is there hope for avoidant people?

from K's diary

As some of you know, I occasionally share thoughts here from my friend, K.

To those who aren’t familiar, here’s the tea:

K is a friend of mine, yet, like great friends often are, there’s a slight chance that K is imaginary— that he does not exist.

K might be a fake personality that I invented to tell my own personal stories. K might also be the combination of every story I’ve ever heard from my friends. K might be a mouthpiece for stories I have completely made up. K might legitimately be an individual I know. K might be a combination of all these things.

—From my essay the constant apocalypse of modern dating.

Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

Now that we’re all acquainted with K,

A few years ago, I was by his side as he was going through a particularly strange experience.

He had met a girl who confused him endlessly.

She confused me, too.

Here’s what happened:

At first, they hit it off and seemed to enjoy each other’s company quite a bit.

But, after some time, she began to pull away, and K struggled to get a response to anything as he set out to plan future adventures for them.

Although she’d seem cold and uninterested at times, whenever she’d eventually pop back up, it seemed as though all was well.

K was more confused than he was unhappy, so I figured it wouldn’t make sense for me to tell him what was on my mind about the situation.

Yet, this pattern continued.

One day she’d be hot, and the next day— the next few weeks, actually— she’d be cold.

Eventually, K asked her about this, and a few interesting details emerged out of that conversation.

Here are the highlights—

1. She really liked him, but sometimes, the fact that she liked him, coupled with the thought that her liking him might lead to expectations, would make her really nervous, so she’d choose to close herself off.

2. She’s, in general, a bad texter and has been working on it. The anxiety that comes from feeling liked by someone also contributes to the inability to text back.

3. Deep down, what she’d actually like is to be more open and together with K. But, right above wherever deep down is, is the part of her which actually hopes she’ll frustrate K so much that he just stops reaching out. But, above that part of her is the part which really hates that this is how her brain works.

(I have taken some creative liberties in recounting this to you. Believe it or not, K, in addition to potentially not being real, is also an unreliable narrator)

So, upon hearing this recounting of the facts from K, I had a simple thought, which I shared with him.

“She just doesn’t like you”.

Now, I should say two things—

First, let’s keep in mind that this conversation happened a few years ago.

If I were to have this conversation with K today (especially in the aftermath of all the anxiously avoidant people I’ve now met), I might approach the situation differently.

The second thing is: I want to expand on my thought process in saying this to K, because, in some ways, it’ll form the main topic of this particular essay.

My thought process was thus—

I understand that life is hard.

Furthermore, I understand that some parts of life are harder for some people.

“Little things” come in different shapes and sizes based on the people who must deal with them, so it is not apt, generally speaking, to assume that we’re all bound by the same conventions in terms of how we ought to react to one another.

Despite all this, however,

I thought to myself,

“Sure, but, as the Scriptures say, love covers a multitude of sins.”

My thought here was simple— where there is love (or, at the very least, general fondness), surely it will make some of these difficulties easier.

I told K something along the lines of,

“I understand that there is much anxiety attached to responding to texts, but if she sees a text from you and the anxiety wins out over her fondness for you, then she really just doesn’t like you that much”.

Now, I really believed this at the time.

One of the reasons I believed this is that I did, and in many ways, still do, believe in people.

I tend to believe that people are, at any given moment, usually much more than we often think we are.

Because of this belief, alongside my notorious suspicion of “fixed identities”, I’m usually rather sceptical when someone tells me the story of their life and, in doing so, puts themself in a box.

Recall the old proverb— no situation is permanent.

I say all this because I simply did not want to believe that this girl’s story was permanent.

I wanted to believe that even if she’s currently overwhelmed by this situation, hopefully, some other situation will arise where there will be enough love to pull her out of it.

So I had two options before me when faced with K’s story—

Either this is simply how she is, and there’s nothing to be done. Or, this is how she is with K, and, if someone else arises, she will have the power to overcome her brain— power that her relationship with K did not provide.

I chose to believe in the second option because it meant that I chose hope.

K would eventually break things off with her.

But here, we depart from his story (although we will return with a surprise ending at the end of this essay).

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Is there hope for avoidant attached people?

In the years since this adventure with K, I have crossed paths with several people who, almost word for word, echo the sentiments of the girl in our story.

Perhaps such peeople have always been around, and I just did not notice, or maybe, around a few years ago, the language of “attachment styles” became more widespread, so things were easier to categorise.

In either case, in meeting many such people over the years, I’ve noticed some trends that worry me.

My (genuine) worries are captured in the question above—

Is there hope?

The internal monologue I laid out earlier is one I have seen in friends, more-than-friends and strangers on the internet.

Everyone I know with a similar story says, without fail, that they’re working on it.

Yet, I have never met an individual who has shared with me that they once had such a monologue but have since worked past it and are in a lighter place in life as a result.

Likewise, there’s the occasional TikTok which blows up where a person recounts pretty much exactly the internal monologue I’ve laid out here, and far too many comments pose a simple question—

“Genuinely, how does one fix this?”

There seems to be no answer to this question.

The situation simply is what it is.

The internal monologue wins every time.

I think that this is why I remain suspicious regarding fixed identities.

The stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves matter.

One can declare that they are “anxiously attached” and that becomes part of their being.

This in itself is not an issue, but it easily can be.

It starts to become one, I think, when one adds “person who’s working on it” to their persona as well.

There is a difference, I argue, between working on something and being a “person who’s working on something”.

One of those is an active process, and the other is a stable personality.

This brings to mind that old joke where a person says they’d like to get a master’s degree, and they turn that into their whole being because the persona of “person planning on getting a master’s degree” has some utility in the world. It, for instance, gets people off your back when they ask what you’re doing after college.

Yet, when they actually start said degree, and the persona shifts, they realise that the persona of “person planning on getting a master’s degree” was much more desirable than “person actually working on a master’s degree”.

(I’m aware that I’m reading too much into a silly joke here, but there’s a reason this page is called long walks for short drinks of water)

Anyway, I did not want to come to this realisation, but it became unavoidable after a series of strange encounters, including one with a close friend of mine.

I understood her general avoidant nature, even with friendships.

And, for the better part of a year, the thought was the same— she was working on things.

At some point, it seemed, to me at least, that the concept of “working on something” with no discernible change is a bit odd.

Now, I’m aware that this goes hand in hand with some conversations (and critiques) regarding therapy, what it does, what it’s for, and the extent to which the goal is to actually “cure” anyone of anything.

These are good theoretical questions, for some other day.

For our purposes, what we care about is that, theoretical concerns aside, our friendship became unsustainable.

At some point, it seemed like what was needed for the friendship to grow was impossible.

We remain friends, but it’s unlikely we can be as close as we once were or could have been.

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Now, I should say, I was wrong in my initial advice to K.

It is not true that if she’s avoidant, it means she just doesn’t like you.

I did not understand the weight of one’s inner monologue on these issues.

There’s no doubt in my mind that my friend, whom I just talked about, really did try and really did value the friendship.

It just so happens that life’s a bit more complicated than that.

As the Scriptures say, in fact, as Christ Himself says, sometimes,

The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

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Epilogue: Let me wrap up K’s story real quick.

About a year after K parted ways with this girl, he learned, because they lightly kept in touch, that she was in the process of getting into a relationship with someone.

In her words, it was unexplainable, but it felt “easy” with this person.

Quite the tale.

Might even be a happy ending.

vibes est vida.