Why You Keep Over-Sacrificing for Your Avoidant Ex

No relationships is one hundred percent 50/50 give-and-take. In most relationships, one person is always giving a little more. In others, one person gives more this time and the next time, the other gives more. And it’s healthy in a relationship and secure behaviour to sometimes put your partner or ex’s needs before yours, but when you are giving way too much of yourself to extract even a small amount of love (affection, attention, support, etc), your giving is unhealthy and even toxic.

This type of giving is what is called self-abandoning. Self-abandoning very briefly is:

• When you sacrifice your well-being to maintain connection.
• You consistently put your own needs, feelings, and boundaries aside to please someone else or keep a relationship going.
• You erase parts of yourself because you fear rejection, or fear losing the other person.

Over time, it creates imbalance: you give too much, compromise too much, and lose touch with your own identity, which often fuels one-sided dynamics, especially with avoidants.

You think you are being truly loving and caring by anticipating their needs and meeting them even when unasked, but to an avoidant it feels intrusive and feels like an attempt to induce dependency. It’s like “I’m receiving all these things that I never asked for or necessarily want, and now you’re going to expect things from me in return” – and to avoidants it feels transactional and even manipulative.

And avoidants have a point because anxiously attached, consciously or not, often give with the expectation of getting something in return. Most won’t admit it, but this expectation fuels much of their frustration with avoidants. They give, hoping their partner or ex will match it either right away or eventually. They wait, sometimes endlessly, for reciprocity, or even just a fraction of what they’re giving. When it never comes, that lack of balance slowly turns into resentment.

Over time, that resentment seeps into the relationship. Small irritations become arguments. Moments that used to feel intimate feel heavy or tense. You may find yourself withdrawing emotionally or overcompensating to try to get the balance back, which only pushes the avoidant further away. The more resentment builds, the more the relationship becomes a cycle of unmet expectations, frustration, and emotional distance—hardly the connection you were hoping for.

But that’s not all that self-abandoning does. Self-abandonment makes you question your worth and lovability.

You feel that you have to prove your worth and love and often find yourself trying to convince (and/or force) an avoidant to want or take what you’re giving (care, help, support, space etc). You become the “relationship coach” in the relationship explaining attachment styles, how relationships work, what loving someone means etc., all in the attempt to prove your worth to them.

But what ends up happening is that you make an avoidant uncomfortable being in the relationship with you and this comes out as:

• I need space
• I can’t give you what you want
• You deserve more than I can give you
• I don’t think I am good enough for you

When the relationship ends, you are left feeling empty, unworthy and unlovable. You made sacrifices and did so much to make the relationship work, but someone still doesn’t want to be with you.

But instead of looking inward and asking yourself:

• Why you keep self-abandoning
• Why you over-invest in your avoidant ex’s attachment struggles
• Why you focus on their feelings and needs more than your own

You fall back into the same pattern of giving too much and self-abandoning. You gravitate toward advice like, “Give an avoidant all the space they need,” or, “Show them you understand how hard relationships are for them.” In reality, this guidance encourages you to give even more while quietly ignoring your own need for connection.

I see this a lot with many of my anxious attached clients. They know more about their avoidant ex’s attachment style than they know about their own. Some even tell themselves they’re securely attached to direct attention away from us talking about their full-blown anxious attachment feelings and needs because they want the focus to be on their avoidant ex’s feelings and needs.

When I point out that they’re more anxious than secure, they feel embarrassed as if their feelings and needs are something to be ashamed of instead of something to be acknowledged and given just as much attention as their avoidant ex’s feelings and needs.

Then you wonder why after going no contact, giving an avoidant “all the space they need”, telling an avoidant ex you understand how hard it is for an avoidant to be in a relationship or understand why they need space, nothing much changes. You’re still the one doing too much and working too hard to keep an avoidant in the relationship or make them want to be with you.

At some point, you have to pause and ask yourself: Why am I doing this to myself? Why am I bending over backward for someone who won’t meet me even a quarter of the way? Why am I ignoring my own needs and feelings?

It’s a hard question because the answer often points to back to you and patterns that if you are honest with yourself, you can see that you’ve had for years.

Asking why and being honest with yourself is the first step toward breaking the cycle of over-giving, over-sacrificing and self-abandoning and choosing yourself over the endless wait for someone else to change.

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