In Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book Into the Wild, Chris McCandless, a superior student and athlete in his early twenties, leaves his ordinary life behind and heads for the Alaskan wilderness. Traveling alone, with minimal gear, Chris makes his way toward Alaska with the goal of living off the land without the help of other human beings. Throughout his journey, Chris engages people who want to make him a part of their lives, including an elderly man who offers to adopt him, a young girl who falls in love with him, and a couple who invites him to live with them. Chris, however, is determined to make it on his own.

Before reaching his final destination, Chris has his last human interaction with a man named Gallien who has given him a ride:

Metaphorically speaking, we view people with an avoidant attachment style as lonesome travelers on the journey of life and relationships. Like Chris, they idealize a life of self-sufficiency and look down upon dependency. If you have an avoidant attachment style, the lesson Chris ultimately learned—that experiences are only meaningful when shared with others—is key to your happiness as well.

In this chapter, we look at the ways in which you, the lonesome traveler, manage to keep your distance even when you’re with someone you love. We help you gain insight into why you behave as you do in relationships and how that behavior is stopping you from finding true happiness in your romantic connections. If you belong to the remaining three-quarters of the population, chances are that you know—or may someday get involved with—someone avoidant. This chapter will help you understand why they act as they do.

Susan, who has an avoidant attachment style, describes herself as a free spirit. She gets involved with men—sometimes for more than a year—but then eventually tires of them, moves on to the next conquest, and jokingly refers to the “trail of broken hearts” she left behind. She sees need as a weakness and looks down on people who become dependent on their partner, mockingly referring to such situations as “jail time.”

Are Susan and others with avoidant attachment styles simply devoid of the need to meaningfully connect with a significant other? And if so, doesn’t that contradict the basic premise of attachment theory—that the need for physical and emotional proximity to a spouse or lover is universal?

Answering these questions isn’t an easy task. Avoidants are not exactly open books and tend to repress rather than express their emotions. This is where attachment studies come in handy. Sophisticated research methods are able to reach beyond people’s conscious motives and succeed where straightforward communication fails in cracking the avoidant mind-set. The following set of experiments is particularly revealing.

In the second part of these studies, researchers distracted the avoidants by giving them another task to perform—like solving a puzzle or responding to another cue—while the word recognition task was going on. In these situations, the avoidants reacted to words related to their own attachment worries (“separation,” “loss,” “death”) just as quickly as other people did. Distracted by another task, their ability to repress lessened and their true attachment feelings and concerns were able to surface.

The experiments show that although you may be avoidant, your attachment “machinery” is still in place—making you just as vulnerable to threats of separation. Only when your mental energy is needed elsewhere and you are caught off guard, however, do these emotions and feelings emerge.

These studies also tell us that avoidants such as Susan aren’t such free spirits after all; it is the defensive stance that they adopt that makes them seem that way. In Susan’s account, notice how she makes a point of putting down those who depend on their significant others. Other studies have found that faced with a stressful life event, such as divorce, the birth of a severely disabled child, or military trauma, avoidants’ defenses are quick to break down and they then appear and behave just like people with an anxious attachment style.

If you’re avoidant, these small everyday deactivating strategies are tools you unconsciously use to make sure the person that you love (or will love) won’t get in the way of your autonomy. But at the end of the day, these tools are standing in the way of you being happy in a relationship.

The use of deactivating strategies alone is not enough to keep attachment at bay. They’re just the tip of the iceberg. As an avoidant, your mind is governed by overarching perceptions and beliefs about relationships that ensure a disconnect with your partner and get in the way of your happiness.

Joe, 29: “When I was growing up, my father constantly told me not to rely on anyone. He said it so many times it became a mantra in my head: ‘You can only count on yourself!’ I never disputed its truth until I first went to therapy. ‘Relationships? Who needs them?’ I told my shrink. ‘Why would I waste my time being with someone when I can only count on myself.’ My therapist opened my eyes. ‘That’s nonsense!’ he said, ‘Of course you can—and should—count on other people, you do it all the time anyway. We all do.’ It was one of those white-light moments. I could see that he was right. What a huge relief it was to let go of such an obsessive notion that set me apart from the rest of the world.”

