Avoidant partners do want closeness
Amir Levine and Rachel Heller found that the people who pull away in relationships are not indifferent — they are deactivating.
The avoidant partner is easy to misread. They seem unbothered when you're upset, self-sufficient when you need reassurance, and subtly resistant to any conversation about where things are going. It looks like distance. It can feel like indifference.
In Attached, psychiatrist Amir Levine and Rachel Heller draw on decades of adult attachment research to reframe this pattern. People with avoidant attachment styles are not without the need for closeness — that need is as biologically embedded in avoidant people as in anyone else. What they've developed instead is a set of deactivating strategies: mental moves that suppress awareness of attachment needs when those needs start to feel threatening.
This includes focusing on a partner's flaws, fantasizing about other relationships, insisting they would be fine alone, and tuning out in moments of conflict. These aren't personality quirks or signs of low investment. They are coping mechanisms that developed when closeness felt risky or unavailable.
The practical consequence is significant. Pursuing an avoidant partner harder typically triggers more deactivation. What tends to work better is creating conditions of genuine safety — predictability, low stakes, no pursuit — that make the deactivating strategy unnecessary. The closeness the avoidant partner claims not to need is usually still there, waiting underneath.