#197: What Avoidant People Need to Thrive in a Relationship
When we talk about avoidant attachment, it’s often framed in the context of what makes these relationships hard—the pulling away, the fear of intimacy, the patterns of shutdown and self-protection. And while those challenges are real, we often miss the opportunity to ask a more constructive question:
What does someone with avoidant attachment actually need in order to feel safe, secure, and thrive in a relationship?
Understanding this can be transformative—whether you're someone with avoidant tendencies yourself, or you're in a relationship with someone who is. Because it’s not about walking on eggshells or doing all the emotional heavy lifting. It’s about creating the kind of relational environment that fosters mutual growth, trust, and safety.
Let’s explore what that can look like.
1. Space Without Punishment
Avoidant partners often need time to themselves. Not because they don’t love you, but because they’re wired to value autonomy and regulate emotions through solitude. That need can be healthy when expressed with clarity and respect.
What creates safety is the ability to take space without it being met with punishment—emotional withdrawal, sulking, accusations, or demands for intense processing. If asking for space consistently leads to guilt or backlash, it reinforces the very fears that fuel avoidant coping mechanisms.
Ironically, the more safe and accepted someone feels when they take space, the less they tend to need it in that knee-jerk, self-protective way.
2. A Partner with a Full Life
People with avoidant attachment feel safer when they’re not the sole focal point of their partner’s world. If your entire sense of identity and joy hinges on the relationship, that can feel like pressure—like there's no room to breathe.
Having your own friendships, interests, passions, and sense of purpose doesn't just help your avoidant partner feel more comfortable—it also supports your own wellbeing. This one is a win-win.
A full life outside the relationship signals to your partner: “I’m here by choice, not dependence.” That’s magnetic, not threatening.
3. Self-Regulation Over Emotional Intensity
If your partner is avoidantly attached, big, uncontained emotional displays might be overwhelming for them. That’s not because they don’t care—it’s often because they’ve learned to suppress or disconnect from their own emotions, and genuinely don’t know how to respond when someone is dysregulated.
Now, this isn’t to say you should bottle things up or hide your feelings. But bringing a sense of self-responsibility and groundedness to your emotional communication—rather than offloading or lashing out—can help your partner stay present, rather than shutting down.
Think: expressing emotion with them, not at them.
4. Clear, Calm, and Honest Communication
Avoidant folks often get labelled as avoidant because their partner has tried to communicate in ways that are reactive, pleading, or chaotic—and the avoidant partner withdraws in response.
But what if the message came through with clarity, calm, and self-respect?
Direct communication that honours your needs without blame or emotional volatility can be a game-changer. When you’re grounded and clear—“This is what I need, this is what I won’t tolerate”—it’s harder for your partner to avoid accountability or default to defensiveness.
It creates a relational dynamic that fosters genuine reflection, rather than one where both partners are caught in protest behaviours.
5. A Sustainable Pace
Many anxiously attached folks want to go deep, fast. It’s understandable—we crave certainty and emotional closeness. But for someone with avoidant patterns, that can feel like a runaway train.
It’s not that avoidant people don’t want connection—they just need it to unfold at a pace where their system doesn’t freak out. If the relationship escalates too quickly, it can trigger panic or self-sabotage once things start to feel real.
Instead of racing toward milestones, focus on consistency, curiosity, and connection. Let the relationship breathe. That sustainable pace often helps avoidant partners feel safe enough to stay in, rather than pull away from, the connection.
6. A Balance of Lightness and Depth
Avoidant partners tend to shut down when a relationship feels like it’s all work and no joy. If every conversation is a heavy one, if every moment together is about what’s not working, the relationship can start to feel like a burden.
That doesn’t mean avoiding difficult conversations—it means finding balance. Making space for fun, ease, play, and shared joy can go a long way in creating a relationship that feels safe and sustainable for someone who’s prone to emotional withdrawal.
This is true for all of us, really. Relationships should feel like a soft place to land, not a constant emotional boot camp.
Final Thoughts
When we understand what helps avoidant people thrive, we can start building relationships where both partners feel seen, respected, and supported. This isn’t about self-sacrifice or moulding yourself into someone you’re not. It’s about recognising patterns with compassion and creating new, more secure ways of relating.