Joe’s belief in self-reliance—and his experience of feeling alone because of it—isn’t unique to him. Studies show that belief in self-reliance is very closely linked with a low degree of comfort with intimacy and closeness. Although avoidant individuals were found to have a great deal of confidence about not needing anyone else, their belief came with a price tag: They scored lowest on every measure of closeness in personal relationships. They were less willing to engage in self-disclosure, less comfortable with intimacy, and also less likely to seek help from others.

As is evident in Joe’s account, a strong belief in self-reliance can be more of a burden than an asset. In romantic relationships, it reduces your ability to be close, to share intimate information, and to be in tune with your partner. Many avoidants confuse self-reliance with independence. Even though it’s important for each of us to be able to stand on our own two feet, if we overrate self-reliance, we diminish the importance of getting support from other people, thus cutting ourselves off from an important lifeline.

Another problem with self-reliance is the “self ” part. It forces you to ignore the needs of your partner and concentrate only on your own needs, shortchanging you of one of the most rewarding human experiences: It prevents you (and the person you love) from the joy of feeling part of something bigger than yourself.

Another disabling thought pattern that makes you keep your partner at a distance is “seeing the worm instead of the apple.” Carole had been with Bob for nine months and had been feeling increasingly unhappy. She felt Bob was the wrong guy for her, and gave a multitude of reasons: He wasn’t her intellectual equal, he lacked sophistication, he was too needy, and she didn’t like the way he dressed or interacted with people. Yet, at the same time, there was a tenderness about him that she’d never experienced with another man. He made her feel safe and accepted, he lavished gifts on her, and he had endless patience to deal with her silences, moods, and scorn. Still, Carole was adamant about her need to leave Bob. “It will never work,” she said time and again. Finally, she broke up with him. Months later she was surprised by just how difficult she was finding things without him. Lonely, depressed, and heartbroken, she mourned their lost relationship as the best she’d ever had.

Carole’s experience is typical of people with an avoidant attachment style. They tend to see the glass half-empty instead of half-full when it comes to their partner. In fact, in one study, Mario Mikulincer, dean of the New School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel and one of the leading researchers in the field of adult attachment, together with colleagues Victor Florian and Gilad Hirschberger, from the department of psychology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, asked couples to recount their daily experiences in a diary. They found that people with an avoidant attachment style rated their partner less positively than did non-avoidants. What’s more, they found they did so even on days in which their accounts of their partners’ behavior indicated supportiveness, warmth, and caring. Dr. Mikulincer explains that this pattern of behavior is driven by avoidants’ generally dismissive attitude toward connectedness. When something occurs that contradicts this perspective—such as their spouse behaving in a genuinely caring and loving manner—they are prone to ignoring the behavior, or at least diminishing its value.

When they were together, Carole used many deactivating strategies, tending to focus on Bob’s negative attributes. Although she was aware of her boyfriend’s strengths, she couldn’t keep her mind off what she perceived to be his countless flaws. Only after they broke up, and she no longer felt threatened by the high level of intimacy, did her defense strategies lift. She was then able to get in touch with the underlying feelings of attachment that were there all along and to accurately assess Bob’s pluses.

Having an avoidant attachment style can often make you feel like that parent. You’re not strong at translating the many verbal and nonverbal signals you receive during everyday interactions into a coherent understanding of your lover’s mental state. The problem is that, along with your self-reliant attitude, you also train yourself not to care about how the person closest to you is feeling. You figure that this is not your task; that they need to take care of their own emotional well-being. This lack of understanding leads partners of avoidants to complain about not receiving enough emotional support. It also leads to less connectedness, warmth, and satisfaction in the relationship.

