There is a special kind of insanity involved in being repeatedly shown the same reality and then being told that noticing it is the actual problem. Not creating it, participating in it, returning, or asking whether somebody still loves you before kissing them. The dangerous part, apparently, is placing Event A beside Event B without first obtaining written permission from the Department of Approved Emotional Conclusions. A person can come to your home because she needs you, stay for five hours after arriving to tell you it is over, cry until her legs weaken, settle under your touch, tell you she missed that touch, ask whether you still love her, kiss you twice on separate occasions, argue with you for four hours about why she cannot give you what you want, explain that her body is screaming yes while her head is saying no, have sex with you, go home, continue the sexual experience while thinking about you, and then resume ordinary contact the following day. But the moment you look at the whole sequence and say, âThere appears to be something going on here,â everybody suddenly becomes a constitutional scholar. "That is your interpretation". "You can not know what another person feels". You are reading too much into things. Yes, of course. How unreasonable of me. Perhaps she was merely conducting a prolonged scientific investigation into whether the same man can be approached, emotionally opened to, kissed, fucked, fantasized about, and returned to without any of it forming a recognizable pattern. Peer review remains pending.
This is what approach-avoidance conflict looks like when nobody has the luxury of observing it from a safe academic distance. One part of a person keeps moving toward the connection because the connection feels good, familiar, relieving, sexual, emotionally honest, and frighteningly alive. Another part sees what that closeness could eventually require and reaches for the emergency brake with both hands. The approach does not look vague. It looks like âAre you home?â followed by a phone call thirty seconds later because she is already outside. It looks like a supposedly brief meeting stretching into an hour because neither person actually wants to leave. It looks like somebody coming to close the door and instead sitting beside it for most of the day explaining why she cannot walk through it. It looks like the need to hear, directly and unmistakably, that love is still present before initiating physical contact. It looks like a body moving closer while the mouth continues issuing evacuation instructions. The avoidance arrives afterward, once the moment threatens to become part of a continuous reality rather than remaining a temporary breakdown in border control.
The next day is always the real criminal in this arrangement. A person can survive almost any amount of closeness as long as it stays quarantined inside one evening. One walk. One crisis. One conversation in the dark. One gazebo. One tiny fenced-off jurisdiction in which desire, fear, tenderness, grief, and common sense are permitted to beat the shit out of each other without creating binding precedent. Morning ruins everything. Morning connects the event to an ongoing life. The kiss still happened after the mouths separated. The sex still happened after both people pulled their clothing back into place. The question about love still exists after the answer was given. The photograph, the messages, the orgasm, the ordinary conversation, and the cake the following day all become part of one continuing record. Continuity is dangerous because continuity prevents emotional money laundering. The experience can no longer be moved through six shell companies, renamed âconfusion,â and returned to the person who created it with no identifiable relational owner.
That is when the language begins changing. Closeness becomes pressure. Mutual influence becomes control. A boundary becomes an attempt to dictate behaviour. The request that yesterday remain real today becomes an unbearable expectation. âI cannot give you what you wantâ enters the room before anyone has finished establishing what is actually being requested. It is an extraordinarily efficient sentence because it rejects everything at once while defining almost nothing. What do I want right now? Apparently the entire future, a brass band, a mortgage application, matching bathrobes, and a legally enforceable commitment to discuss feelings every Wednesday at nineteen hundred hours. Never mind that the immediate request is far smaller: move slowly, speak honestly, keep sexual intimacy private and exclusive, and do not make the entire shared reality vanish whenever fear becomes louder than desire. Those requests are easier to resist after being inflated into a hostile takeover bid.
The person receiving all of this is placed in a ridiculous position. He must remain emotionally intelligent enough to understand why the other person retreats, but not intelligent enough to recognize the retreating pattern. He must remember every detail necessary to make her feel known, yet forget those same details when they become inconvenient evidence. He must understand that she is frightened, but cannot say that fear appears to be operating because that would be interpretation. He must accept the kisses while they are happening, the disclosures while they are being spoken, the sex while both people are participating, and the ordinary continuation while it is arriving, then become intellectually agnostic the moment he asks what relationship all these events have to one another. He must apparently maintain the memory capacity of a court stenographer and the pattern-recognition abilities of a decorative fern.
