People with love avoidant personality disorder set boundaries with distancing techniques. View examples in this article.
About 1% of the population has some form of Avoidant Personality Disorder, which can cause problems in any social or work environment.1
Love Avoidants have difficulty with personal relationships. I once dated a woman with this personality disorder. She repeatedly pushed me away with her evasive disposition and pulled me back with her good nature.
The experience encouraged me to study the frenzy of a love-avoidant personality and the struggle one might face with this behavior.
The term ‘love-avoidant’ can be misleading. They don’t necessarily avoid love. In fact, they often crave it.
They desire to be loved and to love others, but their fear of intimacy and past experiences can lead to behaviors that seem like avoidance.
I know that because my girlfriend was previously married. Twice! So, she did find a way to enter into a committed relationship. The only problem is that they didn’t last because her avoidance methods pushed both husbands away.
A love avoidant tends to use techniques to distance themselves from their partner. They might have been hurt before, and this is their defense mechanism.
Early childhood experiences play a significant role in the development of love-avoidant behavior.
Unresolved issues from unfavorable events during one’s formative years can create a fear of intimacy, making it difficult to feel comfortable sharing a life with another person later on.
They struggle to protect themselves from imagined undesirable treatment despite the need to be loved.
Some distance is certainly understandable in a relationship, since partners continue to lead individual lives. However, lovers in a healthy, committed relationship expect to support one another, especially when they are most vulnerable.
When one has a love-avoidant behavior, they want too much distance. They set boundaries that are unrealistic with distancing techniques such as the following: 2
When I researched the traits of a love-avoidant, I found it fascinating to see similar issues I had with my girlfriend that were discussed in “Top 6 Signs of a Love Avoidant” by Jim Hall.3
I noticed the following common theme:
It isn’t easy to have a healthy rapport because they make their partner feel they are walking on eggshells. That’s how I felt with my love-avoidant girlfriend. I always had to make an effort to eliminate conflict.
When I studied research publications on this disorder, I found that many doctors confirmed that attitude. I learned what they want when I read “Identifying and Understanding a Love Avoidant Person” by Ariel Quinn.4
I noticed two specific desires my love-avoidant girlfriend had:
1. They Want to Keep Their Life Private
They want to keep their past history private and not allow their partner learn much about their life or background.
My girlfriend got angry when I asked questions to get to know her more. Her anger made me feel I was out of place for asking questions.
It was evident to me that she was using distancing techniques to keep me from getting too close, both emotionally and physically.
2. They Want to Avoid Repeating Hurtful Past Experiences
In many cases, love avoidants are afraid of being hurt by someone they love, so they keep a distance for their protection.
That fear of being hurt might be the result of a negative experience they had in the past. It could have been with another relationship, but it might have been a bad experience in early family life.
For example, if they had parents who argued and yelled at each other in anger, that memory might create a fear of experiencing it in a personal relationship.
I once noticed a certain degree of confusion. It turned out that my love-avoidant girlfriend had interpreted a particular incident differently from what was actually meant.
That became clear when we discussed what was confusing.
When the incident first occurred, she was devastated, and later told me she was considering leaving. However, she admitted she was confused and didn’t understand what it was all about. And she put her own interpretation into it.
Unfortunately, that confusion made her set boundaries. And it made me feel I had to be extra careful to avoid setting her off.
Strangely, when I backed off to give her space, she felt abandoned.
It was as if she were afraid of losing me. I felt I was dating two different people: one who pushed me away and one who wanted me to be close.
The lesson I learned when dealing with a love-avoidant is to understand their way of expressing themselves.
That is true for any healthy relationship. However, when living with a love-avoidant person, one might misunderstand what’s really going on for them since their way of talking sometimes pushes one away.
If you feel it’s worth the struggle, you have to earn their trust.
Her previous experience with two failed marriages left her with emotional stress. I’m not sure if that caused her to develop a love-avoidant personality or if that personality disorder was the cause of her failed marriages.
Either way, the effect on anyone she dates is the same. That baggage caused tremendous problems in our relationship. Her prior bad experiences made her push me away numerous times, thinking I’d be like the others.
Every time she noticed that I was moving away emotionally, she tried to pull me back. She was aware of her tendencies to do this, but it didn’t help her refrain from repeating the same push-and-pull technique.
Her technique was to push with her actions and pull with her words. I always understood that actions speak louder than words, as the saying goes, so her kind words didn’t offset her negative actions in my mind.
Words don’t mean much. I pay more attention to people’s actions. Her actions always made it seem she didn’t want a relationship. I found it unsettling never to understand her confusing behavior.
I felt she was playing mind games with me because she’d turn around and say she missed me each time she pushed me away.
I felt like a fish. As an analogy, she would catch me with a hook and then throw me back in the water. Suddenly, I’d see another baited hook fishing for more — only to throw me back again.
I may have had a desire to work things out. But since it was a new relationship, I had no desire to put more effort into it, especially with the constant push/pull craziness.
To my surprise, she called one day to admit that her son had just told her, “Yes, Mom, Glenn is right. You always push people away. You did that with Dad, too, before the divorce.”
Again, that was her way of baiting another hook. She tried to tell me that now she knows and can change. I didn’t think she would change after two husbands left her. People don’t change that easily.
Some people never change at all. Many issues that hinder us emotionally, that occur in childhood, can take a long time to recover from and require much effort to heal. I give credit to those who genuinely are willing to work on it.
Was this meaningful to you? Tap