Because at the end of the day, avoidant attachment isn’t about not wanting love—it’s about fearing that love will come at the cost of freedom, identity, or safety.
But with the right relational environment—and a willingness to do the work—avoidant partners can (and do) learn to lean in, trust, and love more deeply than ever before.
If you’d like to explore this more, check out my free resources or dive into one of my courses that support you to build more secure, connected relationships—whether with an avoidant partner or within yourself.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:04]:
You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I'm your host, relationship coach, Stephanie Rigg.
[00:00:23]:
And I'm really glad you're here. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking about what avoidant attachers need in order to feel secure and thrive in a relationship. So this is going to be part one. I'm going to do the anxious attachment version of this video as a follow up and I actually originally recorded this as a shorter YouTube video, but I thought that given it received a lot of traction there, and I know that it's something that a lot of people in my audience are interested in in, then it might be worth elaborating on here on the podcast. But as always, my intention with sharing this is really to emphasise that no matter how your attachment patterns express, really, our attachment styles are just describing a set of protective strategies that we've taken on over the course of our lives in response to whatever relational environments we've found ourselves in. And they are the ways we've learned to keep ourselves safe.
[00:01:27]:
And certain relationship dynamics are likely to trigger us more, and other relationship dynamics are likely to support us to maybe step off the ledge, to feel a little less braced. And particularly in the context of avoidant attachment, we know that there are certain fears around intimacy. A loss of autonomy, a sense of being controlled, a fear of failure. All of these things really do best with certain conditions in the relational environment, certain partner traits maybe that will allow someone with more avoidant patterns to slowly take steps towards security, safety, trust in relationships so that they don't feel so reliant on those patterns of self protection. And I do just want to make abundantly clear, if you've been around here for a while, I probably don't need to say this, but for anyone who's new or newish, when I share things like this, it is not to suggest that if you are in a relationship with someone with more avoidant patterns that you suddenly need to try and change yourself in order to get someone's love to keep them, to make them feel safe. But equally, I think for those of us who are in relationship with avoidant partners, we can either do that in a way that exacerbates patterns or we can do that in a way that is sensitive to the things that our partner struggles with. And I think that really part of Building a secure relationship between two people who might have insecure attachment patterns. So maybe one of you is more anxious, one of you is more avoidant.
[00:02:59]:
Part of building a secure relationship is both of you being mindful of one another sensitivities and taking steps to acknowledge, honour, validate the things that your partner finds hard and trying to have compassion for that, obviously, alongside, you know, boundaries and recognition of each person's needs and all of that. It's not about it all being about one person. I'm trying to preempt all of the protests that I'm likely to get from my anxious listeners. But really, we can either keep doing the things that aren't working or we can try something that is much more likely to work. And so that is the spirit in which I offer today's episode. It is not about telling you that you are the one who has to do all of the work and all of the heavy lifting in order to make your partner feel safe and leave all of your needs behind in the process. That's not what I'm saying. That's never what I'm saying and it is not what I encourage.
[00:03:49]:
Actually, I actively discourage that kind of approach. So all of those disclaimers, as I'm saying all of this, I'm wondering whether I should have started with the episode about anxious attachment. But never mind, we're here now and rest assured, next week you can hear about all of the things that help anxiously attach people to thrive and feel secure in their relationships. Okay, so with that very long introduction out of the way, let's dive into these six things that support avoidant folks to thrive in a relationship. The first one is the ability to take space without punishment. Again, without wanting this whole episode to be a series of caveats and disclaimers. Unfortunately, I'm so accustomed to people jumping down my throat, that is where I go by default. So we all know that space is this thing that comes up when we're talking about avoidant attachment and needing to have some time and space to themselves.
[00:04:40]:
A sense of autonomy, a sense of having their own life rather than having their whole life and identity kind of subsumed into the vortex of the relationship. That's really, really important for someone with more avoidant patterns to feel like they can ask for that and have that and take that without there being some sort of adverse consequence in the sense of their partner sulking, their partner being hurt, their partner wanting to have some conversation to unpack it. All of these things that are going to register as punishment for someone with more avoidant patterns, that is really going to be hard. And that's going to lead them into a lot of their deactivating strategies. That's going to lead them to feel like this relationship is really hard work. By contrast, if someone is able to take space, if they're able to say that they like some time to themselves and they know that their partner's going to be fine with that and it's not going to be a big deal and it doesn't have to be this big significant thing that their partner's going to take personally and they're going to take to means something about, you know, if you love me, you'd want to spend every minute with me, you must not care about me, why would you want it? All of that kind of stuff. So if someone can really confidently say that they want space or that they've made plans or something, and for that to be fine, for that to not be an issue, that's going to really create more safety. And ironically, the more safety there is around taking space, the less space someone is going to need to take from a self protective, knee jerk, reactive place of just going dark, just withdrawing for, you know, days, weeks on end.
