u/Acceptable_Target627

I’m talking about the need to create emotional distance. Now that I understand how this whole thing works, I’m sure it’s not for me! Seriously, you’re telling me he feels threatened by the exact thing I look for in a relationship? This isn’t just about “needing space” sometimes. Anyone can need that! In fact, I would have no problem leaving someone I care about alone when I know they need to recharge.

The problem is the reason behind it. I could never be with someone who experiences the very thing that is fundamental to me as a problem: affection, connection, feeling close. I’m an affectionate person, so why the hell should I be with someone who doesn’t appreciate that, doesn’t value it, and doesn’t feel happy that I’m like that? I don’t want to become a worse version of myself just to make someone more comfortable when, frankly, it’s not even clear why they’re wasting my time... someone who maybe really does care, but God forbid they show it too much.

And the problem is also the pattern. Pulling away or going cold exactly when the relationship might start gaining momentum means making sure it never actually progresses. In my opinion, a lot of avoidants do everything they can not to understand this part. They pretend it’s about cultivating personal space, when in reality they’re sabotaging the core of the relationship and using these supposed “spaces” as weapons of sabotage. And I say “supposed” because I think that, a lot of the time, they literally invent new spaces solely to create distance from you, not because they have suddenly, genuinely discovered some great new passion for a thing you just happen to be unable to participate in. They would rather say you’re needy than admit what they’re doing.

And do we want to talk about the compulsion to constantly look for new people to spend time with, people they can show their relaxed version to, people they have no attachment to, while becoming colder and colder with you?

I’m sorry, but all of this is really sad. I could never be with someone who behaves like that. I just can’t imagine being in a relationship where I watch the other person use these petty little tactics, knowing there’s nothing I can do to change things. No, I’m not a masochist, and no, I don’t want to learn the ways to “avoid triggering him” and mutilate my own affection for a partner who sounds terrible even on paper.

Have you ever thought about all this in your own case?

This is a question I pose to all of you, because I'm curious to understand what kind of dynamic you were experiencing and if you felt satisfied.

For simplicity, let's limit ourselves to the last three months of the relationship.

I'll start. I'm sure I wasn't having fun, and I also know that this isn't a retrospective reconstruction because I was already talking about it with my best friend a month before the breakup. Here’s what I told her:

1. In the last three months, it seemed extremely difficult to have a satisfying conversation on any topic. By "satisfying," I mean the feeling that the other person actually took a moment to think before responding, rather than just replying with the first thing that came to mind, which, by the way, was as superficial as possible. Moreover, the time dedicated to conversation had also decreased. It felt like every conversation had to happen between one hectic commitment and another, to the point that I almost needed to be psychic to guess the right moment.

2. When I stopped to think about how it felt at the beginning of our relationship, I realized that his current version didn’t resemble him at all. I had been interested in him because I attributed certain qualities to him, so it wasn't a trivial matter. I told my friend: "I realize that if he had been like this from the start, I wouldn't have had any interest in getting to know him better."

3. Hot, cold, hot, cold. The suspicion that these mood swings could be a reaction to some mistake of mine had long been dismissed since I could never pinpoint anything that could reasonably explain them. It was clear that it wasn't my fault. However, a person who is cold on alternate days is cold for too high a percentage of the time for their company to be genuinely pleasant. And besides, it seemed he was following a trend where warm days were progressively decreasing.

4. Seeing that he was still able to chat with random acquaintances while he became practically unable to talk with me was frankly, and unnecessarily, painful.

5. It was as if, without ever saying it openly, he acted in a way that sent this message: "I owe you nothing, don’t count on my presence, there are plenty of other people and things in my life." There are plenty of people and things in my life too, maybe even more, yet I don't feel the need to emphasize it. I'm perfectly capable of carving out meaningful space for the people that matter to me and giving them my full attention when we're together. So I behaved very differently. I must admit that his attitude felt subtly offensive, as if he thought: "If you care so much about talking to me, maybe you have too much free time." I'm quite intolerant of this kind of rhetoric.

6. In his frantic need to prove to himself, and to me, that he wasn't involved or dependent, he even ended up missing important opportunities, as if mere presence was an obligation he was desperately trying not to be bound by. And while I can understand the underlying logic of his behavior, I kept asking myself: what’s the point of keeping someone close who is so eager to prove that they DON’T have to be present, or who always has the right to show up only on their own terms, as if it were a matter of principle rather than a real lack of free time? The practical effect is still your absence.

7. Frankly, his ambiguous, confused, and brusque way of communicating cost me too much cognitive energy just trying to understand what he meant. At first, I didn’t realize it, because I thought it was an isolated case where he had expressed himself unclearly. But by now, it had become a habit. And how many better things could I have done with that cognitive energy, instead of wasting it on someone who doesn’t even try to be understood?

8. If specific questions were asked about himself, he responded with the vagueness of a KGB secret agent. Indeed, worse, because at least a KGB agent would have had a cover and would have talked about that. So, really, it was like talking to a stone.

