Your Ex: The Lie of The Curated Life

Over time, I’ve come to understand how much damage unhealed emotional avoidance can create—not in dramatic explosions, but in quiet, cumulative ways.

There are real loving partners who are discarded rather than given the honesty they deserve. Relationships that exist as lies not truth. Connections where the avoidant stays physically present while emotionally elsewhere, longing for something they can’t—or won’t—name. The harm isn’t always obvious, but it’s real (and devastating to all involved, including the avoidant.)

When children are part of this dynamic, the impact runs even deeper.

What isn’t felt, spoken, or repaired doesn’t disappear. It gets passed down. Emotional distance, confusion, and unresolved pain often become the atmosphere they grow up breathing, shaping how they relate to themselves and others long before they have words for it.

What makes this especially difficult is how intact everything can look from the outside.

Many people who avoid emotional intimacy are highly functional. They build stable lives, appear responsible, and check all the expected boxes. But emotional presence can’t be curated. When it’s missing, the people closest feel it most.

For a long time, I believed that understanding, patience, or love might be enough to bridge that gap. Eventually, I learned the harder truth: you can’t heal someone who hasn’t chosen to look inward. You can’t warn others in a way that will land. And you can’t make someone ready for intimacy by wanting it badly enough.

There’s a quiet grief in accepting that.

Letting go isn’t about judgment or anger. It’s about clarity. It’s recognising the difference between compassion and self-abandonment. Between staying open-hearted and staying stuck.

The unexpected gift of doing your own healing is discernment. Over time, the patterns become easier to see:

Emotional vagueness framed as independence. A life that looks solid on paper but feels strangely empty up close. Charm without vulnerability. Stability without depth.

With that awareness comes a new kind of choice.

You begin to choose people who can stay present. Who can repair. Who can be honest about their inner world. You choose relationships that feel real, even when they’re imperfect, rather than impressive but hollow.

For those still living inside emotional pretense, the only respectful response is to step away. Not to punish, not to rescue—but to release.

Because staying with an unhealed avoidant doesn’t help anyone. Not them, not you, not the children …. No one.

And once you’ve learned that difference, you don’t really go back.

You move forward more quietly, more carefully, and far more whole.

As for the avoidant? Well, you just have to let them keep digging their grave. Silently blowing up everything around them until one day they finally recognise that they have a problem….

Don’t wait for that day though! Let them get there on their own! Meanwhile, take your open, honest heart to someone who truly deserves it! 😜