FA who just won't open up..at all

If you push an avoidant they will either bite or run. I just pressed my DA about a week ago and he told me to move on. When I texted more, he told me we should go our separate ways. When an avoidant distances to make him or herself more comfortable it can be very anxiety producing in their partner- even if the partner is secure. These anxious feelings encourage chase mode and the avoidant feels smothered and runs faster. The trap. The cycle.

He's opened up just fine by ignoring your attempts to communicate about your needs. His need is clear- the need to avoid.
Secure behavior would be to accept his behavior as either conducive to a mature, mutual relationship or not conducive to a mature, mutual relationship, and make choices according to one's own boundaries, values, and priorities.

Insecure behavior would be to make attempts beyond the ones you've already made to create a meaningful dialog, and then go about finding ways to get the non-responsive partner to change their behavior.

So, you get to choose your own security or insecurity here, but you don't really have an option of influencing his.

I recently wrote about the person who test drives a lemon, falls in love with it, and keeps driving it hoping it will become a better vehicle ( because they want it to run better and get them around, where they want to go.)
Attachment, feelings, denial, and wishful thinking and multiple goes with a wrench likely won't fix a lemon.

It's a good idea to choose a relationship partner who possesses the qualities that you desire instead of trying to elicit the desired qualities from someone who isn't displaying them consistently as you develop your relationship. That seems to be a consistent lesson learned here. Best of luck!

I think for some insecures, that is all they’ve known their entire life based on parental behaviors most likely. Their parents were available and then unavailable and then available again, as and when they have resources or bandwidth. For example, they might be loving and present during the holidays, then emotionally and mentally absent when work starts and gets busy. as children, we were told to be understanding when parents get busy and have no time and energy to meet your silly needs for attention, and so we just need to wait till the period is over. That is construed as love - understanding and waiting for someone to have time and space for you. Thus, this inconsistency is “normal”, and so ghosting is “normal” and “understandable”. The nuance between “needing space” and “disappearing” is often lost/equated for insecures, and so ghosting is accepted; waiting for someone you love to resurface and come to you IS considered loving behaviors that demonstrate our love for the other party. How else would we then show that we have tolerance and patience and love for the other party’s difficulties? It’s warped logic, but it is what we learnt as being loving - accepting the disappearance because we are understanding of other people’s lack of resources for us. This is also why you see APs in particular making excuses and making up narratives for all the disappearances.

The trouble with that POV is that it must surely only be an AP that sees remaining available as an act of "love" . It leaves the AP wide open to exploitation and objectification, and it seems like the person who ghosts and returns sees the faithful AP as gullible and easily manipulated. All the ghoster has to do is express appreciation for waiting on them and then they are back, welcomed with open arms because the AP is so relieved, and ghoster even gwts catered to and tippy toed around. It's completely enabling to take a ghoster back, especially under the guise of being tolerant and loving and patient. This means, no negative consequences for such harmful behavior, in fact, the whole thing just lowers the bar permanently from what I've observed here. Even (self aware) FA's admit that when they go back, it's not with real feelings, it's a fix of some sorts. I think one FA wrote here that they knew it is too ballsy to expect to be able to return after disappearing.

So this is just a really self destructive mindset, to tolerate it. Ouch!

Oh dear. I can't stand worrying about anything. My auto response is to fix it. Deal with it immediately. And boy have I tried to fix things. He runs but then he comes back. It has been so exhausting that I became anxious about the fact that I was anxious all the time. That was the strongest clue for me that things were not quite right. Love, to me, isn't supposed to be a rollercoaster of highs and lows. I hate drama and I am terrible at taking hints. I kept questioning why I feel bereft, starved even of love. Not knowing about avoidants and how they operate, I began to blame myself. 

I have read about anxious types.  I can see that asking him to emote is acting anxious on my part. At the beginning, I used to disengage too. Once he shut down, I would not contact him at all. The first time it happened, I assumed that whatever we had was over and went about my life. Ignoring my texts asking how he is, telling him a story or giving him regular information...ignoring them for 2 days was enough to make me disengage completely. When he got back in touch, I would be non-committal until we could meet and talk. In these talks, I would bluntly ask him what was going on. He had some answers once I probed beyond the "I was busy" response. Pretty telling ones now that I know about avoidants. It has to do with his own anxiety. He talked of panic attacks. Very reluctant to call it anxiety though. Just panic attacks that make him leave the room, quit a conversation or go hide in his apartment for days until they subside. He told me that he has it under control and I thought nothing of it.

However, as we got closer (with a number of week-long disappearances on his part) he seemed to open up a bit more each time. This lulled me into thinking that we were making progress. Recently he disappeared for a month. No amount of mental gymnastics could assuage my anxiety. I couldn't continually psych myself into thinking that I don't care. I was driving myself nuts with mixed messages..to myself. On the one hand, I really love this guy. On the other, this is a screwed up situation to be in. Then I began to reason that regardless of our issues, I owe it to him (and myself) to get to the bottom of it. Not just throw in the towel. When I first read about avoidants, I got even more confused. Couldn't decide if he was FA or DA and I was upset that he was an avoidant at all. There is so much negative stuff on the internet about avoidants that one gets the impression that one should run far, far away. I wanted to run, to cut things off abruptly at first. But then I figured that he is not the first avoidant in the world and that someone somewhere may know how to approach having a talk with one. Avoidance seems to work because they avoid things. I figured that if I got him to open up then perhaps we could discuss our perceptions of the relationship, our individual needs and come to some sort of agreement. To be honest (and I don't know what this says about me), there are some advantages to his avoidant behaviour. It is not all bad. It is weird but there are some other avoidant things he does that work well for me. 

Ohhh. I am so sorry that you went through that.  Verbal abuse and personal attacks have not been an issue for us...yet. I can see that it could progress to that point especially if we spend a lot of time in close proximity. Abuse is a deal breaker for me - even verbal.

The silent treatment. Yeah I know how that works. I used it a lot when I was in an abusive marriage. I would refuse to say a word for weeks on end. I practically blanked out my ex-husband. As if he ceased to exist. In my defence, I did it because I was trying to keep a lid on my emotions. The man just wouldn't stop with the harassment. Every day, every hour he was at home, I felt harassed. So much drama from him..always. I worried that if I engaged him, I would lose my mind, say horrible things that would result in getting beaten up once again. I avoided such an escalation because I knew that it would spell the end for us. A decision I didn't want to make at that time. So I shut up and erased him from my existence as best I could. In a way, I was protecting my ex-husband, the marriage and my family unit from my explosive feelings and the resultant break up. When I did decide to engage (because I could only sustain silence for so long), it got really ugly and I left him, never looked back. Perhaps that is what your FA was doing too. Maybe he thought that he was protecting the status quo, the relationship.  

I can understand the silent treatment as a way to gain control of oneself and maintain stability in the relationship. Couples have issues and the silent treatment approach is, in my view, a pretty calm albeit passive-aggressive way of handling things. What I can't understand is the verbal and/or physical abuse of someone you claim to love.