“You should do this work not because avoidance makes you broken, but because underneath every protective pattern is a longing that never left: A longing to love and be loved. The part of you that learned to disappear so it would not be hurt is the same part that has been waiting, all along, to be found.”
In “We Are Entertaining Ourselves to Death,” I named what artificial stimulus is taking from us: our agency, our patience, our capacity to sit inside our own lives without reaching for a screen. But underneath every dimension of that crisis, economic, neurological, technological, sits a wound that does not show up in a debt report or a happiness index. It shows up in the empty chair across the table, the conversation that never moves past the surface, the relationship that looks full from the outside and feels hollow from within.
We already named the pattern. Constant stimulation makes silence uncomfortable. Stillness starts to feel like failure. The emptiness in which real intimacy is born becomes something to escape rather than enter. A generation raised on the instant scroll has learned to expect that connection can be found by swiping, that validation must be immediate or it is not real, that relationships are platforms to perform on rather than spaces to inhabit. We called this a socio-relational wound. It is that. But it is also more specific, more clinical, and more treatable than the word "wound" suggests. It has a name, a set of measurable signs, and a body of research behind it. It is called intimacy avoidance.
In four decades of sitting across from individuals, couples, and families, I have come to see intimacy avoidance not as a character flaw or a lack of love, but as a nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do. Love avoidance is what happens when the very thing a person longs for, closeness, being truly seen, being needed and needing in return, has become, somewhere along the way, associated with danger. The body does not distinguish between emotional exposure and physical threat. It simply protects. And so a person can spend a lifetime reaching for connection with one hand while quietly, unconsciously, blocking it with the other.
Clinically, intimacy avoidance shows up as a pattern, not a single behavior: the partner who changes the subject when things get emotionally real, the client who can talk for an hour about everyone else’s inner life but never their own, the marriage that runs efficiently on logistics and never touches feeling. Psychologists measure this pattern with instruments like the Fear of Intimacy Scale, developed by researchers Descutner and Thelen, which distinguishes it from general shyness or introversion. It is worth being precise here: intimacy avoidance is not the same as Avoidant Personality Disorder, a fixed clinical diagnosis. What I see most often in my work is something more fluid and more hopeful, a learned pattern, which means it can also be relearned.
Why is it an epidemic? Because roughly seventeen percent of adults in Western cultures meet the criteria for this pattern, according to research cited by psychologist Hal Shorey, and in my own clinical experience, that number feels conservative once you account for the people who function well enough on the surface that no one, including themselves, names what is happening underneath.
Genuine intimacy is not a feeling. It is a practice that requires tolerance for exposure: the willingness to be seen without editing, to sit in another person’s silence without fixing it, to stay present when the outcome is unknown, and most of all not to run: Running looks like diving headlong into your phone, or even not answering it when someone calls to ask how you are. It looks like building lives on distraction so you do not have to be present and vulnerable. And the distractions available to us in our culture make sure to reward us handsomely, so we will just keep coming back for more and avoid real connection. Genuine intimacy is built in the unglamorous middle of ordinary time, not in the highlight reel we now perform for each other.
Sherry Turkle, the MIT psychologist who has spent decades studying how technology reshapes intimacy, put the trade plainly.
“We expect more from technology and less from each other.”
--- Dr. Sherry Turkle, MIT, Alone Together (2011)
Her research found something more unsettling underneath that trade. We do not turn to our devices simply because they are convenient. We turn to them because they let us feel connected while staying protected from the vulnerability real connection demands.
Esther Perel, the psychotherapist behind Mating in Captivity, named the paradox this creates in a recent dialogue with fellow therapist Brené Brown: what looks like the most connected era in human history is also producing a distinct, disorienting kind of loneliness.
“Modern loneliness masks as hyper-connectivity.”
--- Esther Perel, in dialogue with Brené Brown
Brown, in that same conversation, offered her own term for what fills the gap: counterfeit connection, the kind that mimics closeness without asking anything real of us, and that leaves people more isolated the more of it they consume.
This is the piece that was missing from my first article. We are not only distracted from intimacy. Many of us have quietly, unconsciously learned to fear it.
Intimacy avoidance is a recognized pattern in relationship psychology, defined as the extent to which a person withdraws from close emotional contact with a partner, even when such contact is available and desired on some level. It is distinct from simply being private or introverted. Researchers describe intimacy as built from positive involvement, self-disclosure, and mutual understanding, and note that people with high intimacy avoidance often want closeness and retreat from it at the same time, caught between the desire for connection and the instinct to protect themselves from the risk it carries: being hurt, rejected, or truly known and found wanting.
Psychologists measure this using tools like the Fear of Intimacy Scale, developed by researchers Descutner and Thelen in 1991 to assess the anxiety a person feels specifically in close relationships, separate from general social anxiety. And it is worth being precise about what intimacy avoidance is not. It is not the same as Avoidant Personality Disorder, a fixed clinical diagnosis marked by pervasive social inhibition and fear of judgment. Intimacy avoidance rooted in relational or attachment wounds is different: it is learned, which means it can also be unlearned.
I have taken the 35 or so questions from this metric and ask these ten when I am working with clients. See where you are.
Ten Questions to Ask Yourself About Love Avoidance
When someone gets emotionally close to me, is my first instinct to lean in or to find a reason to step back?
Can I tell a partner what I actually feel in the moment I feel it, or do I wait until it’s safely in the past or just not share at all?
