Why Avoidant and Anxious Partners Find It Hard to Split Up

Fractious couples are often made up of one party who is avoidant (hiding their intimacy needs) and one who is anxious (nagging and pressuring counter productively for their intimacy needs to be met). These couples go through cycles that run from cosiness to fury to sulk to blow up to cosiness. Why do these cycles happen and why are they so hard to break? What might be a better way forward? Sign up to our new newsletter and get 10% off your first online order of a book, product or class: https://bit.ly/2LayJ9F For gifts and more from The School of Life, visit our online shop: https://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/ Our website has classes, articles and products to help you think and grow: https://www.theschooloflife.com/ FURTHER READING You can read more on this and other subjects on our blog, here: https://bit.ly/2zLuEXc “There is a certain sort of relationship that is alternately passionate, fiery and painfully unfulfilling – and that tends to puzzle both outsiders and its participants; a relationship between one person who is, as psychologists put it, anxiously attached and another who is avoidantly attached. There is, in such couplings, a constant game of push and pull. The anxiously attached party typically complains – more or less loudly – that their partner is not responsive enough: they accuse them of being emotionally distant, withholding, cold and perhaps physically uninterested too. The avoidant lover, for their part, stays relatively quiet but in their more fed-up moments, complains that the anxious party is far too demanding, possibly ‘mad’ and, as they put it pejoratively, ‘needy’. One person seems to want far too much, the other far too little.” MORE SCHOOL OF LIFE Visit us in person at our London HQ: https://bit.ly/2QrwC4v Watch more films on RELATIONSHIPS in our playlist: http://bit.ly/TSOLrelationships You can submit translations and transcripts on all of our videos here: https://www.youtube.com/timedtext_cs_panel?c=UC7IcJI8PUf5Z3zKxnZvTBog&tab=2 Find out how more here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6054623?hl=en-GB SOCIAL MEDIA Feel free to follow us at the links below: 2NWdRJJ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theschooloflifelondon/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheSchoolOfLife Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theschooloflifelondon/ CREDITS Produced in collaboration with: Direction & Illustration- Natalia Ramos http://www.nataliarama.com #TheSchoolOfLife #AttachmentStyles #Relationships