What Is an ‘Avoidant Discard’?

The arrival of love should ostensibly always be a matter of celebration. Imagine that, finally, after years of waiting, along comes what might be called ‘a nice person’. They are mature, they apologise for their flaws, they listen, they ask questions, they take an interest, they are generous. The new couple go on a number of holidays. First to Pisa. Then a weekend in Wales. Then a trip to Nottingham. Introductions are made to best friends from the training course, to an aunt, to a brother-in-law. There is laughter, some innovative sex, some deep conversations, some tears about past traumas; a sense, at last, of having come home. Yet this very situation is often the prelude to what psychologists describe as an avoidant discard.

In the background of one of the parties – the lover who is fearful of love – there is a rising discomfort. For a time, this is managed through strategic lowerings of the temperature. There is an argument on the steps of the museum which ruins one afternoon. There is a mysterious bout of illness which puts pay to a few dinners. There is an urgent need to see a friend which shatters the intimacy of the third weekend. There is a pressing need to attend a course or fix a shelf – subtle attempts to ensure that love cannot deepen, that dependence is stymied, that a home is carefully dismantled at the same time as it is being put up.

Why Love Can Feel Like Danger

An analogy: a person is taken prisoner early in their life, a time of terrible war. In the prison camp, there is barely any food. The young prisoner grows up having to adjust to an extreme calorie-controlled diet. There is little nourishment and the stomach shrinks to accommodate what is on offer. Then, suddenly, there is peace; the prison gates are open. It’s liberation. There is joy and celebration. A banquet is laid on. There are chocolate tarts, creamy cheeses, lush fruits, dried meats. But the banquet is wholly indigestible to the prisoners. Some succumb at once. Others last a little while, then wretch. The goodness cannot be metabolised. 

Something comparable will have happened to the lover who cannot love: they may have been neglected by a mother who was mentally unwell. Or a father who was filled with rage and then later ran off and married a friend. The lover has never been fed. The lover’s emotional stomach has shrunk. They dream of banquets – the deprived always do (they are the greatest dreamers of all) – but they will wretch at the sight.

The Logic Behind an Avoidant Discard

Gradually, a conclusion forms in the emotionally undernourished partner’s mind: they must get out. Very fast. Their lover is not – despite appearances – very nice at all. They are ‘controlling’. They don’t have their best interests at heart. They aren’t actually interested in listening to them. These accusations bear the imprint of their opposites. They can be read as desperate, confused pleas on the part of the unwell lover’s unconscious mind: What on earth is one meant to do with kindness? What in heaven’s name is one meant to do with trust? How can one handle goodness? These are desirable but entirely alien properties. And they kick off an acute (unconscious) fear of loss. What would happen if the lover were to be snatched away again? How could one survive disappearance now? It would quite literally kill one.

Better, then, to instigate loss oneself than see it unfold hideously outside of one’s volition. I must fire rather than be fired. I must deny the legitimacy of love to prevent dependence growing. The lover who is terrified of love sets about priming the explosives. An affair. A grave rupture of trust. A disappearance. A cancelled holiday. Silence online. And they are ready with an answer were they to be questioned by the incensed, terrified partner: it’s your fault, you are complaining about nothing, you have a bad temper, you don’t listen to my needs.

When the Relationship Is Erased Overnight

And they are off. In a classic so-called avoidant discard, the lover can blow up a relationship in a matter of days, sometimes hours. Social media profiles are changed instantly. The lover who is afraid of love may be back on the dating scene in minutes. The now-ex is erased from history, airbrushed out like a Soviet-era leader. The love never happened; the lover was ‘too intense’. It would never have worked. They were controlling.

It takes a very steady mind indeed not to fracture at this point, when one is on the receiving end. One is being told to go away on the grounds of something one has not done, by someone one adores who is denying they are up to anything.

We need to remember some core truths when we have suffered an avoidant discard: we have been discarded because love is terrifying to those who were not loved as children. We have been thrown away not because we were horrible but because we were not horrible enough. We have been punished for caring for people who do not, in their core, in any way feel worthy of care.