Avoidant is the term usefully coined by attachment theorists to define those of us who, through no fault of our own, but with full responsibility for our condition, have grave difficulties around intimate relationships. We may want, in principle, to be close to people, but in reality we tend to find ourselves feeling claustrophobic and sickened whenever we grow overly involved with anyone. We long to sleep somewhere on our own after lovemaking. We want to make independent plans for the weekend. We rather ungratefully cool whenever a partner becomes too affectionate towards us. Or, if a relationship threatens to work, our thoughts turn as though by some automatic process to the charms of other people. Researchers tell us where this comes from. Somewhere long in our pasts, our relationships with our caregivers didn't go as they should have done. Someone let us down. Someone implicitly taught us that love was not to be trusted. Someone injected us with a dual suspicion of ourselves and of the solidity of any bond with another. And so, we learnt to associate distance and solitude with safety. We may be high-functioning in many parts of life. When it comes to love, we may, until now, simply never have been able to get things to work. It sounds dispiriting and even rather dangerous to be around. But we can find hope in an important detail – that there is a substantial difference between acting avoidantly from unconscious motives on the one hand and, on the other, feeling drawn to avoidant responses while being actively and pre-emptively aware of what is actually going on. There is a difference, in other words, between acting out and insight. The latter doesn't miraculously remove the problem, but it gives us an enormous advantage, the capacity to warn others that we care about and might well, in a rational part of our minds, be sincerely trying to build a relationship with that we are not fully well. Arguably, in love, we don't need, or in any case unlikely to find, perfection. What we need are people with a more or less solid grasp on some of their leading imperfections who can then warn us of them with charm, grace and apology before too much damage has been done. There is a sizeable difference between ruining a weekend for someone by mysteriously deciding at the last moment that one has made other plans and explaining to the partner on a Thursday evening that the prospect of forty-eight hours in their company, though fully welcome in theory, in practice has generated an awkward set of emotional responses that lie outside one's full control and for which one feels embarrassed and thoughtful. There is a sizeable difference between acting madly and sharing the temptation to do so ahead of time. For the recovering avoidant, the following speech might be helpful. I'm so sorry for being peculiar. I care about you a lot. It's just I've observed that when I do care, something a bit odd happens. A part of me tries to manage the distance and find fault. A part of me that dates back to a defence mechanism of childhood needs to put some walls between us because proximity feels at some level odd and frightening. It's how I learnt to cope way back and the mechanism still operates within me now. It's not that I don't love you, it's that being around love and depending on someone brings with it terrors on account of dynamics in my past that I'm working on.