[00:06:13]:
And to be abundantly clear, again, I can almost hear people wanting to interject with, you know, so you're saying that they can just disappear. No, I'm never saying that people can just disappear. Again, if you are familiar with my work, you would know that I've said a million times that for the vast majority of people, that's not going to be workable, that's not going to be acceptable. So when I say taking space, I'm not talking about disappearing without communication. I'm not even talking about disappearing with communication saying, you know, I just need a month to myself. Like, that's not what we're talking about here. I'm talking about within the context of a relationship with communication, a reasonable amount of space with parameters around it. But again, that instinct to kind of disappear, to pull away, to withdraw, that tends to be less triggered and less activated in relationships that feel safe.
[00:07:02]:
So recognising that the more safety there is around space and separateness, the less likely someone is to disappear. That is the ironic truth of it. Okay, the next piece here, which is sort of similar but distinct, is a partner with a full life. So someone with more avoidant patterns is really going to feel much more safe and comfortable and ultimately thrive in a relationship with a partner who has a full life. So someone who has their own hobbies, their own Interests, their own rich friendships, you know, a sense of purpose and identity that isn't all about the relationship, that isn't just, you know, I will drop everything to be your partner. And that is my whole universe. A lot of us with anxious attachment patterns do that by defaul. I have certainly been guilty of that before.
[00:07:48]:
It's nothing to be ashamed of, but it is something to be aware of. And this is one where, you know, an avoidant partner will certainly do better with someone who's got more going on. But an anxious partner, that is a big part of your growth as an individual. Irrespective of what's going on with your partner, whether you've got one or not. A huge part of your work and your healing journey is to build up those other legs propping up the table. So it's not just this one wobbly leg that's carrying the weight of everything relationship. So this one is really a win win. It's really important for both partners.
[00:08:23]:
Even though for the anxious partner, it's maybe not something that you think you want or need, it's absolutely something that you will benefit from. But to go back to the avoidant side, which is really what we're talking about here, having a partner whose energy and time and attention is evenly distributed and that's not to say like a sense of indifference towards the relationship. It's not, not game playing or anything like that, but we know that avoidant folks are really sensitive to anything that feels like pressure and feeling like someone has made you their entire world and will do anything for you and drop everything for you. I think from the anxious side we can have this sense of like, isn't that romantic? And aren't I the best partner ever because I'm 100% available to you? It tends not to land that way for someone with more avoidant patterns. They can actually find that quite unattractive and will generally find it much more sustainable to be in relationship with someone who has more going on, who has their own interests, who spends time doing their own things, whose whole world doesn't revolve around the relationship. Because as we know, and as I'm sure you know from experience, if you are more anxious and listening to this, when you've got all of your eggs in that basket, it just magnifies everything. And so every little issue takes on a 100 times multiplier. Because of course, if the relationship takes up your whole field of vision, then naturally any issue in the relationship feels way, way bigger because it's all you've got going on.
[00:09:54]:
Right. Okay. The next one is being in a relationship with someone who is able to self regulate rather than being super emotionally intense and volatile. Now again, we could say that's beneficial for any relationship. And I agree. I think that's true for a lot of these things. But particularly for people with avoidant attachment who can be really disconnected from their own big emotions, who can be quite in their head a lot of the time, who you know, as part of their attachment blueprint really had to disconnect from their emotional world, did not have that part of them nurtured or tended to or cared for. You know, they really channel their efforts and their energy into problem solving and rationality and logic and all of those things that are not big intense emotions.
