You want to be in a relationship, but you’re afraid to speak with members of the opposite sex.
Or maybe you’re in a relationship, but you don’t love your partner. You want to love them, you try to love them, but you can’t feel love.
And once the early infatuation you thought was love has subsided, the interest in your relationship fizzles away and fades out like a runaway Catherine Wheel.
Even though you want to love the person you are with, you can’t.
It may not be for lack of trying. Maybe you do try, but ultimately, you will come to realise it’s the sex that’s keeping you together.
Sex is used as a substitute for love.
You know things are going stale when you don’t want to be around them anymore.
What you really want is your alone time, your space.
You’ll also notice that you become irritated with them easily. They might not be doing anything wrong or different from what they did before, but they’re bothering you now.
When they argue, you want to run away. You want to be alone. You want peace.
Yet all they want is to be with you.
If this sounds familiar, it may be that you have an avoidant personality.
Or you’re with the wrong person.
If it’s an avoidant personality, read on, otherwise the pattern described above will happen in every relationship you have.
It’s not them. It’s you.
Why do I not feel love?
The avoidant personality is a relationship pattern I am all too familiar with. I wanted to love, but felt nothing.
The best I got was a splash of excitement.
But I didn’t feel love.
You don’t feel love when you’re cut off from your emotions. When you avoid your emotional life, it interferes with your love life because you can’t or won’t discuss how you feel.
Yet discussing how you feel enables you to develop a meaningful relationship.
Meaningful relationships breed love because you care about how your partner feels.
An avoidant personality has an impaired ability to care.
What is Avoidant Attachment?
Avoidant attachment is a coping strategy loitering in your neural networks. The program prevents you from addressing your emotions.
You avoid them.
Yeah, I know this sounds weird. How can a detachment from your emotions be an attachment?
It’s because an attachment is an attitude, a motivation or a behaviour. It’s the attachment to a specific way of being that you feel is right.
Avoidant attachment basically means your habitual pattern of behaviour is to avoid anything that feels uncomfortable.
Difficult conversations.
Admitting you’re wrong.
Giving up a bad habit even when you know it’s a bad habit.
The fallout of avoiding your partner is that they feel as though they don’t matter.
And that feeling is hurtful. They get paranoid, mad, angry.
My avoidant attachment caused far too many unnecessary arguments, and it annoyed the shit out of me.
And this cycle played on repeat for years.
I blamed the disturbance on my lovers. They’re moody. They’re a drama queen. They’re hard work.
But no. None of those excuses were true. Well, maybe a little bit. But mostly the girls felt rejected, betrayed, vulnerable.
Then I realised how I had contributed to the chaos because I have an avoidant personality, an inability to love. Because I didn’t know how to love myself, how to receive love, or how to love others.
Being affectionate was simply not in my programming.
Avoidant attachment was, however. It was my unconscious refusal to allow anybody to get too near that prompted the arguing.
What made the girls argue was their Emotional Brain sensing a threat to their personal integrity. My failure to make them feel special was a dagger to their sense of self-worth.
Daggers cause pain.
Disconnected
Although I had a vague recognition that I probably wasn’t paying my girlfriend enough attention, I hadn’t realised it was because I was disconnected from myself.
Because I didn’t know how to connect with myself, I didn’t know how to connect with them in a way that made them feel special.
I was cut off from my emotions.
Which also meant I was cut off from theirs.
Guys, when a woman says, “You should know what I want,” she isn’t expecting you to read her mind. What she’s really saying is “You should know how I feel.”
Humans share the same emotions. When you can access them, you automatically know how someone is probably feeling.
Girls, if you’re dating an avoidant personality, he doesn’t know how he feels.
Cut him some slack. Don’t expect him to know how you feel. You’re only projecting unrealistic expectations onto him. And that never ends well.
Avoidant attachment is a survival strategy to protect feelings of discomfort and inadequacy. It can develop in childhood if you learned that being emotionally vulnerable meant you could be hurt.
You become hypersensitive to criticism and cut yourself off from your emotions.
Then in your adult relationships, you get criticised for things you didn’t know you’d done wrong.
Avoidance becomes a way of protecting your fragile emotions from being hurt again.
You disconnect from yourself to avoid pain.
The Cause of Avoidant Attachment
To understand the inner workings of avoidant attachment, it helps to understand how attachment develops in the first place.
Attachment Theory supposes that we develop attachment styles in early childhood in relation to the bond with our parents.
The model was proposed by the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby who noticed that the relationship between parents and child has lasting effects.
Bowlby observed that when parents consistently reject, ignore, or minimise a child expressing emotional needs, the child can become detached from their emotions.
These patterns can continue into adolescence and adulthood. Eventually, you risk becoming detached from reality altogether.
Shutting down emotions is a coping mechanism performed by the central nervous system to protect you from repeatedly experiencing unbearable pain and suffering.
Pain comes in various forms: rejection, shame, humiliation, guilt, feelings of being unheard and unworthy, no sense of belonging. Feeling unloved.
Over time, the child adapts by distancing themselves from intimacy. The compensation for a lack of intimacy is navigated through control, avoidance, or performance.
Do any of the experiences below resonate with you? If so, you may have an avoidant personality.
- Your emotions were dismissed as a child — “Don’t cry or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
- Being told to go away when you wanted to be close or attention — “Go and play outside so I can have some peace.”
- You avoid displaying your emotions and withdraw from difficult conversations
- You felt ashamed and embarrassed when anyone mentioned the possibility of you having a boyfriend or girlfriend
- You struggle to trust others to fulfil your emotional needs and feel uncomfortable talking about how you feel and what you want
- In relationships, you feel your personal space is being invaded
When you consider the points above, there is a glaring observation: avoidant attachment isn’t a character flaw — it’s a survival strategy.
