At a glance
An anxious avoidant relationship is 2 people reaching for the same safety in opposite directions. One needs the conversation finished tonight. The other needs 20 minutes before any sentence is safe to say. Each request makes the other one louder. Here is what each of you is defending, and where the circuit can be cut.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I am Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The fear underneath is usually identical. Couples sit down certain they are built differently, and I hear one worry wearing 2 outfits.
- Speed increases with stakes. People tell me everything is fine until something actually matters, and then the old positions lock in within seconds.
- Diagnosis can replace disclosure. Partners start trading attachment terms at each other instead of saying what landed badly.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why does every argument end up in the same place?
Within about 3 exchanges you have both stopped discussing the topic and started answering each other. One of you senses the thread going thin and reaches for it. The other feels the reach as weight and needs a gap before words will come. Reaching reads as demand. Needing the gap reads as abandonment. From there you are each defending against the other one defending.
It stays invisible because neither position is irrational. If contact is how you confirm nothing is broken, finishing this tonight is obviously right. If pressure is what takes your words away, stepping out for a moment is obviously right. You are not wrong about yourselves. You are each deploying a remedy that happens to be the other one’s allergy.
The topic is almost incidental. I hear about dishes, visiting parents, phones at dinner, and the underlying choreography is word for word the same. Noticing that the content varies while the steps do not is usually the first thing worth having.
What is each of you really doing?
One of you is confirming the connection survived. The other is trying to stay capable of speech.
Nobody who moves in is trying to trap anybody. They are trying to switch off a physical sensation in the stomach, and the only thing that has ever switched it off is evidence of contact. The repeated question is not obstinacy. It is the sensation returning, because nothing inside has actually settled.
Nobody who steps back has stopped caring, although that is precisely how it reads. What they describe to me is closer to a system overloading: volume rising, vocabulary vanishing, a conviction that anything said in the next minute will be wrong and will cost them. Going quiet is harm reduction. From the outside it is indistinguishable from indifference.
Hold those as possibilities about couples in general, not conclusions about yours. Sometimes somebody genuinely is on their way out. Sometimes the person moving in is not frightened at all, but asking for the tenth time for something perfectly reasonable that has never arrived. Establishing which is true in your case should come before either of you accepts a label.
So is one of us to blame?
It takes 2 of you to run the circuit, which is not the same as 2 equal shares of responsibility. Calling something a dynamic can quietly erase real differences in conduct.
Leaving the building in the middle of a row, or staying unreachable for 3 days afterwards, is not merely one half of a dance. Putting the same question to someone 12 times in an evening has a weight the other person carries. Some behaviour sits squarely on one side. I would not ask anybody to absorb a share of something that is not theirs just to keep an explanation symmetrical.
The circuit itself is genuinely joint, and that is the part you can both change without settling who began it. Who began it is a question with no answer, and it will happily consume entire sessions.
Does withdrawing cost more than pursuing?
The visible bill tends to land on distance, which is not the same as fault.
Among 175 couples in one study, the partner who wanted more distance rated their own satisfaction lower, their partner also rated theirs lower, and the stronger association sat with the distancing partner’s own experience of the relationship.1 Withdrawing during conflict explained part of that for the person withdrawing, but did not explain how satisfied their partner was, which implies the partner is reacting to more than the withdrawal by itself. The sample was Spanish, better educated and better off than average, and measured once, so it marks an association and not a cause.
The careful conclusion is that stepping back is not a free move. It is often that partner who tells me, once the room has gone quiet enough, that they have been unhappy for far longer than anybody noticed.
Can a mismatched pair actually last?
Yes, and mismatch is the norm rather than the exception. Most couples I work with are not alike in this. The ones who come through it did not converge. They stopped reading the difference as proof that something worse was going on.
A study that followed 294 married couples for roughly 5 years found higher relationship quality travelling alongside lower insecurity and a gentler rise in it over time.2 The couples were mainly American and not in crisis, and the design cannot establish which way the influence ran, so it does not demonstrate that a good relationship makes people secure. It fits something I see constantly: how 2 people treat each other and how safe each of them feels tend to rise and fall together.
The movement I look for is tiny. One of you manages to say I am shutting down because I am swamped, not because I have stopped loving you, and the other manages to receive that as a fact rather than as a door closing.
What cuts the circuit early?
Meeting in the middle is not the goal. Interrupting it while you are still in contact with each other is. 4 things do that.
- Report your own state, not their conduct. It scares me when we go quiet arrives somewhere entirely different from you always shut me out, which is a charge and gets defended against.
- Put a clock on the break before you need it. A pause only works with an agreed end. 20 minutes and I am back is a pause. Leaving with no return time is the single most frightening move available to you.
- Say the retreat out loud. Unannounced silence gets filled with the worst available interpretation. 5 words, I need 10 minutes, completely change what the silence means.
- Identify the small thing that actually calms the one reaching. Frequently it is not discussion at all. It is touch, or a stated time you will be home, or one fixed hour in the week nobody has to request.
Those address the circuit. They do not address everything, and I would be wary of applying them where they do not fit. Where one person has genuinely checked out, or where distance is being used to govern what the other one does, a well-managed pause simply makes the arrangement more comfortable for whoever already holds the power.
They are also insufficient where the identical argument has run for years, where one of you has stopped raising anything at all, or where an old injury underneath was never properly addressed. That usually asks for sustained work with both of you present, over time.
If you want to look at your own circuit with me, sessions run by video wherever the 2 of you are, and a free 30-minute call is a sensible way to find out whether it fits. My work with couples is described on the online couples therapy page.
Questions people ask
Together or separately?
If the circuit between you is the main trouble, together is the right room, because the pattern can occur live where we can slow it down. Individual sessions suit the situation where one of you is still working out something unsaid.
My partner refuses to come. Is it pointless?
No, and starting alone is common. Alter your half of a circuit and you alter what the other half is responding to, which is frequently enough to make the conversation possible later on.
Will you take sides?
I will not pretend the 2 of you are contributing equally when you are not, and I am not there to rule on who is right. My job is to make what happens between you visible enough that you can both see it.
Does couples work hold up over video?
It does, including when the 2 of you are in different countries, which is now a regular part of my practice. What it needs is an uninterrupted hour and a connection that holds.
What kind of therapy suits this?
One that works with what is happening between you as it happens, rather than teaching rules for conversation. I draw on emotion-focused therapy for couples and on attachment thinking, and I use them to follow the circuit rather than to label either of you.
You may also find these helpful
Sources
- Avoidant Attachment, Withdrawal-Aggression Conflict Pattern, and Relationship Satisfaction: A Mediational Dyadic Model. Frontiers in Psychology, 2021.
- An Exploratory Longitudinal Dyadic Analysis of Couple Attachment Trajectories. Contemporary Family Therapy, 2025.
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
