Healthy Relationship Avoidance

We talk A LOT about avoidance in relationships.

Fear of intimacy.
Fear of commitment.
Fear of vulnerability.

And while avoidance can absolutely keep us from experiencing the relationships we deeply want …

I don’t think all avoidance should immediately be treated as something we need to get rid of.

Sometimes there is real wisdom inside of it.

✨ ✨ ✨

I think about this in my own life.
I was very young when I experienced my first serious relationship, and there was a lot of cruelty, control, and unfair power dynamics within it.

That relationship shaped me deeply.

I remember leaving it with this feeling somewhere inside of me … “If I get into a relationship with a man, I could lose my power. I could lose my voice. I could become trapped.”

So of course there were parts of me that became protective around relationships after that experience.

Looking back, I don’t see those parts as dysfunctional.
They had learned something.

The work wasn’t to bulldoze through that protectiveness and convince myself that relationships were safe.
The work was learning how to listen to it without allowing it to make every decision for me.

✨ ✨ ✨

I work primarily with women, and I think there’s another layer here that we don’t talk about enough.

Some of our fears around partnership aren’t only personal.
They’re also shaped by what we’ve witnessed and inherited.

For generations, relationships and marriage often weren’t entered into by women from the same place of choice that many women have today.

Women have navigated:

• Unequal power.
• Financial dependence.
• Expectations around caregiving.
• Unequal domestic and emotional labor.
• Less freedom around sexuality and reproduction.
• The expectation that their lives, dreams, and ambitions should bend around someone else’s.

And even as relationships change, some of those dynamics can still show up in much subtler ways.
So when a woman tells me that some part of her is afraid of losing herself in a relationship …
I’m deeply interested in that fear.

I don’t immediately want to get rid of it.
I want to understand where it came from.

✨ ✨ ✨

This became really important when I started my relationship with my husband.
I moved slowly.
I needed enough time and space to actually experience him how he navigating privilege and power.

I wanted to notice:

• Could he be influenced by me?
• Was there room for my voice?
• Could we talk openly about power?
• Were my dreams treated as being as important as his?
• Could I disagree without being punished, dismissed, or diminished?
• When something felt unfair, was he willing to look at it with me?
• Could the relationship expand around BOTH of us?

I didn’t want to abandon my protectiveness.
I wanted to let it become discernment.
And there is a really important difference between the two.

Healthy relational avoidance, or protectiveness, can sometimes help us slow down enough to gather information.

✨ ✨ ✨

It can say:
Don’t disappear into this.
Pay attention.
Make sure there is room for you here too.

But eventually, if what we want is partnership .. our protection also has to become flexible enough to receive new information.

Because we don’t want past relationships, or generations of relational inequality, to become the only lens through which we experience the person in front of us.

The goal isn’t: “Stop being afraid and trust.”
It’s much more nuanced than that.

It’s also:

• Understand what your fear is protecting.
• Heal what still needs tending.
• Move slowly enough to discern what’s actually happening.
• Have the conversations you need to have.
• And notice whether the person you’re building with responds to those conversations with openness and action.

✨ ✨ ✨

Relationships for many women today don’t have to exist primarily as a means of survival.

We get to ask for more.

We get to want:

• Pleasure.
• Partnership.
• Equality.
• Collaboration.
• Mutual influence.
• Teamwork.
• Space to actualize our dreams.

Those aren’t excessive demands.
They’re important ingredients of the kind of secure-functioning partnership many of us are trying to create.

So if you notice resistance to dating or partnership, maybe don’t immediately ask: “What’s wrong with me that I’m so avoidant?”

Try asking yourself.. “What has this part of me learned about relationships?”

And then perhaps ask yourself … "What would I need to experience in a relationship to know that I don’t have to lose myself in order to love someone else?”

With SO much courage,
Silvy