[00:10:43]:
And so feeling like someone is coming at you with not only really big outwardly expressed uncontained emotion, but that they are kind of dumping that onto you and expecting you to know what to do with it. That's going to be very overwhelming for someone who doesn't know how to be with their own emotions. Right. And I think again, if you're on the other side, you can see that as being cold or uncaring or, you know, how are you just sitting there when I'm here in tears and when I am, you know, hysterically crying, why are you just sitting there blankly staring at me? And it's so easy to then make the judgement that someone just must not care. But oftentimes it's that they have no idea how to approach that because they have never been able to do that for themselves. They've never allowed themselves to express emotionally in that way. And so to be confronted with someone else's those big wild emotions feels absolutely daunting and will often send them into what's almost a freeze response. So by contrast, having someone who has a decent grip on self regulation, again, this is not about not needing anything from your partner, it's not about not expressing emotions.
[00:11:53]:
But there's a big difference between regulating and then expressing your hurt and upset from a somewhat self responsible, grounded, centred place. And lashing out, reacting, crying hysterically, sending these poison barbs at someone to try and get their attention, like those are very different things. And obviously we all want to be aiming for the version of that which is a more secure and self regulated way of communicating and doing conflict in relationships. But certainly if you're in relationship with someone more avoidant, their capacity to be with and stay with that level of uncontained emotionality is going to be really limited because Oftentimes they just don't have that tolerance level, they don't have the experience, they don't have the literacy in it and they don't have the patience or the bandwidth for it. So someone who is relatively self regulated, who can hold their centre through difficult conversations, that's going to be really beneficial in creating more safety for someone with avoidant patterns. Okay, the next one is kind of similar, kind of different, and it is clear, calm and honest communication. So again, I think a lot of folks with anxious patterns tell themselves the story that when they speak up, if they speak up, if they express a need, if they express a concern, then their partner becomes very defensive, pulls away and that feels like punishment. And so they take on the message that I'm not allowed to say anything, I have to suppress myself.
[00:13:18]:
And then we all know how that goes. I actually think that that is a misconception. And I think that avoidant folks absolutely do well with someone who is clear and direct and honest in their communication, in their boundaries, in their self advocacy, in their expression of what's not working for them. But it does need to come from a more secure place. If it's coming from a place of accusation or desperation or blame, or, you know, begging someone or pleading, you have to do this, you can't do this. That is not the same thing as clear and direct and honest communication. Again, we really want to convey this sense of like I am holding my centre and I am setting the guardrails here and I'm telling you clearly, here's what I'm available for, here's what I'm not available for. And really with this embodied sense of knowing that you would walk away if it came to it, you know, if there were a non negotiable issue that you couldn't see eye to eye on or something of that nature, conveying that level of genuine self confidence and self respect is very, very attractive.
[00:14:22]:
And actually I think creates a lot of, of accountability and self awareness for someone with more avoidant patterns because there's really nowhere for them to hide in that. And what I mean by that is I think what happens a lot of the time when avoidant folks are with anxious folks and anxious folks do all of that protesting stuff that I was just talking about, the blaming and the pleading and, you know, the making empty threats and not following through, it's really easy for someone with more avoidant patterns to point the finger and say like, they're just too needy, they're just too sensitive, they're just so insecure. And anxious and I can't do this because of them. And then they might pull away from the relationship, they might leave the relationship and they never really have to look at their own stuff. Whereas if you're coming from this really clear and grounded and centred, secure place and you're being really direct but entirely reasonable, then it's much harder for someone to abrogate responsibility and accountability for their contribution. And you're much more likely to have someone with more avoidant patterns in that kind of dynamic, genuinely self reflect. And they probably have the space and the safety to do that and come to the table with a level of compromise and willingness that you just might not have when you don't have that kind of open dialogue, clear, direct, honest communication that is inherently self honouring and self respecting. And that really comes through that someone isn't going to participate in those dysfunctional attack blame patterns, that someone's just putting their cards on the table and saying like, here's what I'm available for, here's what I'm looking for, here's what's important to me, here's what I value, here's what I absolutely won't tolerate.
[00:16:01]:
That is actually a really, really powerful way to create safety in a relationship. And I think for avoidant folks, that's kind of the medicine that they don't know that they need a lot of the time. Okay, the next one is a relationship that moves at a sustainable pace. So. So as we all know, particularly the anxious folks, we like to move at lightning speed. Again, I have been personally guilty of this in pretty much every relationship I've ever been in, so I get it. And we also know that that can lead us to places where we maybe don't want to go. And our anxiety and our sense of urgency around wanting to just get the connection to a place where we feel certain, where we know that it's a committed relationship and we know where it's going.
