After years of dating an emotionally avoidant person, I can tell you, don't date them. Avoid them at all costs.
Not because they're broken. Because you will break trying to fix them.
Here is what actually happens:
You will have the same conversation dozens of times. The same unmet need, the same explanation, the same promise of change, the same silence two weeks later. You will start tracking their moods to decide whether today is a safe day to bring something up. You will rehearse how to say things in a way that won't make them shut down. You will apologize for having needs because your needs make them uncomfortable. You will do all of this automatically, without noticing, because it becomes survival.
Their avoidance is not passive. It actively trains you. Every time you soften a request and they respond better, you learn to ask for less. Every time you bring up a real issue and they go cold, you learn to stay quiet. You are being conditioned, slowly, to need less, expect less, and accept less, and you will call that growth. You will call it "not being needy." It is not. It is erosion.
The intimacy you want will always be slightly out of reach. Close enough to keep you there. Far enough that you never actually feel it. That gap is the whole relationship.
And the timeline is always the same:
Years in, you are exhausted, they are unchanged, and you have to decide whether to leave someone you genuinely love because they will not meet you halfway. That decision will cost you enormously either way.
You cannot love someone into emotional availability. That is not how it works. They have to want it, pursue it, and do the work, independent of whether you stay or go. Most don't. Not because they can't. Because nothing has made it necessary yet.
You being there makes it unnecessary.
@apacifish@arikoyarii no rug" multiple times and asked me for the same reassurances. I focused my therapy on "sitting with discomfort" because I was told by her that the feeling of difference for months was my inability handle a LDR. It's gaslighting. My trust is all fucked up now. Thank you again 💚
@apacifish@arikoyarii Tysm honestly. I don't want to therapy speak either tbh, but idk if it's because I already have PTSD and it's a processing issue, but it really has been weirdly traumatizing in a long and backwards way that hurts worse than my childhood trauma lmao. She literally said "there's
@apacifish@arikoyarii I want it" the second it's no longer fun for her. Spend thousands on a plane ticket and hotel to go see her, buy her a TV lol, help clean out her Ex's stuff, spend time going through family photos with her dad and he calls me son. "It's perfect." The second I leave, she ghosts me
@apacifish@arikoyarii Why spend the time to convince me that twin flames are real, that we are bound for eternity, that she feels an unbreakable, cosmic pull to me - we are meant to be. After being best of friends for 15 years. She told me she was everything she'd need and vice versa. And then "idk if
@Jayjaynorton32@kay_kb9@soullig Look man. Idk if you're a troll so I'll just say this:
It doesn't matter.
Because at the end of the day, the govt you're trying to keep from feeding Americans is funding OTHER COUNTRIES' comprehensive social services.
You're being lied to. They give where it's advantagous.