By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
I have written separately about how anxious attachment tends to show up in dating, difficult conversations and conflict, and about how avoidant attachment shows up in the same three places. This piece is about what happens when the two end up in a relationship together, which happens often enough that it has its own name in the couples therapy world. It is not a coincidence or bad luck, and neither partner has done anything wrong. The two patterns tend to lock into a specific, repeating cycle once they meet, one that neither partner can usually see clearly from inside it.
What the Cycle Looks Like
One partner reaches for closeness, reassurance or clarity, sometimes urgently. The other feels the pull of that reaching as pressure, and creates distance to manage it, going quiet, changing the subject, finding somewhere else to be. The first partner feels the distance as confirmation of the fear that started the whole exchange, that they are not enough, that they are about to be left, and reaches harder. The second partner feels the harder reaching as confirmation of their own fear, that closeness costs too much, that they will be consumed if they do not protect themselves, and pulls back further.
None of this is done on purpose, and none of it is unreasonable given what each partner is afraid of. That is what makes the cycle so sticky. Both people are responding sensibly to their own fear. It is the combination that produces the mess, and not either person's individual reaction. It is also why advice aimed at just one partner, be less anxious, be less avoidant, tends to fall flat. It addresses half a system as though it were the whole problem.
A concrete version of this might look like one partner sending a third message after two go unanswered, growing more anxious with each unread tick. The other partner sees the messages stacking up and feels the walls closing in, so they delay replying further to create breathing room, which produces exactly the silence the first partner was dreading. From the outside this can look like one partner being needy and the other being cold. From inside the cycle, both partners are doing the only thing that has ever made the fear more bearable, and both are making it worse for the other person in the process.
Why It Is Self Reinforcing
Therapists who work with this pattern, most often within emotionally focused therapy, describe it as a negative cycle with its own momentum, distinct from either partner's individual attachment style. A study of couples in emotionally focused therapy looked at how closely the pursue and withdraw pattern maps onto attachment, using data from a randomised trial of that therapy. The therapists in the study categorised every man as a withdrawer and every woman as a pursuer, while the categorisation was not significantly related to attachment (Huerta et al., 2023). That is a small, exploratory finding, but it fits what I see in the room. The cycle is real and recognisable, and it is not a fixed law that anxious people always pursue and avoidant people always withdraw. Roles can shift by topic, by mood, and by which partner feels more exposed in a given conversation, even within the same relationship.
What tends to stay constant is the shape of the cycle itself, and not the identity of who plays which part. Pursuit and withdrawal feed each other regardless of which partner is doing which, and the fear underneath each move is usually more revealing than the behaviour on the surface.
This matters practically because couples who arrive believing one of them is simply the anxious one and the other is simply the avoidant one can get stuck trying to fix the wrong thing. If the roles shift depending on the topic, money one week, family the next, in laws the week after, then the useful question is not which partner is which type. It is what is happening in this specific exchange, right now, that is triggering the fear on one side and the retreat on the other. Treating the pattern as fixed and permanent tends to make both partners feel more stuck than they are.
This Is Not Only a Heterosexual Pattern
Much of the couples therapy writing on pursuer and distancer dynamics was built with heterosexual couples in mind, and some of it leans on assumptions about gender that do not hold up cleanly elsewhere. A review of emotionally focused therapy with gay and lesbian couples points out that there has been little discussion of whether pursuer and distancer concepts fully translate, and sets out the complexities of applying them (Bigler and Modica, 2022). In my experience the cycle itself, one partner reaching, the other retreating, each response confirming the other's fear, shows up across relationship structures and genders. What changes is which cultural scripts a couple has available to make sense of it.
This matters in practice, and not only academically. A lot of the popular language around this cycle assumes a specific configuration, usually a woman pursuing and a man withdrawing. Couples who do not fit that configuration can end up feeling that the available advice was not written with them in mind, or worse, that something about their dynamic is unusual. It is not. I see the same cycle in same sex couples, in trans and non binary partnerships, and between partners in consensually non monogamous relationships. The pattern is the same one wearing different cultural clothes, depending on who is involved and what scripts are available to them.
How This Looks From Outside the Relationship
Friends and family often pick a side without meaning to, and usually pick wrong. The pursuing partner's distress is visible, sometimes loud, and easy to read as evidence that something is badly wrong in the relationship. The withdrawing partner's distress is invisible by design, since withdrawal is precisely the strategy of not showing what is happening internally, so it reads as calm, or indifference, or simply not caring as much. This asymmetry in how legible each partner's pain is to outsiders tends to produce lopsided sympathy. It can leave the withdrawing partner feeling doubly isolated, unseen inside the relationship and unseen by the people around it too.
The same asymmetry can show up in how each partner describes the relationship to people outside it. The pursuing partner often has more practice narrating what is wrong, since naming distress is part of how the pattern expresses itself. The withdrawing partner often has far less practice putting words to what is happening for them, since the pattern is built around not doing exactly that. This does not mean the withdrawing partner's account matters less. It usually means it takes more deliberate effort to get it into the room at all, including in a therapy session, and it needs active space made for it, and not to be read as having nothing to say. If withdrawal has tipped into long silences, my piece on stonewalling and emotional shutdowns goes into that in more depth.
Roles can shift by topic, by mood, by which partner feels more exposed in a given conversation, even within the same relationship.
