Should I Send A “Love Letter” To My Fearful Avoidant Ex?

After a breakup, many anxiously attached have an urge to tell an avoidant how much they love them and miss them. While hearing that your ex still loves, misses you and still cares about you is reassuring to someone with an anxious attachment, it doesn’t have the same effect on an avoidant. In some instances, telling a telling an avoidant you love them and miss them may backfire. It may end up making an avoidant pull further away.

Attachment theory explains why. According to attachment theory, how we experience relationships or feel love, process relationship-related information and perceive another person’s efforts to show us love and care is different for each attachment style. Each attachment style has mental representations and expectations of what love feels like based on early childhood and subsequent experiences with significant attachments.

These mental representations and expectations also known as internal working models or scripts run at a sub-conscious level and affect how we experience relationships and feel love, how we regulate attachment-related emotions, how we react to separation, how we interpret situations and events, the decisions we make and the strategies we use to justify our decisions and actions.

Because we feel love based on our attachment style, it presents several challenges especially when it comes to showing another attachment style that we still love them and want them back.

Fearful avoidants are fearful of people who claim to love them

When you have anxious attachment, you endlessly loop a script that says: Do you love me? Do you miss me? Do want to want me? If an ex sent a text telling you how much they love you, you’d be over the moon because you now know that they love you, miss you and may even want to be with you.

Fearful avoidants’ endlessly run the script that says: Can I trust you? Can I trust myself? Can I trust us together?”. This script loop is a result of an attachment figure who was loving and caring in some ways but also scary and hurtful in other ways. The contradiction between love and fear is what started their attachment style and why many adult fearful avoidants, question and are suspicious of their parent’s love for them, and often have a “complicated” relationships with a parent or parents; one which seems to be loving and close in some ways but also unhealthy and even toxic in other ways.

Loving and close in some ways but also unhealthy and even toxic in other ways is also a fairy accurate representation of many fearful avoidant adult romantic relationships. They love you (and even trust you), and you love them back, but things happen in the relationship that leave a fearful avoidant questioning 1) if you truly have their back and 2) if they can trust themselves to know who truly loves them and who is in it for themselves.

This is the filter through which fearful avoidants processes and interpret a text or love letter from an ex proclaiming their love. It’s very different from the filter someone with an anxious attachment uses to process a text or love letter from an ex.

If your fearful avoidant ex reads your text or long email letter professing how much you love them, what a great person they are, how they made you feel loved, special, etc., they may feel validated but also be reminded that people who say they love them have always disappointed, lied, taken them for granted, manipulated, betrayed and abandoned them, and why would this time be any different.

Your fearful avoidant ex may even know you love them, miss them and remembers all the good times and how great your connection was, but not respond to your love letter because they don’t fully trust that you truly have their back or aren’t sure if they they can trust themselves to know who truly loves them and who is in it for themselves. And sometimes sending an ex a love letter is no different from sending an ex flowers or gifts. You devalue yourself trying to bribe your way into someone’s heart and life.

If you are serious about changing a fearful avoidant’s mind about the breakup and get them to want to get back together, you need to consistently show up in a way that makes them feel that you are there for them and can be trusted to have their back at all times, and not just because you want them back.

RELATED:

Avoidant Ex Says “I Don’t Want A Relationship” (What to Do)

How to Make An Avoidant Ex Feel Safe Enough To Come Back

How to Be Consistent With A Fearful Avoidant Ex (Get Them Back)

How Do You Reassure A Fearful Avoidant Ex?

Anxious attachment – How to Communicate With An Avoidant Ex