Originally published on Substack February 15, 2026
“Urgency. That’s the answer to how to get that commitment from an avoidant. If they realize they will lose access to you, they will panic. They will realize how valuable you are and they will not want to lose you. They will step up or they’re losers.”
Oh, I get the temptation. It promises a quick solution to your pain, but quick fixes do not solve the underlying reason for the behavior.
This claim distorts a very real phenomenon that may show up in the avoidant attachment process, and in doing so, can do more harm than good. If you’re sitting here scratching your head and wondering why, let me ask you one thing: when has building a foundation on fear ever worked out? Yeah, I thought so.
Influencers sometimes lean into urgency because it resonates so strongly with us anxious types. Urgency is one of the worst aspects of being anxiously attached. I know this because I feel it deep in my chest, this panic that I must do something to fix this feeling right now. The impulse is powerful enough to move mountains, but the behavior itself often produces the very outcome I am trying to prevent—i.e. distance.
We anxiously attached women, those of us who struggle with sitting in the discomfort of uncertainty and want immediate relief, find these social media videos to be captivating because they promise a faster fix. But the best things in life take time.
Avoidants are not consciously behaving this way to be assholes. I know it’s hard to believe when they’ve hurt you. When you spent weeks bawling your eyes out over his hot and cold bullshit—or how he said he wanted to keep it casual and you wanted exclusivity but you were too scared to lose him that you agreed to casual terms.
The pain, it’s real.
For real.
Brain scan studies have shown that emotional pain activates many of the same neural pathways as physical pain. Meaning, emotional pain can be just as debilitating as physical pain. And the worst part? People like you and me, we feel things strongly, overwhelmingly so. That’s a lot of pain to carry.
We must acknowledge that the harm of avoidance is very real, but the behavior itself does not stem from strategic cruelty or manipulation. And if you’re committed to loving an avoidant, then I think you know this already. Their behavior is somatic. It’s unconscious and automatic. It’s based on physiology and the way they learned to compartmentalize different aspects of their life to keep them functioning.
We can think about avoidance in terms of a house built on unstable ground. It appears fully functional on the outside, but over time, you need to repair the sagging porch, reinforce the windows, seal off uninhabitable rooms, and so on to keep it functional. Not fixed, not optimal, but working at the very base level—providing a roof over your head.
Avoidance was learned to keep up on these surface level repairs in order to function, while still not addressing that underlying problem—which is a much bigger issue to fix. It’s a survival mechanism their bodies learned early on, just as many of us anxious types learned early on to fix things before we are abandoned, rejected, or dismissed.
The only solution to “getting an avoidant to commit” is not via manipulation but via emotional safety. Playing games, going “no contact,” becoming unpredictably unavailable, giving him the cold shoulder, forcing an ultimatum on him—all of these behaviors cause him to react. Not just any reaction, either, but a reaction to fear and pressure. This is a patch job that doesn’t solve the underlying problem. He won’t suddenly be attentive, emotionally available during turbulent moments, tolerant of intimacy, or any of the behaviors you want in a satisfying relationship.
What it really means is that he won’t feel emotionally safe; and if he stays, it’s because he’d rather feel emotionally unsafe than lose you.
Let that sink in.
He’d rather feel emotionally unsafe than lose you.
I suppose it could be flattering in a dark romance kind of way. The dark romance that has twenty pages of trigger warnings.
Is that the foundation you want to build a relationship with your person on?
You’ve felt emotionally unsafe. You never know what you might say that triggers a withdrawal or defensiveness. Or how about when you’re hurt and sad, and he just dismisses your feelings like they’re nothing?
Emotional safety is built on openness, honesty, kindness, and compassion. You start with yourself. Give yourself the emotional safety you crave. Forgiveness, acceptance, love, trust, boundaries. Then extend it to your partner, boundaries and all. The science says this is the optimal environment for avoidant attachment growth—when met with emotional safety predictably and consistently by an attachment figure (partner or therapist) over time. With one caveat: that they engage in the work. Doesn’t even need to be consciously, but just stretching to meet you, little by little. Maybe at a snail’s pace. Maybe in loops and circles. Maybe they stumble. But the brain will forge new neural pathways to experience closeness differently.
They have to override a lifetime’s worth of fear and survival behavior. Keep your boundaries gentle but firmand give them time. That doesn’t take a week, a month, or sometimes even a year.
So what does this mean for you?
I’m not going to sit here and tell you, “Just chill out and wait.” Not only is it unhelpful, it’s unfair. This is your life; you are the one who has carried the anxiety, uncertainty, hope, and disappointment. You get to decide how you move forward.
Allow me to say this, though: choose you. Choose you over hollow promises of control in uncertainty. If you’re like me, anxiously attached, you have been hypervigilant, constantly fixing, anticipating, accommodating, and minimizing for others in order to maintain a sense of stability. That is beyond exhausting.
Learning to be more secure is learning to put that burden down. It will liberate you from that constant panic of losing connection, of being abandoned and rejected. You will begin to trust yourself. It will rewire your nervous system so that you can tolerate uncertainty. Urgency will slowly fade away. And the cherry on top? A secure, regulated you is exactly what creates the emotional safety your avoidant needs to make the choice to step closer.
Not because you forced him. Not because you threatened him. But because you chose you and your wellbeing.
Romancing the Fox 
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