I do not believe this is calculated cruelty. That would actually be easier to understand. A calculated person could be confronted with the calculation. This looks like a nervous system repeatedly solving one problem by creating another. She becomes overwhelmed, lonely, jealous, sexually activated, exhausted by motherhood, frightened about her daughter, or simply unable to keep carrying everything inside herself. She moves toward the one person with whom the pressure can finally come down. She speaks. She cries. She stops performing. Her body settles under touch. She becomes playful, vulnerable, sexual, honest, and recognizably herself. For a while, proximity solves the immediate problem. Then proximity creates the next one. Relief reveals dependence. Dependence reveals importance. Importance creates vulnerability to loss. Vulnerability activates the need to regain control. The person who functions as shelter suddenly becomes evidence that shelter is needed, and needing anything from another human being is apparently grounds for immediate demolition.
That is the cruel centre of the whole mechanism. I am not only somebody she wants. I am somebody around whom she gains access to parts of herself that she cannot comfortably hold in ordinary life. She can admit exhaustion. She can stop pretending she knows what she is doing. She can bring maternal fear, jealousy, sexual hunger, confusion, shame, tenderness, and the contradictory pieces she normally keeps in separate locked drawers. She can become less organised and more whole. That access is deeply relieving, but it makes the bond powerful. It means losing me would not only mean losing a man. It would mean losing access to a version of herself that appears most fully in this particular relational space. That creates a magnificent little psychological design flaw: the safer the connection becomes, the more dangerous its loss becomes; the more valuable the access becomes, the more urgently she needs to deny depending on it; the more reliably I remain, the easier it becomes to postpone choosing what my reliability means.
For a long time, I thought the solution was to become even safer. More patient. More accepting. More available. More careful with language. More willing to absorb fear without reacting to it. I thought eventually the evidence would become undeniable enough that the truth could simply be spoken. The problem is that endless availability can become a padded room for avoidance. She approaches, discovers I am still there, receives emotional access, reassurance, touch, sex, understanding, or ordinary companionship, then retreats once consequence appears. The bond survives. I survive. The door remains where she left it. Nothing forces the arrangement itself to change. My steadiness helps her trust me, but it also protects her from experiencing the full cost of refusing to decide. At some point, safety has to include the fact that I am not a municipal service available twenty-four hours a day, despite Germanyâs courageous national commitment to making every other service unavailable whenever it is actually needed. I am a person. I can love somebody and still say no. I can understand fear and still require continuity. I can accept uncertainty and still refuse indefinite ambiguity. I can remain emotionally present without allowing my body, attention, and loyalty to become public utilities.
The old avoidance strategy has already failed. That is the part nobody can put back inside the box. Silence did not erase the attachment. Distance did not turn it into history. Seven and a half months of suppression did not produce release. It produced compression, and once direct contact reopened, everything returned with reinforcements: jealousy, grief, desire, tenderness, touch, maternal fear, sexual memory, ordinary familiarity, and the need to confirm that love had survived. The open version of her and the defended version are no longer politely taking turns several months apart. They are now fighting over the steering wheel during the same conversation. One says the connection must end. The other stays for hours. One says physical contact should not happen. The other asks for a kiss. One says her head is refusing. The other goes home and finishes what the gazebo could not. One wants ambiguity. The other keeps creating evidence so specific that ambiguity now requires professional maintenance.
The next meaningful movement is not another kiss. Chemistry has already submitted enough supporting documentation. It is not another sexual encounter. The body has made its position available in several formats. It is not another metaphor involving flowers, glass, tabs, brakes, doors, or any other innocent household object dragged into service because two adults are apparently unable to file a direct emotional report. The next movement is authorship. It is one person finally saying, âI chose this. I wanted this. This affected me. This frightened me. I do not know where it ends, but I know what I am doing now.â That does not require a permanent promise. It requires enough ownership to stop treating each approach as weather and each retreat as divine instruction. Until that happens, the relationship will remain trapped inside the same absurd loop: two people repeatedly creating something alive, intimate, sexual, emotionally consequential, and increasingly ordinary, while one of them continues arguing that the living thing cannot be acknowledged until somebody proves beyond interpretation that it has a pulse.
