On Attachment #245: Should Anxiously Attached People Just Avoid Avoidants?
Mar 31, 2026
A nuanced take on the common advice to avoid avoidant partners. Why labels can flatten real people and miss important differences. How fear-based rules can reinforce anxious patterns. Practical ideas for assessing partners’ actual emotional capacities. Advice to seek green flags and build self-trust in dating.
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Avoidant Attachment Is A Spectrum
- Avoidant people are not a uniform group and reducing them to a label flattens their humanity.
- Stephanie Rigg points out her current and ex partners both showed avoidant patterns but had very different capacities, so blanket avoidance is reductive.
Avoidance Advice Fuels Dating Anxiety
- Advising anxious people to simply avoid avoidants can amplify preexisting hypervigilance and fear about dating.
- Stephanie explains that feeding an anxious person's suspicion of others increases powerlessness and undermines self-trust.
Host's Personal Avoidant Pairing Contrast
- Stephanie shares her personal example that her current partner and ex both showed avoidant patterns but had very different levels of capacity.
- This anecdote illustrates why a blanket rule to avoid avoidant people would have dismissed a healthy relationship possibility.