Can Anxious and Avoidant Relationships Work?

I just finished watching Season 2 of Beef (chaotic) and the relationship between Ashley and Austin made me think — can anxious and avoidant relationships work?

People with anxious and avoidant attachment styles often find themselves in relationships with one another, and it can be so painful and confusing in the same, repetitive ways that they end up wondering whether it's just too hard.

What it means for a relationship to ‘work’ is the real crux of this question. What people mean when they ask this is “Do we have to break up? Is my relationship doomed?” But a relationship that works isn’t just one in which two people stay together.

Healthy relationships

Everyone will have their own considerations as to how they determine whether a relationship is working. When I’m sitting with clients, I’m thinking about whether the relationship is contributing to the health of each person — health meaning mutual support for both tough times and personal growth, and allowing each person to be themselves as well as to grow and shape up any less relational edges.

In general, relationships should be a ‘value-add’ for each person. It does not make sense to choose a partner in which you only ever give out and self-sacrifice, or you just receive crumbs. Adult-to-adult relationships are not like parent-child relationships, in which there is an inbuilt natural direction to the flow of nurture and attention. A relationship, shouldn’t constantly test you, though it can and should help you grow where you need to.

This idea has nuances, of course. The nature of the ‘value-add’ each person provides will look different, each person has their strengths that they bring to the partnership, and those can be complementary. Though that’s not to say that just because one person is less practiced or intuitive with providing emotional support, for example, that they don’t need to upskill in supporting their partner.

In a long-term relationship, each partner will also experience tough periods or reduced capacity that means they require more support than they are giving out. Over time, both partners will go through phases of being the one giving or receiving more care. No relationship is exactly 50/50 in all regards, but most people find the overall sense of balance in the long run is important.

A relationship shouldn’t mostly be a source of stress. Those with anxious or avoidant attachments styles need to work out whether the source of stress is an accurate reflection of the quality of the partnership, or whether their attachment patterns are at the root of their difficulty.

A relationship that means you stay stuck in fear-based behaviours isn’t one that works, whether it’s active (even if unconscious) encouragement to stay stuck, as can happen in co-dependent relationships, or one that is constantly pushing your buttons with no way to help you heal those buttons.

Which is exactly what can happen if someone with an anxious attachment style and an avoidant attachment style get together and don’t do anything to address their attachment patterns.

What is a normal level of conflict?

Relationships don’t have to be perfectly harmonious in order to work either. There is no perfect partner out there that will always get you and always bring out the best in you (sorry, avoidants). Being able to discern what is generally poor treatment by a partner versus an attachment-coloured interpretation is challenging when anxious or avoidant analyses can be strong and convincing.

All relationships go through phases of harmony, disharmony, and repair. It’s part of the healthy interaction pattern between caregiver and child that supports the development of a secure attachment style, and it’s part of being a human in a close relationship with another human.

Occasional disharmony is inevitable when you have human brains, bodies, hormones, stressors, personalities, and quirks (I would bet there’s even friction between monks in a Buddhist monastery). The intensity of the disharmony and the willingness and nature of the repair that happens are measures of the health of a relationship.

Anxious-avoidant relationships tend to be high-conflict. The pursuer-withdrawer pattern is common in this pairing, with the anxious partner taking the pursuer role and the avoidant partner withdrawing.  

People will have their own tolerances for what makes disharmony or conflict intense, so we can’t state a firm rule that arguing X number of times per week/month/year is unhealthy. People who grew up in loud families that had a lot of minor conflict but also made up quickly and effectively will find it less disturbing than people who grew up in more peaceful (or conflict-avoidant) households.

Evaluating the impact of disharmony in your relationship takes honesty. If you’re in an anxious-avoidant relationship, consider these questions:

• Do you and your partner fall out easily and frequently?

• How distressing is it?

• What do each of you do to cope with the distress?

• How long does it take to repair it?

• How does the repair happen? Is it always one of you that initiates the repair?

• Do issues actually get repaired, or do they get brushed under the rug?

Consider too the more harmonious phases: What makes them harmonious? Is one of you working harder than the other to make it that way? Is anything being sacrificed to make it harmonious?

If you and your partner do have a lot of difficult conflict, or keeping the peace feels like a full-time job, it doesn’t mean the relationship is doomed. It does probably mean that the current patterns in the relationship aren’t healthy and need to be identified and addressed.

What's involved in making an anxious-avoidant relationship work?

I tell my clients that I’m of the firm belief that one of the highest purposes of relationships is to help us become better people. They allow us to see and buff up our rough edges, so that we can become healthier, more loving, well-rounded humans.

People with anxious and avoidant attachment styles have the same mission in this regard — to learn to come towards the centre of relationality. This involves discerning reasonable needs from demands, to self-regulate as well as give and receive support, to know what is an appropriate level of occasional self-sacrifice for someone you love, to know how to maintain an independent self while inter-dependent with a partner.

These can be frightening tasks for anxious and avoidantly attached people. It takes a lot of willingness, and depending on the depth of the attachment patterns, it can be a lot of inner work. We know that people don’t tend to make change until they are sick of the status quo — going through the process of change is difficult and uncomfortable, so staying the same usually has to be even more difficult and uncomfortable before we’re willing to give it a go. You need to be ready.

And, not every couple who gets together is a good match and are going to be able to bring out the best in each other. It’s not always a case of “if you just do the work, you can make it work.” Sadly, it’s true that love is not enough, not enough to mean that two people are ready, able, and willing to do what’s required to shape a relationship into something that’s healthy for both people. This is a painful awareness that people with anxious attachment styles often struggle to make sense of.  

Sometimes this means people will go through several of the same kind of relationship dynamic before they are ready to do their own work. It’s a lot easier to believe that it’s just a matter of finding the right partner, an easier partner, and then you won’t have these kinds of issues. Or that you should go and heal all your issues on your own (or in therapy) while single and come out fully prepared and secure for your next relationship. It’s true that you can do a lot of deep and effective attachment-related healing while single — and, when you next get into a relationship, the rubber really hits the road and you will have to work through old anxious or avoidant tendencies in real time.

This doesn’t mean that both people must become perfectly secure partners — more likely, you will feel largely secure much of the time, and then when things are especially tough, you’ll feel your old defaults come up and you’ll manage them without causing too much damage. Many people have happy and healthy relationships like this, because the foundation and the day-to-day of the relationship is stable enough to weather bumps.

An individual who has their own issues to deal with but wants to learn to manage them differently than they have been (and is actively taking steps to do so) can be in a working relationship. Insight isn't enough — knowing you have an attachment-related difficulty and doing something about it are very different things.

So yes, anxious and avoidant relationships can work — if both people are ready and willing to learn new ways of relating to one another and dealing with their relationship fears and challenges.