9. Every time I saw a notification from him on my phone, instead of being happy to hear from him, I felt a knot in my stomach: "What will I find in the chat? Will it be something that makes me happy? Or will it be another cold and brusque message that negatively impacts my mood? Has he pulled out one of his weird quirks again?" And, honestly? Hearing from him was no longer a pleasure.

Even more briefly:

Little presence + Little dialogue + Little depth + Little warmth + Little emotional availability + Little reciprocity + Too much mental effort required + Too much adjustment required + No joy

= A cold soup. But very expensive.

I look forward to your responses.

I’ve been thinking back over the last 5-6 years of my life. During this period, I’ve had to end 3 relationships with people I considered important.

2 of them were just friends.

What I noticed is that, in all three cases, the rupture happened when I pointed out that something they had done had hurt me.

And that really pissed me off, because I certainly hadn’t raised the issue to say: “Go away, I never want to see you again!” And yet, after I did, it seems like nobody wants to do a damn thing to repair things. They’d rather disappear than even consider the idea.

So here are my questions:

1. What the hell is people’s problem with repair?

2. Why does it seem like relationships only last as long as I’m the one making the effort to justify other people’s failures? I’m sick of it.

...did you ever reply: “Yeah, I agree”?

I’m just curious.

Hi everyone. Today was a strange day because exactly one month has passed since I started no contact. A lot of things today reminded me of the day of the breakup, partly because, by coincidence, I had to take the same routes I took that day, but whatever, it is what it is. I thought I’d write a sort of recap of how these 30 days have gone. Basically, I want to talk about my healing process.

I’ll start from the first day, obviously :)

Day 1: shock at his DARVO response, self-regulation, my exit response: start of NC.

Day 2-17: period of intense cognitive processing.

– I thought over and over again about the whole arc of our relationship from the very beginning, looking for an interpretive paradigm that could hold all the data together with the smallest possible number of local explanations

– I went through several before finding the “avoidant” paradigm.

– Intensive research on avoidant attachment style, and also on AvPD, just to be safe.

– At that point, I began rereading past episodes through that paradigm to see whether they made more sense that way. They did. Everything fit.

During these 15 days, most of my mental energy was absorbed by these reflections. In fact, I temporarily interrupted several of my routines, such as reading, writing, going out with friends, etc., and I had to postpone some tasks because I couldn’t concentrate. The things I did manage to do, I did, so to speak, on reserve energy. In the meantime, I kept “checking” his social media profiles, even though I had no intention of saying anything to him if I caught him online. Inside, I was tormented by the question: “Does he rationally realize he behaved like an asshole? Or does he genuinely think I deserved that response?” I can’t say I ever gave myself a definitive answer. At some point, as the days passed, it simply stopped being such an important question to me.

Day 18-20: slowing down of the cognitive work and beginning of detox.

– I started feeling that there was nothing left to analyze. Every episode had already been sifted through. The paradigm held up; there was no need to keep trying to falsify it. The cognitive sphere was at peace.

– I looked into the potential biochemical dependency triggered by intermittent reinforcement and decided to commit to no longer giving in to the impulse to “check his profile,” so as not to slow down the detox process. I also muted his profile to avoid accidentally seeing him online.

Day 21-25: additional strategies.

– I joined the dedicated subreddit. There, through reading similar experiences, I discovered the possibility of treating the issue as a kind of collective experience rather than a personal drama. This encouraged intellectualization and depersonalization of the problem, and also allowed me to pick up new nuances of the “avoidant” paradigm, which became more and more a useful body of knowledge in general rather than something tied only to one specific person. It also worked as a kind of “methadone” against the infamous impulse to check his profile.

– I noticed that, in my head, there are still two versions of him: on one hand, the version explained by the paradigm and supported by the totality of his actual behavior; on the other, the version I projected onto him because of my benevolent interpretations, mostly supported by the initial phase of our connection. The second version lived in my head for a long time, even while its correspondence with reality was beginning to wobble, and it is the version I had feelings for. I still sometimes think of it with tenderness. So, in order to avoid falling into the trap of “hoping” to find that second version again in the real person, I mentally gave it another name and allowed it to remain alive for a while as a separate entity.

Day 25-30: return to routine, reallocation of energy.

– To speed up my exit from the residual and now useless rumination, I started doing grounding exercises, especially the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise. I found it incredibly useful, honestly!

– I’ve resumed a good part of my routine and concentration, honestly. These past few days have been going well.

And that’s it. So how am I now?

