Warning signs of an Avoidant

Raco,

Thanks for your response.  You verified what I had experienced and actually reminded me of several other things that had happened. 

"I often felt that I had no choice but to be passive, letting the avoidant choose the moment, the duration, and the mean of communication."

This was the worst part of the whole thing for me - the constant feeling of dangling at the whim of somebody else.  I'm normally a take-charge person who deals on an equal footing with people.  The phone/text message drama ended up being absolutely horrible for me.

"Tell you very little about their life, and try to compensate that by telling you about insignificant details." 

Totally true - when we talked, he would often plunge into a very detailed description of that day's events, but, as I look back, the big picture was never revealed.

 "They can suddenly stop being distant and do things they would usually not do (like contacting you often, on the phone, etc.)."

This totally describes a weird incident.  After about a month of the his inconsistent, delayed responses to text messages, I began to try to figure out what in the world was really going on.  I found information on attachment styles and immediately recognized him as being an avoidant and saw some very anxious tendencies developing in me.  All of the documentation that I found said that avoidant and anxious personalities are a combination that is a disaster. 

I sent him a message saying that after doing some research, I saw avoidant tendencies in him and anxious tendencies in me.  He immediately responded that he confused many people because he is so friendly but that he never lets anybody get close.  That seemed like a pretty clear admission that he knows that he is an avoidant and that he has had trouble in the past with misleading other people.  I knew that the best thing was to back away and I sent him a message saying thanks for everything that I had learned from him and hoping that he had benefitted in some way from knowing me.  My plan was to drift away.

Two days later, the man who had had absolutely no time to talk on the phone for months, was on the phone with all of the time in the world to chat about the article that I had written three months earlier to publish on his Web site.  Sad to say, the charm didn't last too long.  On the phone, he begged me to do some immediate article rewrites and then never bothered to respond to me for two weeks.  It was as though he had disappeared - I actually wondered if he was sick or dead.  He finally showed back up after two weeks and angrily told me that he had no time for me because he had so many important people calling him and that I should be like other people and just be grateful for any tidbits of attention that he could grant to me.  That was the beginning of the end.  I do confess, I had a very hard time understanding how a person who had seemed so bright and so in touch, could actually be this odd.   

"What I noticed with the avoidants I know is that I always started to feel that something is awkward very quickly, but I did not feel that consciously. The awkward things seemed to be insignificant and subtle at first, and I only realized that they were some clear signs of an avoidant personality afterwards."

As I was writing my initial post, I wondered if my own feelings of being off-balance were actually the most reliable warning signal that something wasn't right about this person.  As I look back, I think he was using his initial charm to cover up being a solo operator who really finds dealing with other people a burden.  And, I now can see that, if you know what you are looking for, the dance with one foot out the door was fairly obvious from very early in the relationship. 

I just hope that we can all learn some good lessons about how to spot avoidants and how to deal with them in the very limited way that they are capable of handling.  I think probably avoidants are great as auto mechanics or grocery store managers or the programmers who write bank ATM software.  What they are not good at is being friends or love interests.

Best wishes to you.

Katy

Thank you both for your responses. I don't actually know who I really dealt with or what his real problem actually is. I've also had some on-going thoughts that he might be a narcissist.  For whatever it's worth, my friend's husband, who is a psychiatrist, who has known me for years and heard five minutes of this story, immediately decreed that he is a narcissist. 

Statistically, there are more avoidants than narcissists in the population, but as Jeb says in his book, narcissists may just be further down on the avoidant continuum.

I freely admit that I didn't have a clue about avoidant behavior.  I'd had five and a half months of very kind, polite interaction with a person whom I knew other people admired.  We seemed to be happily writing an article together about training my rescue dog (this fellow is a very experienced dog breeder and had helped me learn to manage our dog's hard-wired guarding behaviors) and I felt as though I had met a very enterprising, fascinating person. 

My husband and I were planning on visiting him and, when he found out that my husband's former boss had moved very close to him, he even suggested that my husband should talk to his former boss about hiring him so that we could move and be his neighbors.  Obviously, some of that I took with a grain of salt, but I certainly assumed that we were friends.

He seemed to have plenty of time to talk and text pictures of puppies.  He sort of positioned himself as our dog's pseudo- godfather and wanted to keep up on details about our dog's training, he and I were involved in writing an article, and he and my husband would exchange messages to each other with me as the go-between.  It seemed absolutely fun and innocent but to an avoidant or a narcissist, I was probably getting too comfortable in assuming a level of closeness and that I could count on him in the future as a friend.

When he told me that his workload had picked up and that phone calls were tough because he was busy training and delivering puppies to their new owners, I believed him.  After two months of being more and more strangely rejected (supposedly always because he was so busy with work), it was almost as though, at times, I was dealing with a different person. But, in the middle of the rejection, he suddenly invited me to visit for a week to help him show his dogs in a dog show.  I had no idea what was going on until I found Jeb's Web site and books.    

The end actually came sooner than the dog show.  At the end, he was somewhat mean, but I don't know if he was acting as a frustrated avoidant thinking that the only way to get rid of somebody who didn't understand that he needed them to immediately go away was to get angry or if his meanness was a touch of a narcissist's rage because I dared to complain about his high-handed behavior.   

At one point, several months ago, after months of silence, he suddenly said that he would text me changes to my 30 page article!  I told him that we needed to talk to each other to work effectively and that I was sure that we could compromise on a communications method that would work for both of us.  Not a peep in response.  So, at the very least, he has very poor compromise skills.

I've sadly given up on him and I've given up on ever publishing the article.  I've tried to look back to see my mistakes in being uninformed and too trusting and too forgiving.  I've also tried to understand the subtleties of his early behavior so that I'll better be able to identify if new people I meet could be avoidants or narcissists.  I found myself not trusting somebody that I met a few weeks ago because, even though she was kind, she immediately said that she was so busy.  That is not how I would have reacted in the past.  I'm sure as all of this knowledge becomes integrated into my personality, I'll get my confidence back.

Thanks again for all of your excellent comments and help.

Katy