How to Spot Avoidants on an Early Dinner Date

A great majority of people in the dating world will declare, at first blush, that they are very interested in, and capable of, love and long-term relationships. And yet the collective fate of relationships suggests that this cannot be the whole truth. Whatever the stated intentions, a huge number of unions end up foundering on the inability of one or the other person to remotely live up to their stated goals: on someone’s inability to sustain the intimacy and longevity of which they had declared themselves entirely capable and keen over the first cocktails. The difficulty, of course, is that many of the most telling emotional unavailability signs only reveal themselves long after the early charm has worn off.

The mind naturally moves, then, to wondering whether there might be some way of flushing this out earlier. Is there anything other than experience that could enable one to determine what one has on one’s hands? Might there be a way of avoiding the rigmarole of trying to build a relationship with someone who doesn’t, in time, reveal themselves to be constitutionally capable of one?

We suggest a range of questions and conversation topics. This is no science; some of the approaches are deliberately crude. They are a useful starting point nevertheless:

How much space do you need?

Everyone needs space; this much is a given. Those who too actively declare a love of space are often those who will panic when a modicum of presence is asked of them. We should be reassured and relieved by someone who can smile and admit: ‘Not that much. I actually really like being around my partner…’

WhatsApp use

WhatsApp is a medium of particular significance to those for whom connection is – ultimately – tricky. We should ask, with feigned innocence (we’re not being deceptive, just trying to save ourselves years of pain), how a person relates to this technology: ‘Are you someone who answers messages right away, or do you tend to get a bit behind?’

No one can answer messages immediately all the time; but watch out for those who hint at real complexity around the topic: ‘Oh, I’ve been told before I’m very bad at messaging. I am trying hard, as I know it annoys people…’ Or: ‘I’m so terrible at getting back!’ This could signal more than a problem with messaging; it is a relatively sure sign of a problem with intimacy.

If you really liked someone, how fast or slowly would you want to move in a relationship?

There is crazy fast, but there is crazy slow too. What one is looking out for is someone who can, overall, countenance rapid movement, who doesn’t need to make a speech about the horrors of speed, who isn’t terrified by the idea of finding themselves, in relatively short order, in a deeply committed situation – who might not balk at the idea of being engaged within six months.

It’s not for nothing that, in almost all pre-modern societies, the dating process was very fast indeed. You went on ten or fifteen dates; then engagement followed. It sounds peculiar, even demented, to us, but there is something equally demented – and very dangerous too – in the idea that you might need to circle someone for four years in extreme ambiguity before one person decides they need a bit more freedom after all. The modern dating world, with its entirely diffuse timelines, has become a paradise for the avoidant, and a guard-rail-free hell for the anxious.

When there’s a conflict in a relationship, do you lean in or step back?

People with avoidant temperaments cannot bear what they call intensity. They don’t want you to want anything too much from them. They don’t want to deal with your demands; they certainly don’t want to hear about your anger – even if they might have caused it. Their response to relational difficulty is solitude.

‘Tell me how you repair a conflict in a relationship?’ is a useful question. Those who have almost never repaired will be particularly stuck. Throw out a novelistic scenario: You’ve just had to cancel a weekend that your partner was especially looking forward to. They are now furious with you. How might you repair things?

What would it take for you to feel smothered in a relationship?

It’s a provocative approach. Because the ‘right’ answer could be: a bit of smothering might not be too bad, if it was done right.

Those who cannot bear closeness will respond by being particularly incensed. There will be an emphasis on the dangers of being too often around other people. We can sympathise – until those other people turn out to be us.

Why did your last few relationships break up?

A classic avoidant approach to the problems of intimacy is to have a passionate love affair with someone who doesn’t care. Avoidants are notorious for their investment in multi-year relationships with people who never show up: who might have been married, or lived in another country, or couldn’t commit. The way the story is initially told over dinner, it looks like it was the other person who was uninterested in love; it may just as much have been your dinner companion. We signal our readiness for love not just by what we profess to want, but who we pick to realise our wants. Those who repeatedly end up with partners who aren’t present are unlikely to want to truly show up for love themselves.

Watch out, too, for stories in which an ex is made into a villain for what may – through a fair lens – simply have been a very legitimate desire for affection. In describing the reasons for a break-up, a date might say: ‘They were so cloying… They wanted me to message them all the time… They were very needy…’ The word ‘controlling’ is a particularly interesting one in this context, for it is as ready to be applied to a truly coercive situation as it is to a much more innocent desire for a partner to be present. ‘They wanted to control me all the time…’ could just be an avoidant way of admitting, in effect, that it made them very uncomfortable to be asked for love.

Were you loved by anyone steadily and kindly in childhood?

It sounds like a very unfair question. Few of us have perfect pasts. But if no one loved your dinner companion with warmth over many early years, you must not be surprised if they gradually start to hold it against you for loving them now. Deprived grown-up children are very easy to feel sorry for – and to love. The most predictable result of doing so isn’t gratitude, but (eventually) aggression, abandonment and silence.

It would be foolish to imagine we’d ever catch everything on the first date; but equally foolish to imagine that the emotional unavailability signs wouldn’t mostly be there, to the eye that has been trained through suffering.