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Avoidants don't ask for help or want to fix. Anxious Attachment always ask for help because they are obsessed with fixing.

Again with the blanket generalizations. 🙄 This isn't always true. As I said, I have ben told I am avoidant. However, I am the one who has always asked for help and sought therapy/treatment.

Owningitnow

I am still working on nailing down my exact attachment. I am no doubt more anxious since the trauma of the past few years. I don't always ask for help, however I do appreciate it better than 50% of the time, perhaps mainly for the company.

So this part I am trying to condense as much as possible in relation to my wife being avoidant. I have my role in our history, so here is a part of the history that comes to mind. When we first got married and until Jan 2019 I rarely did household chores. It was something I was happy to let my wife do for a few reasons. One being I don't really care for them another is my wife ALWAYS tells me how doing them is her stress release and "her time". So, why would I upset the cart? Well last January my wife says she is hurt and bothered that I didn't do my share of the inside household chores. Well, I totally jumped onboard and did them! She would come home from work to a totally clean house and diner on the table. I would wash the windows, clean cobwebs, mop, sweep, I would sneak out and get her car from work and wash it, clean the interior, fuel it up and change its oil as needed. I learned to cook simple dishes. I shopped for the groceries. Then on May 5th she started her affairs with a vengeance. Her affair activity to me is like a bell curve, as the depth seems to escalate rapidly. Awhile after I discovered her 26 affairs ( May-July) I suggested that perhaps she couldn't deal with me helping so much... Perhaps I was onto something????

A bit of background on my wife. She was raised in a very free range home environment. She actually set her own bed time, the age when she could date and so on. She does not recall but one instance that she felt physically comforted in her youth. Her parents would let her and her 10 month 4 day younger brother walk to a park two miles from their house at age 5 all on their own. They would play in the creek and come home before dark. She is extremely independent and strong willed. She gives 100% at work or any task she is involved with. So much so that she doesn't have anything left after work for me or our daughters. I was the only person my wife dated.

We dated 5 years before we got married and we got engaged at the three year mark. We paid for our own wedding and honeymoon. We will be hitting 28 years this Fall.

My background, My father was verbally abusive to those of us in the family. He would yell and not talk. He had a very short fuse. He blamed all others for HIS issues. I moved out when I was 17 and started dating my wife at 17 too. She was my first serious GF and I had dated two others prior. I started working when I was 13 and bought the company ( small service type) when I was 19. I have nearly always been self-employed. I was a work o holic , however the drive has left me since dealing with my wife and eldests attemtped suicide. Since Jan 2019 I have been head deep into recovery. REading, seeing IC weekly, Videos and so on. I have learned so much about myself and now I am trying to remove my contact with my father as I see just how bad of an influence he continues to be. Our children have never been close to my parents mainly because of my dad. yesterday I drover 2 hours out of town to move his travel trailer for him and he did nothing but complain AT me the whole time I was hauling it. He would be calling out "branch", "fence post" "rut" and so on every few moments. I told him I am nearly 50 years old with a Class A CDL, I have logged over a million miles in my life and a few hundred thousand of them pulling a trailer. I told him he needs to trust my skills... He wouldn't.... anyways a bit of a side rant.

OwningItNow...

Thank you so much for that. I truly accept it. Everything you said makes perfect sense to me. That we would find each other, that we would have the problems that we’re having, and that we would each react (or not) the way we have.

My question is this… If by being avoidant, he does not instigate solutions, and as the anxious avoidant, I attempt to “rehab“ myself into not forcing/requiring a “fix”...how is there ever going to be change?

That would simply mean that in our case, I’m afraid… There will never be a fix. Because if I don’t do it, I feel 99.9% certain that he will not either.

With his health, I am proactive whether or not he is. Because at this point I don’t feel he is physically or psychologically healthy enough to make productive changes.

But, with our relationship… Whatever is left of it… If I do not make the effort, the effort will not be made. Is this to say that it would be better that the relationship never heal any at all, if it has to come from me?

That seems a little bit like cutting off my nose to spite my face, so to speak.

Does that make sense?

OR...oh, shit...are you saying that there is not going to be any change either way?

When I was researching this online today, it says that avoidant individuals can learn to change/recover. If someone does not present opportunities and urge the avoidant to get the counseling or do the work to make the changes, will they just never happen?

I feel like I want to ask if I’m being dense here, but I’m afraid of the answer!

I don't think attachment is all fundamentally because FOO. I think a lot of it can be situational, or even just how we mesh with another person.

I've seen it over and over where a nonmono person has an awesome secure relationship with one partner, and then kind of uses it as their security and winds up in an anxious relationship with another partner.

Based on that, it makes me think that a good portion of how we connect with our partners is more than just the sum of our FOO, but how our personalities and chemistry merge. So I think there is always room for change and improvement based on how we relate to each other.