Fearful-avoidant and fearful-avoidant: fast, intense, unstable
This pairing gets close faster than almost any other, because neither of you is pacing anything and both of you recognise something in the other one immediately. It is genuinely intense and the intensity is not fake.
Wants to be close and backs away from it, sometimes inside the same week.
Wants to be close and backs away from it, sometimes inside the same week.
What actually happens
Then the stakes rise, and both alarms fire at once, and there is nobody left in the room who can absorb it. What follows tends to be sudden: a week of silence from both sides, or a fight that goes further than either of you intended within twenty minutes. Because the swings are synchronised, the good parts are very good and the bad parts have no floor underneath them.
What this one needs
This is the one pairing where outside structure matters more than anything either of you says. Fixed times, agreed rules about what happens during a silence, and ideally somebody outside the relationship that each of you talks to. Two people improvising this at the same time does not produce stability, however much both of them want it.
Something you can send
Both of us go quiet when it matters. Can we write down now what we do when that happens?
Not sure which one you are? The quiz is 16 questions and gives you two scores rather than a single label.
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