Are You An Avoidant Personality?
Avoidant attachment is noticeable in specific personality patterns. If you have an avoidant personality, you may recognise some or all of the seven strategies listed below.
1. Surface-Level Gestures, Without Depth
Avoidant personalities use thoughtful gifts and sweet-talking to demonstrate you have feelings for someone. However, these interactions are typically surface-level and superficial.
You rarely, or never, share your emotions and discuss how you are feeling. Admitting how you feel is too awkward.
You may say “I love you.” You may even think you mean it and plan a romantic date, but they reveal a telltale sign — that you want closeness, but you feel too vulnerable to actually become emotionally attached.
Part of the problem is you have a crippling fear of rejection and abandonment. The other part of the problem may be that you do not know how to meaningfully connect with others on an emotional level.
2. Offer Practical Help Rather Than Emotional Support
Rather than discussing emotional struggles with anybody, individuals with an avoidant attachment style tend to offer practical “help”.
This may come in the form of offering advice like, “That happened to me, and what I did was…”
You may try to fix the problem, or offer to buy something to make the person feel a bit better, or at least grateful. While practical help can be of some use in some circumstances, it’s a sidestep that helps you to swerve from talking about how someone feels.
Emotional conversation requires a level of intimacy that takes you out of your comfort zone.
3. Sex, Yes. Express, No
Avoidants typically do not have a problem sharing intimacy on a physical level. Sexual intercourse, cuddling and hugging are all doable.
Where you struggle is having a conversation that requires emotional openness.
Expressing what they need, for example, feels uncomfortable. You may go to speak, but then swallow your words.
The underlying motivation to hide your feelings is to avoid the risk of being rejected, unheard or humiliated.
4. Avoid Discomfort with Humour or Logic
When the conversation gets too emotionally involved, individuals with an avoidant personality use humour to defuse the feeling of discomfort. Get the joke right and you can release tension.
Another strategy is to change the subject, or offer a logical reason as an excuse rather than actually discussing your emotions or the emotions of somebody else.
For example, a typical scenario for me was to make excuses grounded in reality. A partner would say, “Why didn’t you reply to my message? I was worried about you.”
I would reply, “I was busy with work and didn’t have time.”
Or I might analyse a situation and explain the reason behind it. I’d say, “Do you feel that way because you’re feeling sorry for yourself.”
What I should have done is hold the space and allow them to share why they felt how they felt.
But when it comes to understanding or even acknowledging the emotional reality of yourself or your partner, the avoidant is confused. But all you really need to do is listen and try to ask the right questions. You will learn about emotions by talking about them. Even when they’re not yours.
5. Pretending Nothing is Wrong
Sharing personal thoughts, past traumas, or vulnerabilities is difficult for people with avoidant attachment. In the past, you learned that expressing how you feel can invite judgment, rejection or humiliation.
Once expressing your emotions causes too much discomfort, the easier option is to protect yourself by guarding your emotions. You will tell others that nothing is wrong even when you feel like you have a dagger in your chest.
If you don’t talk about it, you don’t risk feeling stupid or unworthy of being heard.
Hardships are glossed over with “It’s in the past” or “It wasn’t a big deal.”
6. Non-Committal
Avoidants associate commitment with vulnerability. There is a clear and present danger of rejection, failure or criticism.
By avoiding commitment, you maintain a modicum of control over your emotional wellbeing. You stay in your comfort zone, where it feels safe.
Look a little closer at your reasons for being non-committal, and you find a deep-seated lack of trust — not just toward others, but a lack of trust in yourself.
A lack of trust prompts you to keep relationships surface-level and not pursue anything too ambitious in case you fail and invite rejection or criticism.
The unconscious belief here is that if you get too close, you will get hurt. If you fail, you will be humiliated and that’s painful.
So you make excuses. You tell yourself that you prefer being on your own. You don’t need anyone.
You tell yourself, I’m happy with the job I’ve got. I like the people.
The truth is, you’re afraid to commit to anything that will cause pain.
7. Appearing Calm and Rational
Because avoidants suppress emotions, displays of distress or passion are infrequent. Whenever I had an emotional outburst, people would be surprised.
You can also come across as aloof and withdrawn; cold even. If this is pointed out, you feel even more misunderstood and confused.
Again, this is learned behaviour. If you were raised in an environment where expressing your emotions was discouraged, ignored, or punished, you learned to suppress how you feel and rely on logic and reason.
Logic and reason can help the Thinking Brain to take control of your emotions. Whilst this can be a positive way of developing emotional intelligence, for the avoidant personality, it is a maladaptive strategy that can cause harm in the long run.
Typical responses are to be defensive, dismissive or stonewalling.
A better response is to acknowledge that the other person is feeling emotional, and invite a discussion. You may need to wait until they have finished venting, but it will be advantageous if you recognise an emotional outburst when you see one, and hold the space instead of running away and avoiding conflict or discomfort.
Final Thoughts: Avoidant Attachment Is Curable
Avoidant individuals are not bad or incapable of love—you just haven’t learned how to express your emotions. They’re trapped in your inner world.
Because of this the emotional brain recognises a perceived threat and finds a coping strategy that will protect them from experiencing more pain.
If you’re in a relationship with someone who fakes intimacy, remember: true emotional connection comes from presence, not performance.
By understanding the role of attachment styles and spotting the subtle signs of emotional unavailability, you can make more empowered choices—whether it’s improving communication, fostering growth, or choosing a different path.
Real intimacy is not about doing; it’s about being in the moment.
If you recognise that you have an avoidant attachment style, learn more with our life coaching program, Beyond The Comfort Zone. The Libera Mente archetypes model explains why you have an avoidant personality and what you can do to correct it.