Do I find myself picking apart a partner’s flaws right when things start to feel good between us?
When I’m upset, do I reach out to someone I trust, or do I quietly handle it alone and call it strength?
Have I ever ended, or sabotaged, a relationship just as it was becoming genuinely intimate?
Does physical closeness, being held, being touched without agenda, feel soothing to me, or does some part of me want to pull away? Another way to ask this question is “are you able to receive touch, sexual expression and love and have no agenda, no expectations of yourself, just… receive?
Do I stay busy, overworked, or overcommitted in a way that conveniently leaves little room for closeness?
When a partner tries to know me more deeply, do I redirect the conversation, make a joke, or change the subject?
Do I believe, somewhere underneath, that if someone really knew me, they would leave?
Looking back at my closest relationships, is there a pattern of choosing people who are unavailable, distant, or otherwise safe from the demand of real intimacy?
This is not a fringe experience in our world. Psychologist Hal Shorey, writing in Psychology Today, notes that fearing intimacy and avoiding closeness are the norm for roughly 17% of adults in Western cultures. That is not a handful of people who are simply bad at relationships. That is an epidemic hiding in plain sight, inside marriages, friendships, and families that look, from the outside, entirely fine. Personally, I would give a much higher statistic.
The roots trace back to attachment, the foundational work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. A child raised by caregivers who are consistently available and emotionally responsive learns, at the level of the body, that reaching out will be met. A child raised amid inconsistency, busy lives leading to neglect, enmeshment, alcoholic families, or emotional unpredictability learns something else entirely: that needing someone is a liability. That lesson is not conscious. It is somatic, and the body does keep score. It lives in the shoulders, the shallow breath, the reflex to withdraw the moment closeness starts to feel real. It shows up as fear of touch and hugs and ultimately sexual enjoyment. This is where my work in trauma and somatic remapping becomes essential, because the pattern was never a decision. It was a survival adaptation, and it cannot be talked out of the body. It has to be felt out.
Culture is accelerating what attachment wounding began. We now live inside systems engineered to offer the sensation of connection without its risk: the notification instead of the phone call, the swipe instead of the sustained gaze, the text instead of the difficult conversation held in person until it resolves. For a nervous system already wired to treat closeness as dangerous, this is not a neutral convenience. It is an open door to avoid the very exposure that would heal it. We are, in effect, building a civilization that rewards the wound instead of asking it to close. We are becoming individuals who are disconnected from ourselves and each other.
What I want every person reading this to understand is that love avoidance is not evidence that you are incapable of love. It is evidence that, at some point, love did not feel safe, and your body has been faithfully protecting you ever since from a danger that, in most cases, is no longer there. The work is not to force yourself into vulnerability you are not ready for. It is to help the nervous system slowly, safely, and repeatedly discover that closeness will not cost what it once did. That discovery, more than any insight or any conversation, is what actually closes the gap between the connection we long for and the connection we allow ourselves to have.
This is where the two articles meet. A nervous system already primed to associate closeness with threat is now handed a culture engineered to reward disconnection. The infinite scroll offers the feeling of company without its demands. Texting lets us stay in touch while keeping people at exactly the distance we control. Every notification delivers a small, safe hit of being wanted without the exposure of being truly known. For someone whose body already treats intimacy as dangerous, this is not a neutral convenience. It is a perfectly engineered escape hatch, and we are handing it to an entire generation before they have ever practiced the alternative.
The result is what Perel and Brown both point toward from different angles: a species more hyper-connected than any in history, and lonelier for it. We are not becoming incapable of love. We are becoming fluent in its simulations while losing practice in the real thing.
None of this is a life sentence. Attachment research is, at its core, hopeful research: it shows that patterns formed in childhood can be revised through new relational experience, particularly the kind offered in skilled therapeutic and somatic work, where a person’s nervous system is given repeated, embodied proof that closeness will not cost them what it once did.
The way back begins with honesty rather than performance. What am I doing to keep people at a safe distance while telling myself I want to be close? Where do I mistake being in contact for being known? Whose silence have I never learned to sit inside without needing to fill it? What would it cost me, and what would it give me, to let one person see the parts of me I usually edit out?
We built a civilization that trained us to want stimulation over satisfaction, and in the same motion, it quietly excused us from the harder work of real intimacy. Reclaiming that intimacy will not come from a better app or a longer conversation about the problem. It comes from the same place all real change comes from: the decision, made again and again in small ordinary moments, to stay in the room, in the silence, in the gaze of another person, long enough for something real to pass between you.
Why and How to Change These Patterns
These patterns can change, and they change through the same channel in which they were formed: relationship itself, not insight alone, not willpower alone, but repeated, felt experience of safety in the presence of another person. The nervous system that learned to treat closeness as danger cannot be convinced by argument. It has to be shown, again and again, in small enough doses to tolerate, that reaching out will be met rather than punished.
This is the slow work of therapy, of somatic practice, of choosing a partner or a friend and staying in the room one breath longer than feels comfortable, until the body updates what the mind already suspects: that this person, this moment, is not the danger it once was. You should do this work not because avoidance makes you broken, but because underneath every protective pattern is a longing that never left. The part of you that learned to disappear so it would not be hurt is the same part that has been waiting, all along, to be found.
Healing intimacy avoidance is not about becoming a different person. It is about becoming available, finally, to the person you already are, and to the love that has been waiting on the other side of the wall you built to survive. That availability, more than any technique, is what closes the epidemic one relationship at a time.