How to Date an Avoidant Attachment Style- 11 Tips To Manage Conflict

Intimate relationships have the potential to bring out the most raw, uncensored versions of ourselves. You might notice how you are typically unbothered by most people, but your significant other has the ability to push your buttons in the most frustrating way.

When we are in close relationships with others where we want to feel loved and connected, we become vulnerable. The attachment system comes alive, which is the part of you that seeks close proximity to others you care about to feel safe and cared for, create meaning, and to survive in the world.

Attachment theory explains that everyone has a different way of communicating with others in intimate relationships which were learned early in life. More specifically, the ways we try to get close to others and the way we manage getting disconnected from others.

Did you ever notice how you panic and say things you never thought you would when you think your partner might be abandoning you? Or the way you shut down when your partner starts criticizing you again, even though you know disengaging further won’t help?

These reactions are the attachment system at work. They are your nervous system’s best attempt at keeping you connected or away from danger.

Learning your partner’s attachment style, or the ways they communicate when the sense a threat of disconnection, can help you understand quirks, build a healthy relationship together, and feel more connected to them.

Continue reading for practical tips for dating an avoidant attachment style. We’ll bring you into their world so you can understand how to navigate difficult moments together.

For more targeted support in healing from these patterns, we offer individual relational counseling and couples therapy services conveniently online.

How to Date an Avoidant Attachment Style

About attachment styles

Attachment styles are formed first in childhood when a child learns ways to find connection with their caregivers.

Attachment is all about staying emotionally connected to important people throughout life. Healthy attachments are based on the trust that you can access someone you care about when you need them: that they will be engaged with you, and that they will be responsive to your needs.

Children learn early in life how to respond when they can’t access their caregivers. Typically, they unconsciously continue to use these strategies in adulthood. They may develop a dismissive avoidant and fearful avoidant attached, anxious, or a secure attachment style. On a basic level, the tendencies attributed to each attachment style are:

• Avoidant– they weren’t able to reach their caregiver and learned not to trust others
• Anxious– they received inconsistent response from caregivers and learned not to trust themselves
• Secure– they reasonably received responses from their caregivers as they were needed

If your attachment style is different from your partner’s, you may have a hard time understanding and decoding what happens for them in moments of stress. If you are dating someone with an avoidant attachment, it’s also likely that you have an anxious attachment style, and respond to stress in a completely different way.

Understanding the avoidant attachment style will completely change the way you understand an avoidant partner. It will transform what you see when they show a lack of interest, act passive aggressive, or disengage in personal space. Once you better understand the framework, you can support and love your partner, help create a new pattern, and improve your own mental health.

Avoidant Attachment Style

An avoidant attachment style is developed when someone experiences fairly consistent neglect or rejection from caregivers growing up. They do not find a consistent, reliable way to reach their caregivers when they are needed.

These children learned to suppress or deactivate their attachment system to protect from the pain of further disconnection. This is often correlated with a fear of intimacy, and the overarching fear of being rejected.

To protect from these fears, someone with insecure attachment style may create emotional distance between themself and others. This even happens with those they long to have a close emotional bond with.

Insight of the avoidant attachment system can completely transform the way you understand your partner as an avoidant person and create space for empathy. When a fight or moment of disconnection happens, and your partner starts to disengage, you can presume the attachment system has been activated.

Activation of the system means that this is an emotionally significant event (i.e., the threat of losing you is stressful and upsetting for them). In the context of a romantic relationship, it might look like they do not care because they pull away or shut down. Yet, the avoidance behaviors are actually a defense mechanism to prevent losing more intimacy and closeness.

How to Date Someone with Avoidant Attachment Style

Here are some therapist-backed tips for dating someone with an avoidant attachment style.

Don’t React

The first piece of wisdom when working in attachment cycles is to try not to react. This can be incredibly challenging, especially if an avoidant partner’s withdrawal or apparent lack of interest is triggering for you.

However, if you react in the ways you always do, you are working in the same cycle. You probably know how it will end.

Instead, pause. Take a moment of space and quality time with yourself to get grounded so that you can respond from an emotionally aware place. A 30-minute time out when you realize you are both activated can help you to see more clearly. A little space will actually bring you closer in the long run.

Self-Regulate Before Communicating

Relationship patterns that involve shutting down in the face of stress can be triggering for some partners to witness. Especially with a partner that you crave emotional closeness with. So becoming upset when you see your partner pull away is understandable.

