Do Dismissive Avoidants ever truly LOVE you

Falling in love: thinking someone is wonderful, butterflies in stomach, excitement to see someone. I think my ex was capable of feeling all of those (although he'd call it "attraction" or "lust" or "curiosity").

Real love: This is a more complicated thing, made up of the attraction / romantic attraction / emotional intimacy / commitment or a "choice" to do the work for that relationship because you value it. I am not sure how easy that must be if you're avoidant?

I have a very avoidant best friend. She never had relationships really, then she married at the age of 40 and now aged 43 she intermittently adores and hates her husband. The guy is wonderful / loves her and she cognitively knows he is amazing but her natural tendency is to find flaws / criticize and push him away. This isn't some romantic move where he "loves her enough" and these problems go away; it's an ongoing battle for her to try and love and appreciate her husband.

When I look back to my marriage (he passed away very young) I loved that man every single day. Every flaw he had, I found funny or endearing. If he annoyed me I didn't WANT to stay mad at him. My natural leaning was to adore and appreciate him and so the "love" was partly some kind of chemical attraction and spark but it was also a decision I made every day to be intimate, to connect with him, to choose to love him on good days and bad days and eventually the worst days.

There's a passage in the Book "the Road Less Travelled" where he talks about love being cathecting (basically spending time and effort on something) which is kind of the same theme as the Velveteen Rabbit or the Little Prince - what we love becomes valuable and special to us in a big way because we CHOOSE them and we make the choices to give our love, time, affection and commitment to that thing. With my FA ex, he didn't cathect to anyone. He didn't spend time with people because he didn't WANT to become attached to them. Sometimes he became a little attached despite himself, but ultimately he didn't want that vulnerability.

I am sure there are people who are avoidant who love people romantically but I am guessing it must sure be one heck of an obstacle and also to get to that point much be a much longer and harder road.

I was just sitting with my counselor and we spoke of this exact thing.
I am grieving the loss of the relationship of 18 months with my ex DA.
I asked her if he was grieving me, if he was missing me.
This answer, her answer is specific to my person, but she said this;

"He cannot bond. He was able to show up for those moments he spent with you for only a specific amount of time and when he was done, he was done and had to leave the date.
He would have stayed with you for as long as you would have put up with his push-pull behaviors. He came to you for sex and intimacy, but all on his own terms.
He cannot love. Love is dangerous to him."

I have had a variety of different, loving relationships over my 40 years so far and there are a few things I have learned on that journey. One key one is that "love" is a verb; the actions that you choose to take for a person are tied up very closely with your feelings for that person (maybe why we love our children so much) and loving is often an act of service and in it's nature is very selfless. If you are healthy, you get real joy and happiness from giving those things. Real love in it's most beautiful form requires ultimate vulnerability, ultimate commitment to serving the best interests of the other. It's not something ALL people can do even if they wanted to.

I have a very narcissistic brother. He "loves", but not in the same way I do. I think all personalities and characters have varying capacities for loving and being loved and you don't need to have an attachment disorder to find it difficult. Many people have never really learned how, I think. I have an ex boyfriend who I dated when I was age 14 - 15 (he is happily married now) and we met up for a coffee a few weeks ago (he is now 43 and I am 40) and he told me I taught him how to love and that the year he spent with me at age 16 - 17 was the time that set his pathway for a happy life. That made me very happy and it was a nice thing to hear.

Loving and being loved comes very easily and very naturally to me. I grew up in a house filled with kisses and loyalty and support and I was fortunate that my early relationships and friendships were supportive and loving and prepared me in the right way to have those skills. I don't think this makes me "better" than my ex FA - I could see in him a sadness and loneliness but he just does not have the strength or ability to fix it. He doesn't know how! I didn't feel angry at him, I just felt sad about it and wanted it to get better.

I heard a woman speaking once a few years ago and someone asked her if she believed in "soulmates" and she said, "yes, my husband is my soulmate. We have been together 20 years and we've lived through wonderful times and happy times and house moves and job losses and sick children and financial difficulties and all the wonderful things in between and we've been together through it all. He's my soulmate because we both decided to be that, so we are".

I kind of think that is it! You can have all the feelings of passion and attraction and admiration in the world, but if you don't ACT in consistently loving ways towards someone then I do not think you "truly" love them. Maybe you just love them as best you can.