Dr. Jeffry Simpson, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, studies how adult attachment orientations are associated with relationship functioning and well-being, particularly when partners are distressed. He also researches empathic accuracy—the condition under which people tend to be accurate or inaccurate in gauging their partner’s feelings. In a study conducted together with Steve Rholes from Texas A & M University, they set up an experiment to examine whether people with different attachment styles differed in their abilities to infer their partners’ thoughts. They asked individuals to rate the attractiveness and sexual appeal of opposite-sex images in the presence of their partners. They then asked them to assess their partners’ reactions to this rating process. Avoidant individuals were found to be less accurate than anxious individuals at perceiving their partners’ thoughts and feelings during the experiment. It was common for avoidants to interpret their partner’s reaction as indifferent if they rated someone as highly attractive, when, in fact, their partner had been quite upset by it.

John Gray, in his enormously popular book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, starts out by describing the aha moment that made him write the book. Several days after his wife, Bonnie, gave birth to their baby girl in a very painful delivery, John went back to work (all signs showed she was on the mend). He came home at the end of the day, only to discover that his wife had run out of painkillers and had consequently “spent the whole day in pain, taking care of a newborn.” When he saw how upset she was, he misinterpreted her distress as anger and became very defensive—trying to plead his innocence. After all, he didn’t know she had run out of pills. Why hadn’t she called? After a heated exchange, he was about to stomp angrily out of the house when Bonnie stopped him: “Stop, please don’t leave,” she said. “This is when I need you most. I’m in pain. I haven’t slept in days. Please listen to me.” At this point John went over to her and silently held her. Later he says: “That day, for the first time, I didn’t leave her . . . I succeeded in giving to her when she really needed me.”

This event—the stress and responsibility of having a newborn and his wife’s highly effective communication—helped to invoke a secure working model in John. It helped bring him to the realization that his wife’s well-being is his responsibility and sacred duty. This was a true revelation for him. From someone who was busy looking out for his own needs and responding defensively to his partner’s requests and dissatisfactions, he managed to shift to a more secure mind-set. This is not an easy task if you have an avoidant attachment style, but it is possible if you allow yourself to open up enough to truly see your partner.

One of the consequences of devaluing your romantic relationship is that you often wake up long after the relationship has gone stale, having forgotten all those negative things that annoyed you about your partner, wondering what went wrong and reminiscing longingly about your long-lost love. We call it the phantom-ex phenomenon.

Often, as happened with Carole who “rediscovered” her feelings for Bob only after she’d broken up with him, once the avoidant person has put time and distance between herself and the partner whom she’s lost interest in, something strange happens: The feelings of love and admiration return! Once at a safe distance, the threat of intimacy is gone and you no longer feel the need to suppress your true feelings. You can then recall all of your ex’s great qualities, convincing yourself that he or she was the best partner you ever had. Of course, you can’t articulate why this person wasn’t right for you, or remember clearly why you ended things in the first place (or perhaps behaved so miserably that he or she had no choice but to leave). In essence, you put your past partner on a pedestal and pay tribute to “the love of your life,” now forever lost. Sometimes you do try to resume the relationship, starting a vicious cycle of getting closer and withdrawing. Other times, even if the other person is available, you don’t make an attempt to get back together but continue all the same to think about him or her incessantly.

This fixation with a past partner affects budding new relationships, because it acts as a deactivating strategy, blocking you from getting close to someone else. Even though you’ll probably never get back together with your phantom ex, just the knowledge that they’re out there is enough to make any new partner seem insignificant by comparison.

Not wanting to look inward—and believing that we all have the same capacity for intimacy—you conclude that you’re just not in love enough and so pull away. You partner is crushed and protests, but this only strengthens your conviction that s/he is not “the one.” Moving from one date to the next, you begin this vicious cycle over and over, believing all along that once you find “the one,” you’ll effortlessly connect on a totally different level.

On occasions when avoidants reach a low point in their life—because of severe loneliness, a life-altering experience, or a major accident—they can change their way of thinking. For those of you who have reached that point, take note of the following eight actions that will get you one step closer to true intimacy. Most of these steps require, first and foremost, increasing your self-awareness. But knowing about the thought patterns that deny you the ability to truly get close to someone is only the first step. The next and harder step requires you to start to identify instances in which you employ these attitudes and behaviors, and then to embark on the voyage of change.