Getting Dumped (on) By Avoidant

... and dumping an avoidant

I promised part 2, so here’s part 2, even though I feel like I’ve run out of steam with this dumb story and I’m kind of over wanting to talk about it but here we go blah blah blah. But also, I have an event on Thursday where I will be sharing the stage with Margaret Atwood, you know? So I’m quietly freaking out about that, and that’s actually such a sexier thing to freak out about. I’m told that Margaret Atwood is “dry” and has a sharp sense of humour, and I won’t lie if I tell you I’ve been having thoughts of preparing a two-minute stand-up to impress her with my charisma and wit to the point where she will decide to adopt me and my chihuahua.

My mom doesn’t really understand what it is that I do because she doesn’t read English and she doesn’t follow Canadian or American literature, so my career has been pretty abstract to her. And considering the subjects of some of my books, I bet she still isn’t sure whether she should even brag about me to her friends or not. But everybody — English-speaking or not - understands “Margaret Atwood,” so I’m hoping that, to my mom, my 15 minutes next to Hera on Mount Olympus will signify some sort of success. The only people we actually, genuinely want to impress are our parents, no?

But, okay, fine, let’s get back to our antihero, our little AD, and use this as a segue into talk of success. Like some creative men who date creative women, AD had a strange insecurity around it. He seemed publicly proud and even bragged about me to friends, but I know it bothered him — for example, when he’d call me his “little genius” in a tone that made it sound like an insult.

You know how our whole thing finally ended? We were friends for a while — I thought good friends although things could be tense sometimes — but then he asked me for money for adapting his mediocre screenplay into a novel — a novel I wrote to help him get attention for the screenplay in the first place. I spent months on that thing. A famous author from Montreal raved about it. My agent, who loved the book — though not the screenplay — was about to submit it to publishers. (On top of that, I had also given him the rights to one of my novels so he could adapt it into a screenplay. Sigh. I know. I know.)

He didn’t ask me for money because he needed it. I think he asked me for money because he wanted to re-establish a hierarchy, to shrink me back down into a position where I was the grateful one, the one auditioning for approval. Because accepting generosity from me as an equal, let alone as someone more professionally accomplished than him, seemed intolerable to his ego. Asking for money transformed the dynamic into one where he could feel superior again. He probably knew that it would humiliate me enough to walk away from the novel — the novel that he couldn’t stop gushing over ¹. And it did. I did walk away.

There was so much humiliation in general, in realizing how asymmetrical the friendship was. I experienced it as a deep attachment, even a developing partnership, a shared emotional reality. But he probably experienced it as situational comfort, fantasy, loneliness relief, or simply emotional intensity without actual relational intent. He had once called me his “ghost girlfriend” because he said he didn’t know how to categorize me, and yet I occupied his every thought (we weren’t physical). For me, realizing the asymmetry of that friendship created a very particular kind of shame that attacked not only my heart but my interpretation of reality itself. I’ve lost count how many times I asked myself if I was actually delusional

Anyway, the point is, the experience with the screenplay-turned-novel finally made me understand something painful: he didn’t just fail to respect me romantically — his supposed “soulmate” — he also didn’t respect me as a friend, and he definitely didn’t respect me creatively, as another artist.

And that, finally, ended up becoming one of the clearest pieces of evidence that this was not simply a failed relationship, and a wonky friendship but someone with unhealthy attachment patterns. I left him a voice note as a final goodbye that I wasn’t particularly proud of because I stuttered, “How, as an artist, could you do this to another artist?” I could not understand this.

One of the central ideas in attachment theory is that securely attached people are capable of understanding the nuance and complexity of human relationships. They can tolerate another person being separate from them, or be talented, successful, admired, autonomous… Securely attached people do not experience intimacy as a threat to their identity.

But in insecurely attached people — particularly avoidant or fearful avoidant styles — closeness can create unconscious feelings of inadequacy, shame, competition, or… vulnerability that feel dangerous. Avoidants are people who developed their pathological attachment styles because it wasn’t safe for them to be soft as children. They were either punished for their “weakness,” or they simply got the message that there was something wrong with needing other people. A person like that doesn’t deepen bonds through admiration and reciprocity — they distance themselves emotionally through minimization, criticism, withdrawal, even contempt.

And in retrospect, that was exactly the dynamic. My work, my success, even my emotional offerings increasingly seemed to function less as things he valued and more as things he needed to diminish in order to regulate his own insecurity. Attachment theory talks a lot about people struggling to sustain authentic intimacy because real intimacy requires the very things that drive them crazy: vulnerability, accountability, admiration, dependence, and respect. It is very hard to form meaningful reciprocal bonds when another person’s humanity keeps feeling like a threat instead of a gift.

1. “The writing is outstanding, as I’ve mentioned. You totally locked into the characters, their inner worlds, and the world they are inhabiting. I love all the added detail beyond the skeleton of the screenplay. That’s all you and it’s brilliant. The actors will love you for it. I didn’t want it to end…”

(I’m not going to be pasting his emails because that’s gross, but I’m gross enough to post a tiny sample of the type of reaction he had.)