This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through my links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
It’s a balmy night. The scent of star jasmine and freshly cut grass fuses into a heady spring fragrance that wafts in over a gentle breeze. The curtains lap at the open window in tune with the faint music playing in the background. It’s your song, the one he introduced you to years ago.
You’ve spent a perfect night together. Went to your favorite restaurant. Held hands as you walked through the park in the setting sun. Talked deep into the night about your childhoods, confessed things you’d never said aloud before. He trusted you enough to tell you the thing he’s never told anyone. You held him.
You couldn’t love him more.
Your heart is soaring. You reach out to him, gently place a palm on his cheek and say softly, “I love you.”
You bite your lip shyly, waiting for the words to come back, searching his soft, doleful eyes for the love you know is in there.
But the words don’t come.
You’re met with silence. He furrows his brow and gets this pinched look on his face. Is that terror? He jolts back, and suddenly he’s on the opposite side of the couch from you. How did he get so far so fast?
Your heart thunders in your chest as panic starts to rise. “Don’t you feel the same way?”
He stands up and rubs his neck, not looking at you anymore. “I-I don’t know. Why do we have to talk about this right now? Why can’t we just have a nice quiet night?”
You’re rendered speechless. What the fuck just happened?
If this sounds familiar—you’re not alone. You’re among a special club. Welcome. This is where partners of avoidantly attached individuals come when their partners do a complete 180, leaving them with whiplash.
Since that moment, you’ve likely asked at least one of these:
- Did he ever have feelings for me?
- How could he treat me so warmly without feeling the same way?
- How hard is it to say I love you back? I know he loves me.
- Did I read things wrong?
- How can he be confused? What does that even mean? You either like someone or you don’t.
Good. You’re in the right place, then. If you’ve ever loved an avoidant, here are the 7 things you absolutely must know about the mysteriously absent I Love You:
But First a Word for You Specifically
It’s not you; it’s him.
This is something that I wish someone had told me sooner. My immediate reaction was—“What did I do wrong?” But unless he’s been treating you like his homie all night and you suddenly said that out of the blue, no—it’s not anything you did or did not do.
You didn’t misread the signs.
Mixed signals are one of the most infuriating and painful parts of loving an avoidant. The push and pull. The hot and cold. The constant whiplash. Two things that helped me tremendously: learning to keep myself steady during uncertainty (check out my article on self-regulation here) and learning about how an avoidant experiences this same situation. It’s eye opening, really. Read on.
1. The Confusion Is Real
When he can’t tell you how he feels about you, it feels like he’s piercing your heart with a dull knife. There’s something about it that feels particularly devious. Like he’s intentionally hurting you. And that’s always a possibility, but it most likely stems from real confusion.
For those of us who rely on closeness for regulation, the idea that someone could experience closeness as danger is almost preposterous, and yet, here we are. Loving someone, needing someone, being close to someone, all of these signal alarm to the avoidant’s nervous system.
This isn’t a decision made consciously. It’s biological. Somatic. That panic is real. It’s his mind saying, “This feels special; I want more” and his body saying, “Danger! Danger! You’re about to be rejected! Retreat!”
With this war raging in his body, it’s not only confusing but incredibly stressful.
2. Avoidance and Anxiety are Two Sides of the Same Coin
I can’t emphasize this enough. This is something I need you to know: avoidants and anxious attachers are more similar than they are different. Our core wounds usually come down to two fears we learned in childhood (or repeated traumatic experiences in adulthood): abandonment and rejection.
We all fear them; we simply learned to manage them differently.
One strategy is to cling. We learned to monitor relationships closely for possible threats and to fix them immediately.
The other strategy is to minimize, dismiss, or deflect the importance of relationships in order to push the feeling down.
Both are attempts to protect us from ultimate abandonment and rejection. Same wound; different armor.
3. Avoidance was Encouraged in Childhood
You’ve all likely heard that avoidance develops as a result of a parent consistently and predictably not soothing a child’s distress or meeting the demands of their emotional development. That’s true, but it’s hard to imagine. We think that’s a parent ignoring a child completely. It’s more nuanced than that, and the nuance is where their fear of closeness makes sense.
As a child, whenever he expressed his emotions, he was punished, shamed, ridiculed, ignored, or—what is probably the most hurtful—love was withdrawn. From this, he internalized that he was inherently flawed for feeling the way he did, and for many avoidants, it is a deep well of shame to carry.
What made it worse—when he reached for his parents’ comfort, cried, or otherwise seemed “needy,” he was met with the same rejection. It may have sounded like, “Put your big boy pants on and figure it out yourself” or “Boys don’t cry.” Or it could have been being ignored or punished. My parents, in particular, were famous for “I’ll give you a reason to cry.”
Ultimately, it landed as rejection and abandonment. When you told him you loved him, and he panicked? That was because whenever he was vulnerable as child, he was rejected. His nervous system learned this feeling was dangerous. It leads to his ultimate fear. When things get too close, too vulnerable, his system goes into survival mode. If you want more information on how and why our nervous system experiences danger, you can check out my article on Polyvagal Theory here.
4. The Shame They Carry Drives Them to Hide
Love was taken away from him when he showed imperfections or made mistakes. He learned that imperfection was unacceptable, that the person he was at his core was imperfect, not enough, and unlovable.
