Dating Someone With Avoidant Attachment: What Actually Helps

If you’re dating someone with avoidant attachment, you probably already know the dance.

You reach. They pull back. You reach harder… and they pull back further.

I spent hundreds of hours in couples work with people stuck in exactly this loop. So I want to talk about what actually helps, for BOTH of you, and also when it might be time to stop.

(If you’re not sure which side of the dance you’re on, start with anxious vs avoidant attachment.)

What’s really going on in the anxious avoidant dance:

The anxious avoidant dance is a lot about dysregulation. It’s about being in your sympathetic nervous system and not being able to process the present moment, especially when there’s struggle or conflict.

Both of you are trying to feel okay again. You just go about it in opposite directions.

• If you lean anxious, you try to feel better by pulling someone in.
• If you lean avoidant, you try to feel better by pushing someone away (or by going away yourself).

And those two strategies make each other worse. The more you pull, the more they pull back. The more they pull back, the more you pull.

One shift I see over and over in my community: when an anxious partner stops reading their avoidant partner’s time alone as rejection, and starts seeing it as that person working on their own dysregulation, something opens up. It goes from I’m stuck to… oh, there are actually a lot of things I can do.

The first thing you need: consent to get secure together:

This sounds simple. It’s also the thing most couples skip.

If you’re partnered with someone and one of you is anxious and the other is avoidant, the very first thing you need, most importantly, is consent around getting secure together.

It’s sort of like buying plane tickets. You should both be on the plane to France. One person shouldn’t be headed to Florida while the other one is headed to France.

So both of you need to be committed to secure attachment… to learning what it is, what it looks like, what’s happening in your nervous systems, and to the process of becoming more secure together.

I’ll tell you, a lot of people aren’t really interested in that work. People are busy. They’ve been doing the same thing their entire lives. Or they think they’re invested in growth, and they don’t really want to put the time in.

Why once a week isn’t enough:

One of the biggest things I saw in my couples work was the expectation that 50 minutes, once a week, would be enough to transform a really insecure relationship.

Sometimes it was. A lot of times people needed MUCH more.

It’s a little like being told you have a serious disease… and the plan is to take a painkiller once a week. That’s not the thing that’s going to solve it.

If your relationship is really insecure, what you need is to understand secure attachment and to both be committed to doing the things that create it, day to day.

Avoidant attachers need to lean in, and anxious attachers need to lean out a little bit.

If you’re the anxious partner:

Inside anxious attachment there’s a pitfall part I call the Fixer.

The Fixer is feeling anxious and disconnected and wants to feel closer… so it tries to fix the partner. If you could just say it this way. If you could just do this one thing. I’ll arrange the schedule so you can pick me up.

That’s overmanaging. And overmanaging often drives your avoidant partner further away. They feel controlled, pushed around, sometimes treated like a child.

Behind every pitfall part is a need. So rather than fixing your partner in order to get your need met, the work is to:

1. Feel into the need. What is it that I actually need? What would it look like? How would it feel?
2. Resource yourself first. Do the things that soothe you before you go to your partner.
3. Then ask, simply. I need a hug. Can you give me a hug? Or, I really want to feel close to you. Can we cuddle and listen to some music?

You’re still reaching for them. You’re just doing it together, instead of trying to fix them so you can feel better.

And part of your growth is to lean OUT a little. To get a bit more space, which (I know) can feel like you’re going to die. To quiet down and feel, instead of talking.

If you’re the avoidant partner:

People with avoidant attachment were often left alone as kids. When they had hard feelings, they didn’t talk to anyone about them. They didn’t get to say, Mommy, I need a hug, or I’m really angry.

So they learned to regulate by tuning OUT. Which means getting more secure is about tuning back IN.

Sometimes avoidantly attached people are angry and can’t tell they’re angry. Or sad and can’t tell they’re sad. Or it’s just… clogged up. Numb. And they don’t know what’s underneath the numbness.

The work usually builds in this order:

1. Feeling what you’re feeling.
2. Saying what you’re feeling to someone.
3. Knowing what you need, and asking for it.

This process is pretty slow in the beginning, because you’re building a bridge back to your feeling self. That’s okay. Generally the growth is to stay in more… to stick around instead of going away to feel better.

If you’re dating someone with avoidant attachment, it can help to know this is what they’re up against. It doesn’t mean you wait forever. It does mean that pushing harder rarely speeds it up.

What secure looks like inside the dance:

Love can be unconditional, but relationship is conditional.

There’s an idea floating around that if you just cultivate a calm, secure state, it won’t matter what your partner does. That’s partly true. Your state really does change things… sometimes the other person drifts away, sometimes the right people come toward you, and sometimes your calm helps your partner find theirs.

And yet a relationship is an agreement. Imagine you had a co-founder in a business who was acting out and spending all your money, and you decided to just stay Zen about it. That’s not a secure state. That’s codependent.

Secure sounds more like this: I can regulate myself if you need space. I’m not going to fall apart if you go get groceries. Okay, we don’t have to talk right now… and I’m going to want to talk later. Can we talk on Thursday?

That’s a boundary AND a lean in, at the same time.

When doing it right means it ends:

This one can be hard to hear.

A lot of people with anxious attachment believe that if they’re good enough, and if they’re doing it right, the other person will mysteriously be able to give them everything they need.

That’s not always true. Sometimes doing it right means you’re finally able to articulate your needs… and the person says, I can’t meet those needs.

And then you know that relationship isn’t the right one for you. That can be a good thing.

If you’re still deciding what you’re looking for, this dating checklist for someone securely attached is a good place to start.

The anxious avoidant dance is really a nervous system dance. I teach how to shift your state (instead of just understanding your pattern) in my free training, Attachment Essentials. It also gives you access to my free community.

With love,
Sefora