Signs Your Avoidant Partner Loves You
Hi and welcome! I’m so glad you’re here.
When you are in a relationship with an avoidant partner, it can feel excruciating at times. The anxious-avoidant relationship dynamic is challenging for all involved. When your partner is pulling away, shutting down, or emotionally checking out, these behaviors can really kick up anxious patterns and create an experience full of stress and worry. I have worked with many people who experience a sense of dread and a deep fear of abandonment that is so distracting that they have a hard time focusing on anything else. I remember this feeling vividly in my body—times when a partner would shut down, not respond to text messages, or even check out for days at a time. It felt like my body was on fire with anxiety. When you experience this type of stress, it’s normal to wonder if your partner is really committed to your relationship, if they love or need you, or if the relationship is the right fit for you. I encourage you to be with these questions and explore your responses prior to acting. I know how difficult it is to sit with the discomfort, but I also believe there is a lot we can learn from being in that liminal space. I promise that you aren’t alone in that.
Here’s the thing: when you spend lots of time and energy wondering about whether your avoidant partner is really in it with you, you start to lose yourself. You stop checking in with yourself about whether you are happy, whether you are feeling fulfilled, and whether this relationship is sustainable for you. As long as you are devoting your energy to trying to figure your partner out, you are perpetuating the anxious-avoidant relationship dynamic. If you have the anxious attachment style, how you show up in your relationship with your avoidant partner really does matter—for you and for them.
What would it be like to redirect your energy and spend time focusing on your partner to noticing your own relational patterns? I know from personal experience that this is a difficult shift to make. When we have spent quite a bit of time worrying or feeling concerned about what our partner is or isn’t doing in our relationship, it takes an active effort to reclaim that energy and reinvest it in ourselves.
Here are some practices to try if you are noticing yourself feeling hyper focused on your partner’s actions/inactions:
Get back into your body. What are your internal sensations when you start to feel anxious or worried? What do these sensations tell you? Are they familiar? Moving your body can help off load some of the more stressful experiences so you can feel grounded and centered in the activities and relationships that are important to you.
Check in with your values. How do you want to show up in your relationships and partnerships? Are you currently in alignment with your values? How do you know? Having a list of your values and the actions that align with those values can support you in understanding whether you are feeling in your integrity at this moment and any moment in your relationships. If you are feeling out of your integrity, learning strategies for calming your nervous system can support you in aligning your beliefs and actions.
Nurture other relationships in your life. If you aren’t feeling great about your partnership at this moment, that’s okay—AND you deserve to feel supported in other ways. When you experience doubt or wondering, it can be helpful to surround yourself with other important folks in your life to allow for more grounding and a shift in perspective. If you are feeling anxious, it’s normal to want to verbally process all of your emotions with the people you care about. However, this can actually *increase* your anxiety by carving your emotional patterns even deeper. This is an opportunity to share where you are and ask for support while also showing up fully in the relationship and doing your fair share of listening, learning, and supporting.
I know there is a lot of information out there about the challenges in this dynamic, and I really want to validate the difficulty of being on the receiving (or not receiving) end of the anxious-avoidant relationship pattern. One of my priorities in my work with attachment theory and healthy relationships is reminding people that we all come by our attachment styles honestly. If we are really focused on creating health and safety in our partnerships, I don’t believe there is any room for shaming, blaming, criticizing or judging specific attachment styles. The insecure attachment styles (anxious, avoidant, and disorganized) all stem from life experiences in which our needs were not fully met and we were not consistently accepted and loved for who we are. That being said, when we grow into adults, those early relationships are the blueprints for our intimate partnerships. If we were met with harshness or learned that feelings were threatening or scary, you can bet that we will feel similarly in our adult relationships until we learn how to build our capacity for emotion and develop a sense of safety and trust. We are not in control of our partners, but we *are* in control of whether we create a dynamic that is welcoming, safe, consistent, and in alignment with our relational values. So my question for you is this: are you currently creating this? And if not, what do you need to do it differently?
I want to remind you that I am here to support you in this and in many other ways. My personal and professional experience in the attachment theory realm lends itself to supporting folks in all different types of relational dynamics. There are many ways to work with me and dive into this work, and I fully support you in exploring how you might benefit from this work and how it could potentially impact your relationship—because every bit of security you develop can shift the dynamics of all of your relationships.
Thank you so much for reading!
Warmly,
Elizabeth