Venting after breaking up with my avoidant partner

This is my first time writing a post here, so I’m not sure if I’m doing it right. I talked about my breakup with other people during the two weeks I went no‑contact with my current partner, but I don’t feel like they really understood the dynamic with my former partner despite my attempts to explain what I know about attachment. So here I am in this Reddit community, reaching out to others who have had avoidant partners in an attempt to see if someone else understands what I’ve been going through.

I sometimes questioned whether he was actually avoidant or anxious like me. There were moments when he was able to share his feelings with me, and other times when he completely shut down—until I realized there was a pattern: he mostly shut down when he saw a possibility of us getting into a conflict.

At some point, we broke up because of this—him shutting himself down every time we disagreed on something, and shutting me down. After we got back together, we tried to fix this. I explained to him how it made me feel, and he understood that if he didn’t express himself or let me express myself openly, I was afraid I would lose what made our relationship so valuable to me: being able to be honest and open with each other. So we worked around it by talking about our issues and what we each wanted from the other.

At first, I was met with resistance from him, who avoided conflict by trying to shut down the conversation or change the topic—until we came to an agreement that would let us both get what we wanted.

When we first met, three or four years ago, he never voiced his needs or wants out of fear of making me angry or creating tension over our differences. So, I felt like we were making some progress by trying to work through those differences once we were aware of them. But after some time, another problem arose: he started thinking about his past relationships and how each person ended up leaving him, and he concluded that it was safer for him to be alone than to be in a relationship. He suggested that we stop talking to each other. I didn’t want that, so I suggested we try to figure out these new emotions and find a way to work through them so we could still stay in each other’s lives.

Over time, we started to make sense of these feelings—that they weren’t a reflection of his feelings for me, but of his fear of being in a relationship and what that meant for him: being emotionally vulnerable, fearing hurting the people he loves and driving them away. After a serious conversation about it, we moved on to work through his fear of emotional vulnerability by being more open emotionally and by showing more affection with each other—until everything seemed to become too much for him, and he shut me down again, putting a wall between us by telling me again that he didn’t want a relationship and that we were “only friends” (despite not acting like it).

At that point, I realized that no matter what I did to try to help, his fears were bigger than me and his desire for connection. So I broke it off and told him it would be better for us not to talk anymore, because otherwise we’d probably fall back into the same cycle of repeatedly saying goodbye to each other.

I know I did the right thing, but it saddens me to see how his fears always end up driving us apart and will probably keep driving other people out of his life, reinforcing his fear of being abandoned. I know he’s capable of change—he’s stopped mirroring me and has become someone who can voice his own needs and wants without fear. But his inability to believe in himself and in his ability to overcome these fears is something that will likely keep pushing me and anyone else away from him.