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Yep.
I've become ACUTELY prescient at noticing when someone is anxious-avoidant or worse, just straight up dismissive. Me, I'm mildly anxious (have gotten a lot better) and very secure once basic trust is established. It takes a lot of effort to maintain that, since one scary thing is that secure-attachment people can be shifted over to avoidant and anxious if they have enough bad experiences with the other types.
So the secure types become a rarer and rarer type to find because they're either pairing off or getting ruined by having a handful of bad relationships that failed on them.
I'm semi-comfortable with the anxious types, I don't mind giving reassurances to them that the relationship is strong... but there's always going to be some incident that 'confirms' their fears and causes them to cut it off when they think that things are about to go south.
The ones where the avoidant person is trying to withdraw and the other party is trying to chase and secure their commitment is maybe the worst dynamic on a meta level, because it can remain stable for quite a while but its burning out both parties as it continues. I remember straight up telling one girl "look, its one thing to want men to chase you... but you have to be willing to be caught and its clear you are not."
And the pernicious one is the avoidant who is mostly aware they're avoidant, and keeps trying to establish relationships with people then withdrawing suddenly, closing off all contact as if the connection never existed, and move on relatively quickly. That one hurts.
This is apparently a pattern with some women. Fire up a dating app, stick around long enough to find a nice enough dude, delete the app, date for a bit, freak out and break it off, stay single and get lonely after a bit, then repeat.
You rang?
Thank Christ I broke out of that cycle.
Yeah. You can usually tell with these people most of the time because they’re always trying to breadcrumb you to prevent you from getting too close but not wanting you to become too distant. They’re essentially indistinguishable from attention whores. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt from time to time, but eventually I hit my limit. Get serious and do it quick or get out of here. The long-term effects I’ve personally noticed of those that settle in from those initial relationship dynamics is it produces long-term resentment and dislike due to erecting artificial barriers that had no reason to exist. It wastes and expends energy for the sake of someone who doesn’t value the importance of trust and intimacy.
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How?
I've done the 'anxious with an avoidant' bit from the avoidant side. Wasn't fun at all. Any advice much appreciated.
The best I can say is "persistence". Sticking with a relationship I know makes me happy even when my gut is telling me to cut and run. Per High Fidelity, it's about learning to recognise when your guts have shit for brains.
I don’t know. Never went wrong trusting my gut but I’ve went wrong several times ignoring it. Maybe my intuition was always calibrated just right. I’ve known people who were equally persistent and all miserable just the same.
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It sucks because you rarely ever learn any useful lessons out of it either, because there's no reason for things ending other than "brain said to run so I ran."
You don't learn to be a better partner, you just get left wondering if you were inadequate.
What helped me a lot was keeping tabs on these women for long enough that I could see that it wasn't me, they did this to every guy. I actually had an interesting realization that of all the women I dated seriously... only one of them has managed to get into a stable relationship, so realistically I probably couldn't have made any of those situations work on my own efforts.
But also means I've been pretty bad at selecting good partners.
And finally, the thing I really hate is when I meet a girl whose personality is a really close match to my ideal and is physically attractive, but I immediately clock her as anxious or avoidant and I ultimately learn that she had a bad experience with a controlling, abusive, or adulterous/sociopathic dude who has basically ruined her pair-bonding capability. And I agonize over the "what ifs" I had met her earlier before the damage was done.
This is a problem writ large with how many of them think, that I’ve noticed. They find it easy to attach with men who are “low stakes” to them, because it doesn’t matter if they end up leaving or not. They’ve got no sustained investment in them; they’re a utility or a prop. Guys they have a serious interest in they’re more cold or distant with because they risk a “misstep” of screwing things up; or some other idiotic reason.
Guys see this behavior and say to themselves, “Shit, I wish I was treated like I didn’t matter.” Because women are treating men they don’t like or care for better than the men they do. This is why they’ve got everything backwards. If you like a man and want to lock him down, do literally the exact opposite of everything you have been doing. Roll out the red carpet for him, make his life easy and eschew the attention you receive from other men; keep them a mile away at all times. It’s really as simple as that. I love nothing more than an otherwise boring woman who makes my life easy. That’s the best woman of all time. But they make it harder than it has to be for themselves. And this is the origin story of how good men go bad over time. Men see the narrative unfold with their eyes and see men with bad behavior getting what they want, while upstanding men are punished for it. And so as time goes on, the pool of good men shrinks even further and as women age they wonder where all the decent ones go. That’s what happened to them. They didn’t “go” anywhere. They no longer exist.
Something whenever I hear it that immediately scratches one off for serious consideration thorough is when someone says “I’m not happy…” That is a phrase that is so wildly overused in relationships today that it’s all but lost any serious meaning it may once have had. Concepts like “duty” and “responsibility” are foreign to these people. Nobody in any circumstance of life is guaranteed to be happy 100% of the time. Yes, happiness is enormously important and should be intrinsic to the relationship, but someone who adopts the unhealthy viewpoint of it like they’re always chasing the next high is an emotional junkie who’s more akin to a drug addict that should be in rehab, rather than in a serious relationship. I can’t stand those people.
That's the big one.
Most guys are aware that a woman will have a dozen other prospects in their phone at any given time. You CAN'T get attached to that person, b/c her cost of swapping you out for another is minimal. You become aloof because that's what the game theory says you have to do. She can defect at any time, and she can't be punished for doing so, don't be the chump who cooperates too early.
Costly shows of effort and interest that demonstrate she's not entertaining other men is how you'd actually know she's serious and not as likely to leave on a whim (alas, it takes 5 minutes for her to set up a dating profile, so you're never truly safe).
And no, that doesn't count just sleeping with him, since there's no direct cost to THAT anymore. Be pleasant, show appreciation, make him feel like he is important to you, and he's already yours.
What's interesting is I think women know (or ought to know) that this is a male desire/fantasy, you can find certain genres of softcore porn that emphasize the woman being pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a guy with sexual desire as an undertone. The blackpill is that you can easily get a woman to act this way if you pay for it directly in hour-long increments. Which tells you both that many women don't want to act this way for a man, naturally, and perhaps worse many are able to convincingly fake it anyway.
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