What happens when avoidance stops being a personality quirk and starts being a full-scale fiction department
The easiest way to explain this is to tell you about the neighbours who outed my ex.
After several months of winter wild camping in the Highlands and Hebrides, walking/scrambling coastlines, and summiting Cuillin, then a spring tour of North Wales waterfalls for some wild dips, I’ve recently been back in the place I used to share with him. While there, I bumped into some neighbours and mentioned some business with my ex using the shooting range on my land. He’d told me that they’d become aggressive with him for using it and accused him of shooting into their garden, something which is was horrified to be accused of, but I framed it as “what happened with that? Also, I can assure you he’s no longer around.” to avoid a conflict…and they looked at me like I’d grown a second head.
Blank stare.
“Sorry, what?”
They had fuck all idea what I was talking about, because it had never happened. There was no shooting into the garden, as I’d assumed. But there has also never been any allegation or dispute. No incident at all, in fact. He’d described it in some detail with feeling, with indignation, with the particular energy of a man who’s been wronged, but it had never happened. Not a word of it.
This was not the first story that turned out to be fiction. A few months earlier, he’d mentioned, with appropriate gravity, that a mutual friend and colleague of his had been arrested for raping his ex-wife. Concerning, obviously. Except when I checked with people who would know – including the police – that also hadn’t happened. At all. Never. It was completely fabricated.
Now, here’s what makes this genuinely interesting from a psychological standpoint, as opposed to just deeply fucking weird: he wasn’t getting anything out of these stories. No obvious gain or manipulation I could identify. He wasn’t protecting himself or advancing some agenda. These weren’t lies told for advantage; they were lies told because somewhere in his psychological architecture, reality had become too uncomfortable to inhabit fully.
And I only know that any of it was a lie because we split up. If we hadn’t, I’d be living inside those stories now, none the wiser.
Which, darlings, is the point…
What We Think Avoidance Looks Like
We have a very tidy picture of the avoidant man, don’t we? He goes quiet, pulls back, and needs space. He can’t commit; often ghosts or does the slow fade. He flinches when you say the word “future” like you’ve just produced a trained killer wasp from your handbag.
And yes, sometimes it’s that. But sometimes, and this is the version nobody warns you about, it’s something far stranger and considerably more disorienting. Sometimes avoidance doesn’t look like withdrawal at all. Sometimes it looks like presence, like warmth and plans and commitment and a man who seems, by all external measures, to be absolutely in it with both feet. But underneath all of that, quietly, in the spaces where his emotional life should be, he’s building a slightly different version of reality. One where he doesn’t have to feel what he actually feels. One that creates just enough distance to keep the terror at bay.
The Psychology: What’s Actually Happening
Avoidant attachment isn’t a choice. Let’s establish that upfront, because I’m not here to simply drag men who struggle with intimacy, I’m here to explain what they’re doing and why, so you stop thinking it’s about you.
Avoidant attachment develops in childhood, typically in response to caregivers who were emotionally unavailable, inconsistent, or who punished vulnerability. The child learns, at a neurological level, that needing people is dangerous. That showing emotion leads to rejection. That the safest position is self-sufficient, contained, and needing nothing from anyone.
By adulthood, this has calcified into an attachment style where genuine emotional intimacy triggers a physiological threat response. Heart rate increases, cortisol spikes, the amygdala fires up like there’s a bear in the room. Except the bear is you, telling him you love him.
He doesn’t understand that this is happening. He just knows he suddenly feels trapped, suffocated, wrong, and because he has never developed the emotional vocabulary to recognise it as an attachment wound, his brain does what overwhelmed brains do: it manages the discomfort by any means available.
For some men, that means withdrawal. For others, it means something considerably more creative.
When Avoidance Gets Inventive
Here’s what the textbooks don’t tell you: when an avoidant man can’t tolerate the emotional reality of his situation, he sometimes simply…edits it. Not consciously or maliciously, the brain under sufficient emotional pressure is a remarkable storyteller, and avoidance doesn’t always manifest as silence. Sometimes it manifests as narrative.
The lies avoidant men tell tend to share certain characteristics. They are disproportionate to any gain, are often elaborate, and they create distance or distraction – a crisis here, a drama there, something external to focus on instead of whatever is actually happening between the two of you, even if it is great and what you both actually want. And they tend to emerge when the relationship is getting uncomfortably real.
