The Myth of Avoidance

Written by Ella Donoghue

Everybody claims to want a yearner—right up until they get their hands on one. Then suddenly, that loving, longing, brooding neediness loses all of its appeal. 

Lucy is my best friend—she is one of those women who seems to have completely mastered the art of female friendships. Her platonic relationships are abundant and filled with vulnerability, laughter and life. But historically, when it comes to romantic interactions with men, her interest in nurturing a relationship collapses. 

Years ago, our group of friends collaboratively engaged in consistent, forceful efforts to get Lucy together with Teddy. We spent weeks working overtime, campaigning and convincing both that the other would be their perfect match. It shouldn’t have been particularly difficult; it began with Teddy expressing to us all, frequently and with increasing fervor, that he was interested in Lucy, who had spent most of her life not-so-secretly crushing on him, too. We began to invent party games during which they’d be forced to kiss, or we’d accidentally (on purpose) leave them alone together in cars or in rooms. At least ten of us were pushing them together with all our might, and the one pushing for it hardest of all was Teddy. 

But Lucy pushed back. 

We watched Lucy’s feelings evaporate. The more Teddy wanted her—the more obviously he yearned—the less attractive he became. Though she’d loved him basically forever, she ran faster away from his attention as it intensified. She worried that if she allowed him to get any closer, he would quickly realize he no longer wanted to be there and leave her regretfully heartbroken, reinforcing her pre-existing self-doubts. She kept him at a comfortable distance for months.

Lucy is a classic case of avoidant attachment. Throughout the time she ended up spending in a relationship with Teddy, she never seemed truly at ease with him. She could not let her guard down. And if she did, at any point, let him in and allow herself to fall madly in love, she never completely surrendered to it. He was the one we all hoped could break down the walls she’d built around her heart, but he only seemed to cause her to reinforce them. To this day, when she asks me what I think it was that stood in her way, I tell her that it was fear. 

Avoidance is fear. The myth of avoidance is pretending that it is a separate, unrelated emotion. Sometimes we want to avoid who we think is the wrong person—we get the ick, we develop a destructive inability to be honest. But hiding beneath our apprehension is just fear—of vulnerability, of closeness, of opening your heart to the possibility of it being harmed, toyed with, or shattered. Lucy convinced herself that by avoiding love, she could protect herself from the painful loss of it. A loss that she imagined would be disastrous, a cataclysmic eruption, one that would expose all the parts of herself and all of the emotions she desperately wanted to keep hidden. 

But avoidance—her fear of being stripped emotionally naked—did not protect her from that emotional exposure but prolonged it, and actually, in many ways, caused it. 

By the time Teddy finally secured the title of Lucy’s Boyfriend, he had already become accustomed to her avoidance. He learned to understand her as the type of girlfriend who didn’t want to have deep, confessional conversations, didn’t want to spend more time with him in any given week than with her best friends, and could barely get past niceties with his family, let alone dinner parties or vacations. The things that bring the average couple closer instead scared her off, and he knew that forcing her too far outside her comfort zone would mean losing her. 

Teddy eventually internalized Lucy’s hesitations and became hesitant himself; vulnerability felt unnatural and foreign within their dynamic. He refrained from doing anything she might find too clingy, maintained a near constant facade of nonchalance, and never pried too much when it came to her feelings, until emotional distance began to ferment into a fundamental quality of their relationship. 

As a result, Lucy often complained that he lacked emotional intelligence, or that he had unspoken fears of his own that caused him to be so distant. But what Lucy was encountering was a perfect mirror reflection of the avoidance she had been normalizing since the beginning. 

Being Lucy’s best friend, I found myself acting as a correspondent in her conflicts with Teddy, delivering the messages that they both were afraid to deliver to the other on their own. Talking to one another—especially about serious issues involving feelings—became simply too laborious, each of them terrified to be the one who’d finally blow over their delicate house of cards. Fear and avoidance ultimately became their fatal flaws, the dark shadow cast over their relationship that inevitably consumed it. In the end, avoidance is a myth. 

We can run from fear and we can try to push away those who want us, even when we might want them just as badly. But we can’t outrun our emotions. Eventually you’ll become cornered, left with no choice but to confront them. Avoidance is a mask that will eventually need to come off. And I’ve Always Said That.