop it?” and the anxious hears, “You don’t care about me.”
Both of them are right. Both of them are wrong. Both are suffering.

This is the twisted brilliance of the avoidant-anxious loop. It makes both partners feel justified while guaranteeing that both feel unseen.

The anxious one says, “I’m just trying to communicate.” The avoidant says, “I’m trying to stay calm.” Both think they’re doing the right thing, and both are unknowingly feeding the same monster.

The anxious person starts describing their pain, but it comes out like blame. “You never listen.” “You don’t care.” “You’re so cold.” What they mean is, “I’m terrified you’ll leave.”

The avoidant person starts defending themselves. “That’s not true.” “You’re overreacting.” “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.” What they mean is, “I’m terrified I’ll never get it right.”

The tragedy is that both are scared for the same reason. Neither knows how to find safety in the other.
You can call it attachment theory. You can call it trauma. But under the theory, it’s two nervous systems trying to regulate in opposite directions. One says, “Come closer so I can calm down.” The other says, “Stay away so I can calm down.”

And round and round it goes.

Here’s the part no one wants to hear. If you keep labeling your partner instead of learning to reach for them, you’re killing the relationship. Calling your partner “avoidant” or “anxious” is not self-awareness, it’s self-protection disguised as insight. You’re weaponizing your vocabulary to avoid vulnerability.
The diagnosis isn’t the cure.

Every time you label instead of feel, you create another mile of distance. You stop being two people trying to love each other and become two analysts dissecting a corpse that used to be a connection.
The avoidant isn’t evil for needing space. The anxious isn’t wrong for needing closeness. What’s tragic is that neither knows how to hold both truths at once.

The avoidant needs to learn that space isn’t safety if it costs you love. The anxious needs to learn that connection isn’t real if it’s forced.

And both need to learn that healing doesn’t happen when you win the argument. It happens when you understand the wound.

The anxious person has to slow down enough to see the fear behind the withdrawal, not to chase it, but to witness it. The avoidant has to stay long enough to see the pain behind the protest, not to fix it, but to stay with it.

That’s what it means to make contact.

It’s not dramatic. It’s not poetic. It’s uncomfortable as hell. It’s sitting across from the person you love, realizing you’ve both been hurting for years, and saying, “I don’t know how to do this differently yet, but I don’t want to keep doing it like this.”

That’s where real change begins.

Most couples never get there. They stay stuck in the belief that if they could just explain better, listen harder, talk longer, they’d fix it. But talking is useless when you’re flooded. You can’t think your way out of a threat response. You can only feel your way through it.

You can’t repair connection with logic. You repair it by helping each other’s bodies feel safe again.
That means breathing when you want to bolt. That means softening when you want to defend. That means saying, “I’m scared,” instead of, “You’re impossible.”

If you’re the anxious partner, you have to stop chasing for proof of love and start offering the safety you wish you had. If you’re the avoidant partner, you have to stop hiding from intensity and start tolerating the discomfort of staying in the room.

You’re both wrong when you think the other is the problem. You’re both right that it hurts.
But the hurt won’t heal until you stop trying to be right and start trying to be real.

This pattern will not fix itself. You can spend ten years analyzing it, or you can decide to finally meet the person in front of you instead of their label.

If you want to save your relationship, stop diagnosing, stop explaining, stop pretending that distance is peace.

Get humble. Sit down. Feel the ache in your chest that says, “I miss you.” And say it out loud before pride steals the last chance you have to rebuild what’s real.

“I’ve been calling you avoidant for 6 months. Every time that must have gone in and hurt you, cut your heart to the core. I can barely recognize and feel all this between us. My stress about us connecting has nowhere to go. Can we get some support?”