A woman I know described her ex suddenly developing a deeply complex dispute with a colleague that consumed weeks of his emotional energy right around the time they were discussing moving in together. The details shifted each time she asked. The colleague became more villainous, and the stakes escalated. When she eventually met the colleague at a work event, the man seemed perfectly ordinary and utterly baffled by any suggestion of conflict.
The dispute wasn’t real, but the emotional displacement was.
These aren’t lies told by bad men. They’re lies told by men whose emotional regulation strategies have run out of road.
The Particular Cruelty of Not Knowing
What makes this version of avoidance so uniquely destabilising is that you can’t see it from the inside.
The classic avoidant man who pulls away at least gives you data. You can feel the temperature drop, and you can name the thing that’s happening. It hurts, but at least it has a shape.
This kind of avoidance gives you warmth, presence, and detail. It gives you stories. It gives you a relationship that feels real, built on foundations you can’t assess because some of them are fictional. And you don’t find out until after – if you find out at all. If he hadn’t left, I’d still be thinking the neighbours hated us and that a guy who helped him cut some of my trees down and has shared many meals over my dining table was a rapist. Which he absolutely, unequivocally is not.
The Enmeshment Factor
Here’s where it gets properly layered: avoidant men are, paradoxically, often intensely enmeshed with a parent, usually a mother. Because the avoidant attachment that makes genuine adult intimacy feel dangerous frequently coexists with one relationship that was never allowed to develop healthy independence. And this is exactly what happened in my case, and how I ended up calling the police and mentioning the rape story; his mum started harassing me weeks after we split – online, on my monestised professional Facebook account.
He can’t get close to you, but he can’t leave her either. And she, consciously or not, will often position herself as the authority on what the relationship means and what you represent within it. In my case, very consciously and in explicit but completely fabricated technicolour.
When the relationship ends or threatens to end, this person frequently enters the frame with a narrative, and the narrative is rarely “my son struggles with emotional intimacy and has been managing his anxiety through fiction.” The narrative is almost always some version of: you were too much, you overwhelmed him, and you are the explanation for what he couldn’t do.
I’ve seen this enacted with considerable creativity. It is pantomime performed with genuine conviction, by someone who needs the story to be true because the alternative – that her beloved is emotionally unequipped for the intimacy he craved – is too painful to consider.
Avoidance, it turns out, runs in systems. Not just in people.
Why You Don’t See It Coming
If you’re reading this thinking, “but he seemed so genuine,” yes. He probably was, and that’s the truly gutting part.
Avoidant people still want connection; they’re not robots. They feel the pull of intimacy even as their nervous system screams at them to run from it. When things are new or casual, they’re often genuinely wonderful, present, warm, and full of future. Their prefrontal cortex is painting beautiful pictures, and they mean, and even want, every word. They just can’t handle it, they are not emotionally stable, mature, or capable of seeing any of it through.
The problem isn’t that they’re lying to you. The problem is that they’re lying to themselves first, and they’re very good at it, because they’ve been doing it since childhood.
The plans were real, and the love, in whatever form he was capable of it, was real. But then the intimacy became too actual, too concrete, too present. The future stopped being abstract and started having a postcode, and his nervous system staged a coup despite actually wanting what he could have had.
The collapse wasn’t about you and you didn’t build the fault line, you just stepped close enough to feel it.
What To Do With This Information
I’m not going to tell you to have compassion for men who fill your life with fictional neighbours and phantom arrests. You’re allowed to be baffled and furious and exhausted, and you are allowed to scream “GO GET SOME FUCKING THERAPY” at them, because they really need it.
But I will tell you this: if you’re currently replaying every conversation, wondering what you did wrong, trying to identify the moment you became too much – stop. You were not too much. You were, quite possibly, exactly the right amount, and that was the problem. Because any amount of genuine intimacy is too much for a system that learned to survive by keeping everyone at a carefully managed distance.
The lies weren’t about you; they were architecture built to hold the weight of everything he couldn’t say out loud, couldn’t feel directly, couldn’t tolerate without the buffer of a story. And the story he needed most – “I am afraid of how close this is getting” – was the one he never told.
Watch for the fictional neighbours, colleagues with dramatic lives, and family members with constant emergencies, darlings. They’re everywhere, but they may not be what you believe them to be.
If this resonates, go and read my earlier piece on what happens when your ex is jealous of a dead man – because frequently, it’s the same man, and the pattern runs deeper than any single incident suggests.
Right. I need a drink…
Mistress Mind 
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