Every child wants their parents’ acceptance and validation, so he built up a persona—armor—around his “flawed” self. He might have been the “golden child” or an overachiever or on all the sports teams. He made being perfect a form of art.
Closeness, then, means exposure. There is a terrifying risk of you seeing through his armor, seeing the flawed, unlovable person he really is—and ultimately rejecting or abandoning him. The fear of being rejected for who he really is cannot be overstated. It takes precedence where the nervous system is involved. That’s the danger here.
5. Labels or Lack of Labels Doesn’t Reflect Your Worth
This is something I see a lot of misinformation on, and I think it’s because it’s a very hurtful topic. As an anxiously attached woman, labels were something that I needed to feel secure in a relationship. I struggled (and still do sometimes) to tolerate uncertainty, and labels gave me certainty.
So, you can imagine my horror when my avoidant fox told me he wanted to keep things “casual” and “see where things” went. It was confusing and upsetting, and I really didn’t know what to make of it. To be fair, we had only been “talking” for a week when I asked, so…a little early.
Regardless, the feeling is the same one way or the other. I thought, “Am I not enough for him to want to date me officially? What’s wrong with me?”
Loving an avoidant has taught me something necessary for growth—it’s not about you. You do not need to take responsibility for anybody else’s behavior. He reacts to his own insecurities (as do we all). It does not reflect you value or worth or desirability.
For an avoidant, labels have little to do with how much he loves you.
6. He Isn’t Avoiding Accountability by Rejecting Labels
With that said…if he isn’t avoiding accountability, then what is the point of not labeling us? We’re already acting like a couple.
In many cases, it has more to do with the shame from childhood wounds. An avoidant is deeply sensitive to being seen as flawed. He has developed strategies to reduce being seen, and avoiding obligations and expectations that are attached to relationship statuses is one of them.
Not because he doesn’t want to show up for you. Not because he doesn’t want to be called your boyfriend.
But because if he fails at meeting your needs or your expectations, you will see him for what he really is. Flawed. Unlovable. You will reject him.
Closeness is a biological need we are born with. It’s how we survived as babies, and it’s how we survive as adults. An avoidant needs closeness, too. He wants it, but the fear of rejection and abandonment runs deep. His strategy—that he is not aware of—is to keep you close enough to meet his basest, most minimal need for closeness while not being close enough for you to reject him. It’s not enough for you, and it’s actually not enough for him, either. Something’s going to give.
7. Your Needs Matter More than if He Loves You
We love hard. We care deeply. We empathize with his wounds. We understand why he behaves the way he does. Compassion goes a long way.
There is a difference, though, between being compassionate and abandoning yourself.
The thing about compassion is that it applies to you, too. You have faults, just as he does. You fail, just as he does. You get as much grace, if not more, than you give him. And sometimes, compassion to yourself looks like leaving a relationship that has consistently shown it is incapable of meeting your needs.
That doesn’t mean you don’t love him, that you weren’t enough, that you didn’t try hard enough.
It also doesn’t mean he is cruel or mean or malicious. It doesn’t mean he didn’t love you enough. It doesn’t mean he didn’t fight for you or that he didn’t truly value you.
It just means that the two of you are incompatible. That you are both in different stages of life right now.
I know it’s easier to blame and be angry, but healing is when you let go of trying to control others’ behaviors and just focus on what you can control—yourself. How you treat yourself. How you show up for yourself. That’s what matters.
The answer to the question, then, is he likely does love you or care deeply about you. But that’s not the question we should be asking. Nor is “Why can’t he tell me he loves me?”
It’s “Do I Feel Loved Enough to Stay?” If he keeps retreating after closeness without showing any signs of change, you have your answer.
Further Reading
Amir Levine’s Attached – If you’ve been around attachment spaces long enough, you’ll have heard of this one. I recommend this loosely. I can literally write an entire blog post on it (maybe I will), but it is popular for a reason. It’s easily digestible and gives a pretty good explanation of attachment. My reservation is the narrative favors anxious attachment over avoidant, and therefore doesn’t offer a balanced view of all the attachment styles.
Mario Mikulincer and Philip Shaver’s Attachment in Adulthood – this is the Bible of adulthood attachment. These two experts compiled a ton of research in attachment theory into this tome of a read. It’s dense. I could only read it in small batches. But if you want the authority on attachment theory, this is it right here. Priceless information.
Stephen Porges’ Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us – This was a mind-blowing read (or listen, as I listened to it on audiobook). It changed the way I viewed attachment theory, even if it barely even touched on it. The way it explains how our bodies experience trauma and safety…you will never view hyper activation or deactivation the same way again. I’ll add that this is not a textbook. His normal works are more scientific, but this is specifically for non-clinicians. For example, instead of calling it the dorsal vagal state (which is the state of fawn/freeze), he calls it the red state, which is why in my article, I also use the color coded states. I find it much easier to envision.
If this resonated with you, you might be ready for the next step — not just understanding attachment, but actually working on it.
I run a small Facebook group called Anxious Hearts & Avoidant Souls: Compassion in Practice for people who are done just venting and ready to start doing. We talk about real skills — emotional regulation, reframing, accountability — and we do it without the toxic positivity or endless validation loops.
If that sounds like your kind of space, come find us here.