I plan weddings for a living (such a romantic job!) and so one thing I hear all the time is engaged couples and schmaltzy words about love but no matter how often I hear them the words about love I think are most true are the good old fashioned Bible ones from Corinthians: *Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres* For me that's the ultimate truth of love (when you lose a spouse you find out how true this all is) and I am not sure someone with a severe attachment disorder is capable of all that because it takes more than just wanting to do all that to be actually able to do it.

I am a secure person, have had some WONDERFUL relationships, and my encounter with my FA honestly did break my heart and really shook my faith and security in myself so I think what's important for all of you is to realise how precious you are and that's someone's poor treatment of you is ALWAYS a reflection of their flaws rather than your own. If you think in the long term though, they are going to make the next person feel just as bad as you did. It's a very sad cycle.

The best you can do is to try what you can to let them know you feel they need some help (even if they don;t listen now maybe they will in a year) but also let them know that their behavior is painful for you and that you can't continue with it. Please don't feel bad. I know I have felt terrible but it's not your fault.

While my name isn't Yasmin, I am also a secure who was in a relationship with a (dismissive) avoidant for a long time. I think it's a misconception that a secure will never be with an avoidant. The main difference is that if we act on our secure tendencies, the relationship won't usually last for very long because we adhere to our own boundaries, whereas the anxious will typically allow their boundaries to be overstepped in an attempt to keep the relationship going.

That said, the intermittent reward system that is created by an avoidant's behaviour is liable to make even a securely attached person anxious, given enough time.

Jeagar, I totally agree with you. I was a secure type and fell in love with a DA and I allowed myself to become anxious and triggered by him. What woke me up is finding out he is DA. Everything is clear now and I finally woke up to the reality and I will not allow him to take me on this rollercoaster ride any longer. I’m turned off and I’m hurt and I’m angry. All enough reasons for me to distance myself and move on with my life. I love myself more than I love him. Thank goodness for that. 😊❤️😊


God bless everyone. 🙏🙏

It might help if I also mention my last conversation with him, because I think he was actually being really honest and while the conversation was totally crazy-making and insane, he was actually, with hindsight, giving me a lot of truth.

What happened was it was our first "date" as a couple after almost a year of getting it together. We were very close, very intimate and it was a really happy night. We were holding hands and laughing and we were kissing in the street. Then in the middle of the kiss he starts saying "oh but the problem is this is just so intense. With you it feels so intense and then I want you so badly but then as soon as it happens I want to get away". I didn't know about FA's so I had no clue what he was talking about (to me intense is good). So I questioned him about what he meant and why he was upset.

He said to me....

1) I freaked him out because he felt like he wasn't in control
2) I freaked him out because he felt like I had "the power" and he lost his around me
3) I freaked him out because I had boundaries and he wasn't used to that
4) He was intimate with me emotionally in a way he said he never had been with anyone, including his family
5) He had a dynamic with me that was like nothing he'd ever experienced before

It was like he was telling me that everything about me put him into fear mode. All the things I would consider as a positive thing, he was viewing as something to run away from. We had the most intimate conversation we have ever had that night, and he laid himself bare to me. Explaining how insecure he was, explaining how he felt surprised anyone wanted him, explaining how he was lonely inside and that he'd been depressed and all this. Up until then he'd always come across as a totally together guy, so this felt like a huge confessional.

For whatever reason, this made him defensive, so he more or less insulted the heck out of me at the dinner table. He told me that he could be committed, but only for the right person (ie: I wasn't the right person) and he more or less said all his crappy running away behavior since we met was because I wasn't "the one" and then when "the one" came along he would behave better. I got furiously angry at that point and got up and walked out of the restaurant.

then I kind of froze and walked back in and said to him that I knew he was trying to get me to storm out so he could avoid the intimacy and that I wasn't going to do it. I was seriously rattled emotionally and I told him I didn't want to see him anymore. He started to cry at the table. Not loudly, but I could see his eyes filled with tears. We ended up leaving and he hasn't spoken to me since.

the whole night was really a textbook FA moment, but it left me TOTALLY rattled. I'd gone out that night feeling so in love and so excited and like this was the beginning of a life together and instead I wind up insulted and ghosted. This kind of behaviour is just not normal, but it still hurts no matter how secure you are.