[00:16:44]:
And all of those things, we want to kind of leapfrog past that early period where it's all a bit up in the air and we're still figuring it out and we don't know how they feel and it's maybe not exclusive yet. And all of the things, we just want to cut straight to the heart of it and go deep and go quick because that's our comfort zone. What can happen is that at the start, when there's all of that attraction and chemistry and optimism, I think that a lot of avoidant folks will kind of go along for the ride. As I'VE spoken about this before. I think it's again a bit of a misconception that avoidant people are avoidant from day one and that they have this fear of commitment and aloofness and all of that right from the get go. I don't think that's true much of the time. I think they have the same sense of excitement and optimism as anyone does and they can kind of get swept up in the excitement of it all and they can maybe go along with a really fast pace and they might talk about the future and they might do all of that. The difference is that they all then hit on the brakes really quickly because they'll realise like, wow, I think I'm in over my head here.
[00:17:49]:
Whereas the anxious partner will just keep going like, you know, foot on the gas, let's go for the horizon. Like the anxious partner isn't going to get that whiplash of like, wait, what am I doing? Whereas the avoidant partner is more likely to get that once things start to feel a bit real and serious, they'll have these second thoughts and they can start to self sabotage and all of those things. So for someone with more avoidant patterns a relationship that moves at a sustainable pace, a reasonable pace, not going a million miles an hour, not like jumping forward really quickly into levels of seriousness and depth beyond their capacity, I think is a smart choice. Again, this is not anyone's fault and it's certainly not endorsing like, let's be in a situationship for three years while I find myself or figure out what I want. Not what I'm saying again, more caveats, but hopefully you can see that there's a middle ground there right between like racing into something really serious really quickly and, you know, flaking around in an unlabeled, undefined relationship indefinitely, of course there is a middle ground. And that middle ground is where avoidant finding folks are likely to thrive and to build enough safety to actually stay in the relationship and be in it for the long haul. Okay, and last but not least, and this always tends to be one that again, people get a bit triggered by, even though I think it's pretty uncontroversial, but a balance of lightness and heaviness. So this is not saying that there can never be serious conversations in a relationship.
[00:19:18]:
It's not saying that everything has to be swept under the rug and we just have to play pretend happy families even though there are real issues. But, but if the whole tone of the relationship all the time is just having serious conversations about what's wrong and what's not working and all of the unmet needs and all of the disappointments. That is not going to be a satisfying relationship to someone with avoidant patterns. They are going to be so overwhelmed by this sense of constant failure and disappointment. And unlike someone with more anxious patterns, they don't have a limitless capacity to work on a relationship. They really do value a level of of lightness and harmony to balance out some of that stuff, to make that stuff feel worthwhile. Right? Because if it's only ever hard and it's only ever serious and it's only ever not working, then it's really easy for someone with avoidant patterns to say like, well, what are we doing here? What's it all for if you're always upset with me? So being able to have a balance and ideally have more positive than negative. Again, people get really upset by this.
[00:20:23]:
But I think when we step back from our own hurt and pain and look at that objectively, of course that's what we all want in relationships. We do want to be connected and to be present and joyful and loving and warm towards each other more than we want to be in conflict and in constant fixing mode. And that is ultimately going to be better for someone with more avoidant patterns than the alternative. Okay, I'm going to leave it there. Guys, I really hope that this episode has been helpful and I do hope that you'll tune in to the follow up next week on what supports anxiously attached people to Thrive. Thanks as always for your support and I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks guys.
[00:21:06]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram at stephanyrigg or@stephanyrigg.com and if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here and I hope to see you again soon.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
avoidant attachment, anxious attachment, attachment styles, relationship dynamics, emotional safety, intimacy fears, autonomy in relationships, partner traits, self protection strategies, space in relationships, self regulation, emotional intensity, communication in relationships, clear communication, calm communication, honest communication, boundaries, self advocacy, self respect, personal growth, commitment fears, sustainable relationship pace, individual interests, having a full life, emotional overwhelm, attachment patterns, secure relationships, conflict resolution, lightness in relationships, heavy conversations, healthy relationships