However, those with an insecure avoidant attachment style may become further triggered by realizing they are making you upset. If they see that you are angry and loud or even quiet and tearful, they might see that they are hurting you. A common response to this dynamic is to shut down even more, in order to try to stop hurting you. Of course, this will leave you even more upset and disconnected.

Instead, practice self-soothing techniques first. Ground yourself to manage your intense emotions, and then approach your partner from a place of calm and clarity. You are much more likely to receive the support you need from this place.

Soft Start Ups

If you can start a conversation on a positive note, you are more likely to end that way. The idea is that if you approach with tension, you will receive tension back.

In applying this concept to an avoidant partner, consider the difference in these two statements:

You always zone out when I’m trying to talk to you. You don’t even care, this isn’t important to you. Can you for once in your life just listen to me?

It really freaks me out when I get the sense that we are not on the same page. When I try to talk to you and you only offer one-word answers, it scares me even more. Could we talk about what’s going on here?

The first is accusatory and unspecific. The second is softer, more vulnerable, and more clear. Approaching with a softer start up is more likely to lead to a conversation of bonding and connection.

Don’t take reactions personally

When an avoidant partner pulls away, defends, or withdraws, their attachment system is activated. The activation means that they are impacted by the fight or the threat of getting disconnected from you. It means they care about you, even though their actions do not look like it on the surface.

The reaction is more about their own experiences and the past that is triggered by your present dynamic. They are often pulling away because they do not believe that anything they do will help the situation. And they want to protect you both from further pain.

Try to see the attachment system at work and avoid taking reactions personally to mean anything about your own worth.

Give The Benefit Of The Doubt

When your partner does offer to speak to you and answer your questions about why they pull away, believe what they share with you.

Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that someone cares about you if they walk away when they are upset. However, this is the true experience of many avoidantly attached individuals. If you challenge their reality, you will confirm their belief that it is better to walk away than to share vulnerably. Instead, see the positive intent in their actions.

Validate Their Experience

A person with an avoidant attachment usually has not been told in their life that their feelings are valid. When they receive messages that they are doing something wrong in their reaction, they are only going to pull away and defend themselves even more.

Instead of criticizing, see if you can genuinely validate their experience. This will ease their fears, help them feel safe, and calm the reaction to pull away.

Validating a partner could sound like: “I get how hard it is when we fight. It makes sense that you feel overwhelmed when I get angry. You are so important to me. And I want to talk about this in a way that works for both of us.”

Ask Them About Their Needs

On the other side of every negative emotion or attachment style is a need. Often, we become so caught up in patterns of self-protection that we lose sight of what we actually need to feel safe and connected in close relationships.

Offer your partner the chance to reconnect with their emotions and needs by creating this space for them. Instead of accusing or blaming when they are avoidant, ask them what they might need to feel safe to have a difficult and vulnerable conversation with each other.

Consider Your Own Attachment Style

It’s easy to look at other people and identify what they are doing wrong. It’s hard to look at ourselves and accept how we contribute to the patterns we are in.

Remember, you are half of the relationship dynamic for every relationship you are in. And, it’s very common for anxious and avoidant partners to wind up together. Explore your own attachment style and consider the ways your strategies may impact your partner’s, and vice versa.

Attend Therapy

Working with attachment styles can be complex, nuanced work. It can also be nearly impossible to see these dynamics clearly when you are part of it.

For intimate relationships involving long term plans and sharing a life and commitments, therapy can be an invaluable tool. A therapist will also help you to uncover your cycle of communication rooted in your individual attachment styles and understand how to develop secure attachment for both of you to each other and to yourselves.

In addition to learning about yourselves and your relationship, a dating and relationship therapist will actually help you in spending time practicing new communication patterns so that you replace old reactions with new, effective responses. This will help reduce damage that is done when partners are activated and keep you connected to each other.

Be Patient

We learn attachment styles when we are very young, and they become coded in our brain and nervous system. Remember, attachment styles are threat mitigation systems. They are our bodies’ best attempt at keeping us safe from the pain of losing others.

Learning to adjust an attachment style takes time and success in new experiences. Don’t expect your partner’s avoidance to change after one breakthrough conversation. Real change takes practice over time in creating new patterns.

Give Them Space

Typically partners with avoidant tendencies process thoughts internally on their own, whereas anxious partners like to process aloud externally together.

To support your partner, recognize and respect their need for space. Remember that their need for space is not about needing to be away from you, but needing time to collect their thoughts so they can show up their best for you. Offering this support validates their own process and creates the safety for them to sift through their emotions.