So there you are—both of you successful, intelligent, and highly scheduled.

One of you wants sex.

The other… doesn’t.

Or doesn’t want that sort of sex, or not right now, or not unless the laundry’s folded and the kids are asleep and nobody at work cried that day.

What began as a quiet mismatch has turned into a marriage-wide frequency negotiation, where every touch can feel like a transaction—or a trap.

Welcome to desire discrepancy: the most emotionally loaded—and least honestly discussed—issue in high-functioning relationships today.

It’s Not About Libido. It’s About Meaning.

You’ve got the job. The partner. The shared calendar.

You’ve even mastered parallel inbox management and two kinds of password manager. You’ve built the life you were promised would make you happy.

So why do you feel like strangers passing in a very expensive kitchen?

Welcome to the number-one complaint of professional couples in therapy: emotional disconnection.

You're not fighting. You're not cheating. You're not even disagreeing about who forgot to call the plumber. You're just… no longer real to each other.

Loving someone with avoidant attachment can feel like trying to hug a lighthouse.

You reach out, they dim the beam.

You get closer, they disappear into the fog.

And yet, when you give up and start walking away—there’s a light, blinking on the horizon again.

This is not because your avoidant partner is cruel.
It’s because they’re scared.
Not of you. Of needing you.

If you’re in love with someone who flinches at closeness, prefers texting to talking, and treats vulnerability like a foreign language—don’t take it personally. But don’t take it as permanent either.

Avoidantly attached people can love deeply.
But they often need a different kind of emotional space to feel safe enough to stay.

This post isn’t about chasing or fixing. It’s about showing up—without losing yourself in the process.

Once upon a push–pull, a handsome someone didn’t text you back.

Or they did—but not for 17 hours.

Then they sent a link to a frog video with no context, no follow-up, and no emotional closure. TikTok labeled them “avoidantly attached,” and now we all feel better.

Or do we?

In the online relationship zoo, avoidant partners have become the sexy villains of the decade—stoic, mysterious, and emotionally distant until, inevitably, they disappear mid-bond.

But if we scrape away the memes, moralizing, and Instagram therapy bait, we’re left with something much more complicated:

Avoidant people often desperately want connection.

They just don’t trust it.
Or themselves.
Or you.
Or time.
Or hope.

Let’s talk about that.

What Is Avoidant Attachment, Really?

You said you’d be home at 6. It’s now 7:12.
Your partner is furious. You’re bewildered.

They say you’re gaslighting them.
You were just trying to grab the groceries.

Sound familiar?

In neurodiverse relationships—especially those involving ADHD—this scene plays out in thousands of kitchens every night.

One partner is triggered by broken expectations. The other genuinely doesn’t understand what went wrong.

This post unpacks the critical difference between emotional abuse and executive dysfunction—and why mistaking one for the other can damage even the most loving partnerships.

What Is Gaslighting—and What Isn’t?

In a gleaming factory in Aichi Prefecture, a Toyota line worker once heard a squeak coming from a rear axle. So, naturally, he pulled a cord.

The entire assembly line came to a halt.

Not because someone was getting fired. But because someone noticed something. And in the world of Japanese manufacturing, that’s sacred.

This isn’t a story about cars.

It’s a story about family systems therapy—because that squeak?

That was little Max screaming about the blue bowl again.

A new study out of the Journal of Research in Personality confirms what some tattooed folks have known since the first ink met skin: people are hilariously confident—and largely wrong—when they try to read your soul based on your sleeve.

Let’s start with the experiment.

The researchers corralled 274 tattooed adults (mostly women, mostly White, spanning 18 to 70) and asked them to complete the classic Big Five personality assessment.

Then, they took photographs of the participants’ tattoos and collected the stories behind them.

Meanwhile, 30 psychology-savvy raters were tasked with reviewing the tattoos—some with just the image, others with both image and personal meaning—and asked to assess the wearer’s personality.

And assess they did. Cheerful colors? Must be an agreeable

person. Big bold designs? Clearly an extrovert. A skull with a serpent wrapped around it? Neurotic as hell.

These snap judgments weren’t just consistent—they were confidently consistent. Everyone was vibing the same way about each tattoo, nodding in unison like they’d cracked some secret personality code.

And they were wrong. Almost all of them.

I used to think compersion was a niche affectation of the polyamorous intellectual elite—a smug little parlor trick for those who insisted on moral superiority while casually dismantling monogamy.

In earlier posts, I dismissed it as a shiny buzzword that functioned more as ideological branding than emotional reality.

I may have even implied it was emotionally fraudulent. That was not generous of me. Worse, it was wrong.

In the spirit of intellectual repentance, let me try again. This time, with humility, and actual science.

What Compersion Is—No Spin, No Smugness

Let’s start with a simple, chilling truth:
If your first lessons about sex came through violence and betrayal, adult conversations about intimacy may still feel like combat drills.

Now picture this: you're in a quiet lab in Canada. You've brought your partner. You're here to talk—on camera—about the one sexual issue that bothers you most.

Then, like some surreal therapy-themed video game, you’re handed a joystick.

You’ll use it to track, second-by-second, exactly how you felt while watching yourself argue about sex.

No pressure.

This isn't dystopian couples therapy—it's a groundbreaking experiment led by psychologist Noémie Bigras (2024). The study tried to map how childhood trauma rewires adult emotional responses during sexual disagreements.

And spoiler alert: attachment anxiety, not avoidance, turned out to be the real saboteur in the room.

Not All Trauma Is Equal, Especially When It Comes to Sex

Neurodiverse couples are not rare—and they’re not broken.

They’re often just misunderstood. Neurodiverse-affirming couples therapy helps partners move beyond misinterpretations to find deep attunement across different neurological styles.

Instead of assuming emotional disconnection, therapists translate buffering as a survival strategy, inertia as executive dysfunction, and bluntness as sensory overwhelm.

This approach respects each partner’s brain, creating a shared language rooted in regulation and empathy—not shame.

Meet Nico and Samira: A Neurodiverse Love Story

So the two of you aren’t fighting. You’re not flirting either.

You’re managing schedules. Paying bills.

Swapping logistical texts about Trader Joe’s runs and whose turn it is to get the kid with strep. You share a bed, but not a nervous system.

Welcome to functional dissociation—the quiet purgatory where many modern couples live.

No shouting matches. No passion. Just… performance.

And therapists are finally catching up.

What Is Functional Dissociation?

In trauma theory, dissociation describes a disconnection from the self—thoughts, feelings, memories, bodily sensations. It’s how the brain says, “Too much.”

But we’re now seeing that this coping style doesn’t stay locked in individual experience. It becomes the ambient weather system in a relationship.

Functional dissociation in couples is the mutual, adaptive numbing that lets a relationship survive—but not thrive. It's not classic avoidant attachment. It's not stonewalling. It's more like… ghosting, together.

So the two of you aren’t talking. Again.

One of you is pacing.

The other looks like a statue someone forgot to finish. Silence thickens.

You’re left wondering: Is this emotional abuse? Or is this just Wednesday?

Let’s talk about two of the most misused terms in modern relationship psychology: gaslighting and stonewalling.

They’re not the same thing.

But they often show up together—like that couple everyone finds exhausting but keeps inviting to brunch.

What Is Gaslighting as opposed to Stonewalling?