Why does my partner want me most when I give up?

What is actually happening in a push pull relationship?

Two people are protecting the same relationship by opposite means: you move in to settle your alarm, and your partner moves out to settle theirs. Therapists call the two positions the pursuer and the distancer. In couples research the same shape goes by demand and withdraw. The naming matters less than the speed. By the time you hear your own voice rise, your body has already read the distance and answered it, and theirs has already answered yours.

What makes this hard to see from the inside is that each of you is watching the other half of it. You see a partner who goes cold the moment something matters to you. They see a partner who arrives with a complaint the moment they relax. Both of you are describing something real. Each description leaves out the move that came just before.

Why does my partner pull away just as I reach for them?

Because your reaching lands in their body as pressure, and distance is the fastest relief they know. That is relief seeking rather than indifference, and it has the bad luck to look exactly like the thing you are most frightened of.

• You feel the distance. A short answer, attention on a screen, a back turned in bed.
• You move in. A question, then a sharper question, then the complaint that gathers up every other time.
• Their alarm climbs. Dread first, then a tight chest and a jaw that has set, and only then the thought: this is a charge sheet and I am going to lose.
• They step back. Fewer words, a flatter face, another room.
• You read the step back as being left. The fear sharpens, and your reaching gets louder.

One partner withdrawing during conflict goes together with more demanding and aggressive behaviour from the other, and both positions go with lower satisfaction for each of them¹. That study photographed couples at a single moment rather than following them, so it establishes the pairing without telling you which half of it came first. Inside the loop that question is unanswerable anyway, which is part of why it is argued about so bitterly.

Why do I keep going after someone who is retreating?

Because distance from the person you love registers as danger, and protest is what a bond under threat produces. John Bowlby described protest as the ordinary response of someone whose attachment is at risk, not as a weakness in the one protesting. Your reaching is not neediness. What it needs is a different form.

The trouble is in the translation. Underneath there is fear, and the fear is specific: I am losing you. What arrives in the room is an accusation: you never talk to me. Your partner answers the accusation, because the accusation is the only part that reached them. So you end up arguing about who said what in the kitchen while the thing you were frightened of sits in the corner, untouched by either of you. There is more on this in what anxious attachment feels like from the inside.

Why does the one who goes quiet say nothing?

Because they expect that anything said now will be quoted back at them later, so saying nothing feels like the responsible choice. From the inside, leaving the room is not an exit from you. It is an attempt to stop the damage before it is done.

• What they feel. Dread, arriving well before any argument has been lost.
• What their body does. Shoulders up, breath high and shallow, a face gone flat that reads as contempt and is not.
• What they then conclude. There is no version of this I can say that will not be used.

They have not stopped caring. Many learned early that strong feeling is something you survive by yourself rather than bring to anyone, and the body holds that lesson long after the household that taught it has gone. The British object relations writers, Winnicott among them, described the competent surface a child builds to live behind when distress has nowhere to go. Grown up, that surface is what you are looking at when your partner shrugs. There is more on shutting down when things get close and on going silent in an argument.

Is it always the woman who chases?

No. The partner who wants more change is the one who pushes for it, whatever their gender. Across heterosexual, gay and lesbian couples, how much each partner demanded or withdrew did not differ by the type of couple, and what predicted who demanded was which of the two wanted more change². The positions belong to the conversation, not to men and women.

The subject under discussion moves them as well. In older work on married couples, wives demanded and husbands withdrew when the issue raised was the wife’s, and that difference was absent when the issue was the husband’s³. Both studies were small, so hold them lightly and check the principle at home instead: whoever wants the change does the pushing for it. Plenty of couples reverse their positions completely depending on whether the subject is money, sex or his mother.

How do we stop the push pull cycle?

You stop it by making the loop itself the problem, so that you are two people facing a pattern instead of two people facing each other. In Emotion-Focused Therapy for couples, developed by Leslie Greenberg, the move is to find the feeling sitting under each position and say that instead of the position. In practice it comes out clumsier than it sounds, and it works anyway.

• Name it while it is still running. We are doing the thing again. I am chasing and you are going.
• If you are the one reaching, say the fear and not the charge. I am frightened I am losing you, in place of you never talk to me.
• If you are the one withdrawing, say you are coming back, then come back. The returning is the part that does the work.
• Put a length on the break. As a suggestion rather than a clinical threshold, 20 minutes is long enough for a body to settle and short enough that the other does not read it as leaving.
• Practise where the stakes are low. A disagreement about the weekend before a disagreement about the marriage.

Say it out loud where the load sits unevenly, because it rarely sits level. The partner with more room to move that evening does more of the work that evening, and in the couples I see that is not the same partner twice running. Whether a particular couple comes out of the loop stays genuinely open while one of them is willing and the other is not yet, and that is worth examining slowly rather than settling in the middle of a bad evening.

These steps are not enough when you are both flooded before the first sentence has finished, when one of you is in a depression that takes the energy out of trying, or when there is contempt, intimidation or control in the room. The first two need a steadier setting than the kitchen table. In the third, the loop is no longer the right thing to be working on, and that needs looking at properly before any communication exercise is attempted.

Questions people ask

Do we both have to come to couples therapy?

The work moves fastest with both of you in the room, because the pattern only shows itself when you are both there. If your partner will not come yet, individual sessions on your own half of the loop still change what the loop has to work with.

What actually happens in a session about this pattern?

I slow the exchange down until each of you can hear what sits underneath the position the other is taking. Most of the work happens in the moment the pattern starts in front of me, rather than in an account of the row you had on Tuesday.

Will you take sides between the one who chases and the one who leaves?

No, because the loop is what is being worked on, which means neither of you arrives as the one to be fixed. Where responsibility does sit unevenly on a particular issue I say so plainly rather than splitting it down the middle.

Would couples therapy or individual therapy suit this better?

If the pattern fires mainly between the two of you, couples work fits; if your own alarm has fired in every relationship you have had, individual work is the better place to start. Plenty of clients do a stretch of one and then the other, and which to begin with is a reasonable thing to settle in a first conversation or the free 30-minute call.

I am worried therapy will make us argue more. Is that likely?

Conflict comes closer to the surface early on, because the material you have been going around is now being said out loud. The difference is that it is said with someone in the room whose work is to keep it usable, and you can tell me when the pace is wrong for you.

If you and your partner chase and retreat in turns, I can make that pattern visible in disorganised attachment therapy so you can step out of it.

Sources

1. Bretaña, Alonso-Arbiol, Recio and Molero, Avoidant Attachment, Withdrawal-Aggression Conflict Pattern, and Relationship Satisfaction, Frontiers in Psychology, 2022
2. Holley, Sturm and Levenson, Exploring the Basis for Gender Differences in the Demand-Withdraw Pattern, Journal of Homosexuality, 2010
3. Heavey, Layne and Christensen, Gender and Conflict Structure in Marital Interaction, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1993

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.