Why This Pairing Is Not Doomed
Couples in this pattern often fear, silently, that being anxious and avoidant together is a mismatch with no real future. I do not see it that way. A study combining data from five longitudinal studies of 539 newlywed couples found that the way one partner's attachment insecurity combines with the other's predicted satisfaction and later separation. That underlines that both people's characteristics shape how a relationship goes, and not one person's style alone (Peters et al., 2025). Put plainly, the pattern belongs to the pair, which is why it can also change as a pair. In my experience, some anxious avoidant pairings do struggle badly, and others become some of the more securely functioning relationships a couple can build, because each partner's growth edge is directly relevant to what the other one needs. An anxious partner learning to self soothe and an avoidant partner learning to stay present are not separate projects. They are the same project, approached from two different starting points.
There is also a reason these two styles find each other so often in the first place. An anxious partner's capacity for emotional attunement and an avoidant partner's capacity for steadiness under pressure are complementary strengths, and not just a collision of two weaknesses. Couples who get stuck in the negative version of this cycle are often the same couples who, once the cycle is interrupted, find those same traits working for them and not against them. One partner brings warmth and emotional fluency, and the other brings calm and follow through.
What Breaks the Cycle
The single most useful shift most couples in this pattern can make is learning to name the cycle itself as the problem, and not each other. Repair after a difficult exchange tends to go far better once both partners can say something like, this is the pattern again, and not one partner accusing the other of not caring while the other accuses the first of being too much. The cycle becomes a shared enemy instead of a referendum on which partner is more at fault, which changes the entire emotional tone of the conversation that follows.
Concretely, this usually means the pursuing partner learning to state the underlying fear directly, and not escalating the behaviour that expresses it. It also means the withdrawing partner learning to offer a specific, bounded pause, and not a silence with no promised return. Neither of these is natural at first. Both are learnable, and both tend to move faster when practised together than when either partner works on their own half of the pattern in isolation.
Here are some things couples tend to find useful.
Have the conversation afterward, and not in the middle of the cycle. Once things have settled, you can look back together at what just happened, and you are not trying to resolve the argument in real time.
Agree a shared phrase or signal in advance, something short enough to say when you are both overwhelmed. Naming it out loud, something like "we're doing the thing", often works better than either of you trying to explain your internal state mid cycle.
If you are the one who withdraws, say how long you need and when you will come back, and then come back.
If you are the one who pursues, try saying the fear underneath ("I'm worried I'm losing you") instead of repeating the message or raising the volume.
Timing matters more than most couples expect. In the middle of the cycle, while one partner is actively pursuing and the other is actively withdrawing, both of you are already overwhelmed and neither is available for reflection. For the same reason it helps to agree the phrase in advance, since inventing new language mid cycle is a task neither of you is well equipped for.
If you and your partner see yourselves in this cycle, I have written a workbook you can work through side by side.
How Therapy Can Help
You will not be expected to know in advance who is the pursuer and who is the withdrawer, and the answer sometimes changes depending on the topic. What I am listening for is the live pattern between the two of you, what triggers the first move, how quickly the second move follows, and what each of you is afraid of underneath the behaviour the other one sees.
This work is almost always more effective with both partners in the room, since the cycle itself is relational and is not something either partner is doing alone. A pursuing partner who learns to self regulate without a withdrawing partner also learning to stay present will still find the same cycle waiting for them. A withdrawing partner who learns to tolerate closeness without a pursuing partner also learning to ask for it differently will find the same thing. Where both partners are willing to look at the pattern together, and not at each other, this is often some of the more durable work couples therapy can offer, because it targets the cycle and not either individual's character.
A useful marker of progress is not the absence of the cycle altogether, which tends to be an unrealistic goal early on. It is how quickly a couple can catch themselves inside it and name it out loud, and how much shorter the cycle runs once it has been named. Couples who have done real work on this often still have a version of the old pattern show up under stress. What has changed is the speed of recovery, and not the total disappearance of the fears that drove it in the first place.
This work also tends to surface each partner's own history along the way, and not just the two of you as a couple. An anxious partner's fear of abandonment and an avoidant partner's fear of engulfment rarely started in this relationship. They usually started somewhere much earlier, and the current relationship is often just the place those older patterns are finally being noticed and worked with directly, sometimes for the first time. That can feel disorienting, since it means the work is bigger than fixing a specific argument style. It also tends to mean the change, once it happens, reaches further than this one relationship.
If you feel like now might be the right time to talk this through with a therapist, I offer a free 30 minute consultation, in person in London or online. Either of you is welcome to reach out first.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist working in person across central London, from rooms in Pimlico, Kensington, and Angel. He works with couples, individuals, and polycules on relationship issues including jealousy, affairs and betrayals, sex problems, and considered separation. His practice is integrative, sex-positive, and affirming of all relationship structures and identities.
References
Huerta, P., Edwards, C., Asiimwe, R., PettyJohn, M., VanBoxel, J., Morgan, P., & Wittenborn, A. K. (2023). Exploratory analysis of pursue withdraw patterns, attachment, and gender among couples in emotionally focused therapy. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 51(1), 57 to 75. https://doi.org/10.1080/01926187.2022.2129521
Bigler, K. M., & Modica, C. A. (2022). Emotionally focused couples therapy and gay and lesbian couples: Considerations for pursuer distancer patterns. Journal of LGBTQ Issues in Counseling, 16(3), 300 to 316. https://doi.org/10.1080/26924951.2022.2043217
Peters, S. D., Meltzer, A. L., & McNulty, J. K. (2025). Own and partner attachment insecurity interact to predict marital satisfaction and dissolution. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 16(5), 519 to 529. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506241237294
