Rules for Anxiously Attached Lovers with Avoidant Partners

What defines the section of the population known as the Anxiously Attached are fierce, ongoing doubts as to the solidity and fidelity of all relationships. For the Anxious, love – however promising it might appear – is never assured; there is always something that might threaten its integrity and usher in betrayal and abandonment. In an anxious avoidant relationship, the partner may hold our hand and say they love us today, but what if they harbour secret doubts and are in the midst of chats with strangers on a well-hidden app? Why did they go on such a long walking holiday without us if they claim to love us? Why haven’t they messaged us since 12.43? The Anxious never rest for long: catastrophe is always imminent, fear is permanent.

Why the Anxious Choose Avoidants

To compound the misery, the Anxiously Attached tend to be chiefly or exclusively drawn to that other challenging category described by attachment theory as Avoidants. Avoidants are very scared too, but of something quite different: of not having enough time alone, of having to speak too directly, of being engulfed. Avoidants may share a terror of abandonment with the Anxious; they simply respond to the threat in a different way: by adopting a defensive facade of indifference, by pushing away with an apparent disdain those they want but cannot control (rather than clinging to them with demented ferocity).

The predictable result is conflict. Anxious and Avoidant relations are notorious for their levels of strife: one person always feels the other is standing too close; the other blames them for being too distant. 

What the Anxious Might Practise

What then might the Anxious do to live a little fractiously around the Avoidants that compel them?

— They should, first and foremost, be suspicious of their suspicions. They may be utterly convinced that their partner no longer loves them: they are probably deluded. The safety of the Anxiously Attached will be enhanced if they can learn to substantially disregard their impulses. They may know in their bones that their partner is laughing at them. What if their bones were wrong? 

— To go by their outward behaviour, the Anxiously Attached should more accurately be termed the Furiously Attached – given that their characteristic response to the threat of rupture is one of rage. Rather than admitting cleanly to, and perhaps inviting sympathy for, their fear, they present themselves as, to all intents, simply annoyed, upbraiding and critical. They pick up the phone at lightning speed to tell the partner the many terrible ways in which they have failed them. They should learn to say, more honestly, that they are scared.

— The Anxious should be made aware of the risks they otherwise run. Avoidants are especially sensitive and opposed to intensity and anger: to the very things that come so naturally to their suitors. They really don’t like to be shouted at; they are especially upset about being upbraided. They really don’t appreciate being told they keep being twelve minutes late. So worried they’ll be left, the Anxious may indeed end up being just that.

— Whenever they have unleashed a crisis, the Anxious must recognise that their heat and fury will have perturbed their Avoidant partners, beneath their indifferent surface. They must install a window of between 36 and 72 hours when they won’t keep badgering and accusing. They must limit themselves to the odd warm but undemanding message: ‘so sorry about last night, just hoping all is OK.’ They must learn to articulate a sliver of their worries in a therapeutic language of vulnerability – while keeping the bulk of the turmoil to themselves.

Repairing an Anxious Avoidant Relationship

These principles are likely to provoke painful regrets for the Anxious. How many relationships might they have needlessly destroyed by their nervous insistence that their partners were not on their side? How many people did they wrongly suspect? How unfair were they to perfectly sound lovers? How many years they may have spent lonely because of unmastered terrors of loneliness. How much could have been saved if they’d learnt – slightly earlier – to trust more and to shout a little less. What if they’d swallowed their sense of alarm and gone to bed and thought, as a more emotionally privileged, saner person would, ‘it’s nothing. They love me, they just need some time to themselves…’ Or: ‘it’s OK they don’t show too much affection, or don’t want physical closeness as much as I do. They surely love very intensely deep down…’

There may be enough time left. Their Avoidant partner may be able to forgive them. Perhaps the tendency to drama can be turned into a nearly funny joke or a matter for interesting discussion. Maybe the Avoidant can see that the Anxious person on their hands isn’t a monster: they are just a bit ill. Or, if the Avoidant has in fact now gone, if they bowed out in silence and annoyance, hopefully the world is broad enough that new romantic candidates will in time appear. When they do, and they are Avoidants, this time around, perhaps the Anxious can be careful from the start. They might announce their affliction on the second date and redouble efforts not to let it rule their actions, whatever their instincts are screaming. Perhaps this time around, they may be able to refrain from accusations around time and parties and friends, and trust that things could be more or less OK. And – with luck and a lot of thought – perhaps this time they will be, discovering that even an anxious avoidant relationship might contain more hope than they once believed.