Thank you to this community
I knew my avoidant for a decade as friends before she asked me to be her boyfriend. It lasted a few months. She slept with me, we had a minor conflict and she stonewalled me and just stopped communicating.
I was so devastated- I had suspicions she was an avoidant because I’d seen her with other guys and the dynamics between them were distant and slightly odd. We’d always had a great bond and communicated well as friends. I guess the stakes were lower then. No vulnerability was required.
After a bunch of vague excuses and a cold robotic discard, we went into NC. She left me like it was as easy as breathing, which unsettled me. It instantly broke the trust we had built for almost a decade.
I bumped into her a few times throughout the course of a year (once when she was on a date) and I was polite (I genuinely didn’t feel any anger or hate when I saw her, just a kind of light sadness). She became a stranger to me overnight.
Fast forward to a year later and she reaches out asking to reconnect as friends. I’ve made the heartbreaking decision (with help from you guys) to not respond. I’ve spent the best part of a year with a huge weight attached to me. She left me alone with the weight of this whilst she went on dates and carried on as if I didn’t exist. She is now in a new relationship which of course isn’t an attractive situation for me in the slightest. I don’t feel like being an ear to her if and when she starts to feel unfulfilled with him.
For anyone still in the midst of this rollercoaster, I promise you it does get better. The thing that helped me the most is removing all social media and not talking to the source of the pain. I moved through it- it was far from linear and still affects me to this day- but that weight I carried gradually fell off and around the 8 month mark, I started to see colour again in my days.
Please just know that an unhealed avoidant’s limited capacity and emotional immaturity do not make them a reliable judge of your worth, or quite frankly a reliable judge of anything.
If they don’t know their elbow from their ass emotionally how on earth can they sustain something healthy? There is no emotional continuity, they are state-based. They feel one thing? Act. They feel the polar opposite? Act. With little to no real regard of how their actions affect others.
I wish avoidants the best in their healing journey but I wish everyone on the receiving end of this nothing but healthy relationships moving forward.
Please do not go back to a dynamic that hurt you- you can then make room for a someone who, when they have you, will not let you go easily.
Healthy love is out there, healthy people are out there- but you will never meet them if you allow the person who left you questioning everything back into your life.
Thank you to everyone and their advice throughout the year. I will continue to help as best as I can on this sub, but I wanted to show my appreciation.