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Games Avoidants Play When They're In Love With You

Channel: Chris Seiter
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B97SKNKDu0

Seiter, a self-identified dismissive avoidant, argues that avoidants who are genuinely in love run through five recurring behaviors -- "games" -- that paradoxically push partners away. He draws on Reddit threads from self-identified avoidants and the book "Attached".

Key points

  • Game 1: Make time but keep distance. Avoidants show love by being consistent with their time, but it is rarely quality time. He cites "Attached" (p. 115) on "together but apart -- the compromise that satisfies no one," with avoidants reminiscing about lost freedom or feeling trapped.
  • Game 2: Rarely initiate contact. He frames avoidance as a coping mechanism for anxiety and a need for control. He shares that during his own talking stage with his now-wife he kept a binder charting text ratios to ensure she always reached out first. Left in silence, an avoidant may reach out, but once reassured reverts to making you initiate.
  • Game 3: Stay cool despite fearing rejection. Distinguishes dismissive from fearful avoidant. Invokes Jung's "facade" -- a social mask that conceals the terrified, hypervigilant true self. The mask cracks under sustained stress, and they may resent the partner for having to maintain it.
  • Game 4: Withhold "I love you" until reciprocation is certain. Avoidants hedge bets, sometimes lining up a next relationship while still in the current one to guarantee against rejection. He describes near-impossible checklists (take a bullet, move a dead body) as a deactivation strategy to squelch intimacy.
  • Game 5: Put you through a gauntlet. They unconsciously create harsh tests to see if a partner stays committed. He offers an evolutionary hypothesis (avoidant self-reliance aided survival in scarce/harsh conditions) plus a childhood-wounds explanation, while flagging it explicitly as speculation.

Reception

  • Heavy engagement; sentiment splits between weary partners of avoidants and self-aware avoidants reflecting.
  • Top comment reframes it sharply: avoidants test partners so hard that they themselves become the terrible partner; another bluntly summarizes "they treat you like shit."
  • Several self-identified avoidants offered vulnerable insider accounts of craving yet fearing intimacy, and thanked Seiter for his openness about his own attachment style.
  • A recurring pushback rejects blaming behavior on childhood, arguing adults are responsible for not hurting others.
  • Many shared painful firsthand stories of mixed signals, vague future plans, and being ghosted, with advice to "never date someone's potential."