Extreme fear of intimacy / attachment issues - anyone have these?

[rainbow19]

Very much struggling with my boyfriend who seems to want to both have me close and get rid of me simultaneously. We have been seeing each other for five months now.

Has anyone had a boyfriend or had themselves issues with being intimate and committed in relationships?

I was reading up on "Attachment Theory" and how we all have one of the four styles of attachment and he would fall under the definition of "Fearful Avoidant". He wants to be close and have a relationship but also doesn't.

The type of behaviors are:

**Saying he's not ready to commit but at the same time we are committed and in an exclusive relationship but he's scared to put a label on it.

**Keeping his options open by staying on Tinder and continuing to talk to girls he's met before me.

**Going distanct for days after we have a really great time together and then coming back

**Being a bit foggy about what he's up to and what he's doing to create a distance.

** Not staying in touch as much as he used to.

All of this only really started after we got a bit serious together and before that he was the polar opposite to all of this. I know he doesn't want to lose me but I don't know what to do as a lot of this doesn't make me happy of course and I feel like he often makes a deliberate attempt to keep distance rather than getting closer.

I have known him for years and he wasn't always like this. He got a broken heart about four years ago and has been like this ever since, not that he has has more than two or three girlfriends in that time.

It's made me feel bad and I do think our relationship is doomed because of it because I feel like I need the intimacy to increase and he puts a wall up to stop that happenning.

Can these sorts of issues be overcome or is it beating dead horse? I get very upset at times that he can't overcome it even it it means losing me

I know :(

You want him? As he is? Spending the rest of your life in this torment?
Or as you hope he can be?

I hope as he can be HeadDoctor. AS he was before his fear took him over.

I've been reading, and have seen an avoidant person:

^Creates strict boundaries between themselves and their partners. These boundaries may be physical or emotional — sleeping in a separate room or home or keeping insignificant (or important) information from their partner.
Is uncomfortable sharing deep feelings and maintains an emotional distance to be self reliant and avoid getting too close to their partner^

In relationships they tend to treat their romantic partner like a business partner — they ignore their feelings and respond only to the facts. When confronted they make their partner out to be “sensitive”, “overreacting”, or “needy”

Avoidants still have the basic need for love and attachment. So avoidants will miss their partner when they are not around. But if their partner returns, so does the avoidant’s feelings of being “trapped”, and they feel like they need more space once again

At the beginning of dating an avoidant you may think everything is going well. They are attentive, loving, and supportive. But as time goes on they find reasons to pull away

Avoidants tend to be on and off about their relationship. One day they are planning to move in with their partner and the next day they act as if they just met them. They will appear sensitive yet distant at the same time. Partners are not sure what to think of them. And when their partner finally decides, the avoidant changes again

Reading all of that is exactly what he is like, and with me being aare I am a little needy, an over-thinker and all of that I believe I turned it in onto myself entirely without also seeing there was something deeply wrong with him that was egging me on or making me worse.

I kept saying to myself that he acted at times like he didn't love me or want me and yet there he was proving he did because he kept coming back, kept fighting for me not to leave when I said I wanted to and trying so hard to talk it through when I would have one of my "flip flops" as we called it.

With me coming from a diferrent perspective I felt his "fear" was always something I could love him out of, and that if only he could feel safe enough with me that he would be able to let go and stop being scared - but I am working off the incorrect assumption that his end goal is the same of mine but I am wrong.

My end goal = us to be completely intimate and close and together forver

His end goal = to find any way possible to avoid that hapenning

I understand that has put me in torment, I understand he likes me and wants me but doesn't want real intimacy and closeness with me because that's his phobia - just as mine is being ignored :(

It's very hard though. Even seeing it!

rainbow19

It's hard, yes. It's very sad when we realize the person we desperately want to help can't be helped and will only cause us pain no matter how much love we give them. Even sadder when they're not causing the pain deliberately. But you must allow that sadness to exist because it reflects a deeper truth: sooner or later you will run out of love for this man and he still won't be fixed. You should leave him now, don't wait until you start to hate him.

Yes - what Intheprocess said.

Be gentle with yourself op. I do find there can be quite an unhelpful narrative that goes along with this kind of stuff - you've probably heard it. He's "just not that into you", you're too needy and ugh, men just can't bear needy. Words like desperate and pathetic get thrown around, and when we feel vulnerable it's not always helpful.

Same for him. So easy to get furious - he's a bastard, he's treating us like crap, he doesn't care, he's disrespectful and a bad person.

But if you take a step back perhaps you can accept that nobody is to blame - you're both just at where you're at. And where you're at is at an impasse. It doesn't work. It can't work. Once you accept this without all the angst and overblown emotion it's easier to just let go.

And you do need to let go. Continuing on in this kind of relationship is an insidious form of self harm. You are hurting yourself OP. Time to stop.

It can be changed but that takes years of patient motivated work with a good shrink. You will not be able to fix him, please don't waste years trying.

If you have to spend so much time analysing and labelling why he makes you feel shit, it's never going to work

If you have to spend so much time analysing and labelling why he makes you feel shit, it's never going to work

Honestly just read all the other stuff with a heavy heart and that just made me laugh. Simple but obviously true completely. He does make me feel like shit half the time.

Thanks InTheProcess. I know you're right. I had a friend when I was a lot younger who was a heroin addict. An otherwise really good guy (I know that sounds hard to believe but he was) and he'd just gotten in with the wrong people. He had a little girl at the time aged about 2 or 3 or something and he was about 20 I think and lived with his Mum, who was being heartbroken day after day by his addiction. I remember he was my friend, and I tried to be there for him, even at one point I took him away for a week in the country on lockdown and "Cold Turkey'd" him all by myself - putting up with him crying and being aggerssive and looking so ill and trashing- only for him to be right back on it. I got added by him on Facebook 15 years later and he'd only just turned his life around. I couldn't help him - it was his life really. This is probably the same thing.

Thanks FishFingers. You're right. Those dumb thoughts of he's just not that into you are the ones that make me feel most bad because I know he is, or at least feel that way in my gut, and the obvious way the mind works is: you like a girl = treat her like you do. In his case that's not true. Actually he was able to treat me fantastically until we got very intimate and his feelings deepened. After that he changed. So I will try and tell myself something more positive; like he must like you a lot for you to stir such anxiety in him. I'll try and say that to myself to feel better. I completely agree staying in the relationship is a form of masochism and won't meet my needs.

OhHuge Thanks. I know I can't fix someone else's psychological problems. My therapist once told me I couldn't fix anyone's problems, and that even as a therapist she couldn't either. They had to come and do the work and fix it themselves; and all she could do was act as a guide.

Just as I chat away to myself while trying to get to sleep, I have to admit I have alway been the type of person to look at issues that we label like this as being made up ones. Guilty of thinking things like sex addiction and attachment disorders and all the rest of it are just words we give ourselves and there's not really anyone on earth who could n ot just snap out of it if they really wanted to.

I do have a friend though with the most extreme eating disorder, and she genuinely can't control it at all. She ate a loaf of bread today and was then sick all afternoon. And my little brother once had such bad anxiety he used to call me crying daily because he believed he was dying and he had to be on medication for years to overcome it. And people fall into addictions, and cut themselves and kill themselves and do all sorts of behaviors which are so overtly self destructive and "senseless" and maybe this is also just one of those things.

Beyond his control. I'd really like to walk away thinking that instead of feeling like I wasn't enough or he didn't care enough -hich of course plays on all my own worse fears and insecurities.