This Is Why Avoidants Stop Putting In Effort And Give Up

Avoidants run when things get close because they’re afraid of intimacy — that part is true. It’s the narrative most anxiously attached people like because it highlights the problems of an avoidant attachment style while also sympathizing with the anxiously attached, even allowing them to play the victim of an avoidant ex.

But let’s be honest. Many avoidants have good reason to fear getting close and to run away from the relationship.

In the begening of the relationship…

Like most people, avoidants come into a relationship hoping to be happy and to make someone happy. And in the beginning, the majority of avoidants step out of their comfort zone to do things they think will make someone happy. Even dismissive avoidants whose natural tendency is to put in only the minimum effort and invest less in relationships still try, in the beginning, to do things that make someone they’re with happy.

But even in the beginning, an avoidant’s efforts often don’t match the effort — emotionally, mentally, and behaviourally — that anxiously attached people put into relationships.

The mismatch in investment in the relationship is significant

People with an anxious attachment tend to prioritize connection and make the relationship and the other person a central focus of their lives.

They want to get close and put in the (extra) effort to make a relationship work. They don’t do the hot-and-cold like fearful avoidants or the “you do you and I do me” thing like dismissive avoidants. They’re always there when you need them and even when you don’t want them around.

They’ll abandon themselves to make the person they love happy, and they have an unrelenting ability to persist and try to make a relationship work even when there seems to be no hope. An anxiously attached person will even sacrifice their whole life to be with you if you asked them to.

All of these things make people with an anxious attachment endearing, but they can also be emotionally challenging to be with — even for someone securely attached.

The cycle of reassurance seeking

Most anxiously attached are happy for a while, then they want more, and then more and more to achieve the same level of happiness.

You can tell an anxiously attached person you love them, you’re attracted to them, everything is fine, you’re still into them — you can spend 24/7 locked in their arms and give them all the reassurance in the world — and it works for a while. Then they’re back for more and more.

And if you don’t give them what they need or want, they go into protest behaviour. They’ll blow up your phone, call at the wildest hours of the night, show up uninvited, come to your workplace, accuse you of using them, cheating, or even demand you remove certain friends or relatives from your life just to make them happy.

Emotional exhaustion in the relationship

The constant effort to make an anxiously attached person happy is extremely stressful, emotionally exhausting, and flat-out annoying to an avoidant.

It makes them feel like they can never be enough or do enough, like the anxiously attached feels entitled to their time, space, feelings, love, and life. They have to constantly reinforce boundaries and fend off potential threats. Some avoidants even feel like they’re not allowed to feel a certain way or have needs, because doing so dysregulates the anxiously attached person and makes them unable to function normally.

After a while, avoidants stop putting in effort like they used to and give up trying. You’ve asked them for extra effort, but didn’t directly offer them anything in return. What they were going to get in return was your happiness — which would make you more pleasant to be with, which in turn would make the avoidant happy. But if their effort to make you happy doesn’t actually make you happy, then for an avoidant it is pointless to even try.

The feeling that they can’t make you happy

Avoidants who end a relationship because they felt they couldn’t make you happy walk away feeling beaten and defeated. They keep going over everything they did, over and over again, and still it wasn’t enough.

The feeling that they can’t make you happy is exactly what makes an avoidant not want to come back.

Playing the “if an avoidant had done this or not done that” victim doesn’t help with attachment anxiety. Yes, avoidant behaviours trigger attachment anxiety, and yes, being in a relationship with an avoidant can exacerbate it, but avoidants do not cause attachment anxiety. And if you’re truly honest with yourself, you’ve always:

• Had a fear of losing a relationship or the person you love
• Had a tendency to try too hard in relationships
• Given a lot more than you get
• Tried to control things so you wouldn’t get hurt
• Feared others might not want to be with you or feel attracted to you
• Had difficulty asking for your needs to be met
• Been an overthinker who overanalyzes relationships
• Worried about being needy and clingy
• Feared being used or taken advantage of
• Been in relationships where you felt neglected
• Felt the happiest when someone found you attractive and wanted to be with you
• Struggled to set boundaries (for fear they’d push someone away)
• Found other people’s boundaries frustrating
• Chased after someone who wasn’t interested or who didn’t reciprocate

These behaviours are not caused by an avoidant — and are going to go away by swapping one relationship for another or by avoiding avoidants.

If you can’t be happy on your own, no one – not even a securely attached – can make you happy

Learning to be happy on your own helps you avoid making a relationship or the other person the central focus of your life.

When your sense of stability, fulfillment, and identity comes mainly from within, the relationship becomes something you add to your life rather than something you depend on to complete it.

This reduces pressure on both people — you’re not constantly looking to your partner to regulate your emotions, and you’re less likely to feel panicked or lost when they’re unavailable.

It also makes the relationship healthier overall. You’re more able to respect boundaries, tolerate distance without overreacting, and engage out of genuine choice rather than need.

At the same time, it allows connection to grow more naturally, because it isn’t being forced to carry the weight of your entire emotional world.

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