Obviously, not everything is resolved. I still have negative thoughts related to him throughout the day. Every morning, before getting out of bed, I feel anger and disbelief simmering inside me, like: “Why the hell did he have to behave like that? Everything was fine.” I swear, there was no real problem. It wasn’t one of those relationships requiring any particular or demanding kind of planning for the future. I was only asking him for a minimum of vulnerability and emotional reciprocity. That shouldn’t be difficult. And even if he had wanted to slow things down, there were dozens of ways to do that gently and without drama, while staying on good terms. Instead, he did it in the crudest possible way, for no reason at all. It’s clear that there’s still a part of my brain that can’t believe it and thinks he deliberately wanted to hurt me without any valid reason.

But then I get out of bed, and that anger stays muted in the background, almost disappearing. In the end, whatever the reason, he chose to behave exactly like that. What can you do about it? Ultimately, I’ll get over the pain and move on. I know I can build nourishing, happy bonds. He, on the other hand, will remain stuck in his defense mechanisms, perhaps forever. In some moments, I feel pity for him.

Hi everyone. Today I’d like to hear your experiences on this topic.

I’ll start from my own experience.

When I met this man more than a year ago (someone I only later understood to be avoidant) there was one thing about him that unsettled me and set off an alarm bell, although I ignored it at the time.

It was the fact that I had the impression he never expressed his real personality in an authentic way, but instead seemed to mirror the attitudes, tastes, and behaviors of someone else (maybe someone in our shared social circle, maybe someone outside it).

It wasn’t blatant mirroring. It was a subtle feeling he left me with, and I never knew how seriously to take it or whether to dismiss it as mere suggestion. The fact remains that every time I thought I had discovered something new about him (for example, an interest in a certain social issue or a particular taste in music) I would later start to suspect I had been mistaken, because it didn’t seem to be something that was truly “his”, but rather something he had absorbed performatively from someone around him.

It was a very frustrating feeling, because I was genuinely trying to get to know him better. So every time, it felt like I had hit a dead end, as if I had been chasing a mirage. Still, jumping to the conclusion that it was a form of mirroring felt excessive at the time. I told myself that maybe he was just very open to what he could learn from others, someone who didn’t rigidly cling to his own tastes. This was especially true because he didn’t seem to me then (and still doesn’t seem to me now) to have any narcissistic traits. In the past, I had experienced mirroring, but only in connection with that specific kind of personality structure.

Looking back, though, I now think my impression was probably correct, and that it wasn’t a coincidence that I kept feeling that frustration. My goal was to get to know him better; I had the feeling I wasn’t managing to do that; and that feeling was probably accurate. His “core” (the part of him I wanted to see) was completely shielded by defensive mechanisms and games of mirrors. At this point, I think I may never have seen anything of him except the armor.

My current conclusion is that this alarm bell was probably something I should have taken much more seriously, instead of letting myself be distracted by the fact that he didn’t have narcissistic traits, as if that alone were enough to make the signal harmless.

I’d really like to hear your experiences with this. Thanks to anyone who feels like replying.

Hi everyone.

I’m working through the process of getting over a relationship with someone with an avoidant attachment style and trying to feel okay again.

One of the things that worries me right now is that the dynamics I experienced may leave toxic aftereffects in my psyche, and maybe create problems for me in the future.

I thought that talking about this together and comparing our experiences could be a way to prevent this baggage from going unnoticed, and to monitor it so it doesn’t just settle in our heads unchecked.

Have you ever thought about this issue? Are there any long-term effects you fear might change you for the worse?

Examples:

• The feeling that showing affection, attention, care, and esteem (things that are usually appreciated and work as relational fuel) is actually threatening or suspicious, because we spent a long time dealing with someone who reacted by withdrawing or acting as if they were annoyed by it.

• The feeling that expecting reciprocity in a relationship is illegitimate, because we invested a lot in someone and were then treated as “needy” when it became clear that we also wanted investment in return.

And so on.

I’d also like you to add your own examples.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I may have found an approach that could be useful to others too.

Usually, before gradually revealing themselves as emotionally abusive, a person presents in a way that encourages you to form a very positive internal image of them. And it’s that internal image that you end up caring about. That’s also the trap, because even when the relationship becomes unbearable, you keep hoping the “old version” will come back. You start telling yourself things like: “Deep down, they’re a good person,” or “Things will go back to how they were.”

You might think the solution is to erase that false image and just stop caring about them overnight, like flipping a switch. But that often doesn’t work, because the brain doesn’t function that way.

I’ve been trying something different. Not erasing, not forgetting. Separating. I took the image of the “good person” I thought I knew and gave it a different name. Now the real person is called X, and the one that lives in my imagination is called Y. I’m also separating my memories: all the shitty things the real person did (things the imagined version would never have done) go into folder X; all the good behaviors I expected but never actually got go into folder Y.

Basically, I’m giving myself permission not to suppress either the affection or the false memory overnight. The goal is for it to fade into a mild, harmless warmth, no longer attached to any real person, but more like the kind of fondness you feel for a fictional character. Like the protagonist of a novel who left such a strong impression on you that “it almost feels like you know them.”

Let me know if this makes sense to you. Or if you’ve tried something similar.