The More You Chase, the More They Pull Away

I was listening to a podcast about dog training, because that is apparently what I do with my free time now, and the trainer said something that stopped me in the driveway. "If you chase a dog that's running from you, you are teaching it that being near you means being caught."

I sat there in the car for a while.

Because that is the pursue and withdraw cycle, and I have watched it wreck more marriages than affairs have. One partner reaches, the other retreats. The reaching partner reaches harder. The retreating partner retreats further. Both of them end up alone in the same house, completely convinced that the other one is the problem.

If you are the one reading this at midnight, you are probably the pursuer. If your partner sent you this link, you are probably the withdrawer. Either way, stay with me, because neither of you is the villain here. You are two people stuck in a loop that neither of you built on purpose.

How the loop actually runs

It goes like this.

She feels distance. So she brings it up. "We need to talk about us." He hears a threat, because every one of those conversations has felt like a trial where he is the defendant. So he goes flat. "I'm fine. We're fine." She hears "I don't care." So she pushes harder, louder, with more evidence. He feels attacked and shuts the door completely. Now she is furious and he is gone, and she is more certain than ever that he does not care, and he is more certain than ever that nothing he does will be enough.

Rewind and run it again on Thursday.

The cruelest part is that both people are doing the exact thing that produces the exact result they are most afraid of. The pursuer is terrified of being abandoned, so she pursues, which makes him withdraw, which feels like abandonment. The withdrawer is terrified of failing, so he withdraws to avoid the fight, which guarantees the fight. It is a machine, and the machine does not care who is right.

I was the withdrawer

Confession time. In my marriage, I was the one who went flat.

My wife would bring something up and I would feel my whole body go quiet. I told myself I was keeping the peace. Being the calm one. What I was actually doing was leaving the room while still sitting in it, and she knew it. Every time I went flat, she reached harder, and every time she reached harder I went flatter, and by 2019 she had stopped reaching at all. That is the ending of this loop, by the way. The pursuer eventually gets tired. It does not feel like peace when it arrives. It feels like a funeral.

What broke it was not her reaching better. It was me learning to say one sentence out loud when I felt myself going flat: "I'm shutting down right now and I don't want to." That sentence turned the withdrawal into something she could see instead of something she had to guess at. It turned out that what she needed was not for me to have the whole conversation. It was for me to stay in the room.

Own your brokenness. Mine was that I confused silence with safety.

Four ways out of the loop

You do not fix this by one person trying harder. That is what got you here. You fix it by both people learning to see the loop and naming it before it runs.

1. Name the loop, together, when you are calm. "We do this thing where I chase and you disappear." Say it like a weather pattern, not an accusation. The point is to make the loop the enemy instead of each other. Couples who can say "we're in the loop" in the middle of a fight have already won half of it.

1. Pursuers: shrink the ask. "We need to talk about us" is a five alarm fire to a withdrawer. Try "I miss you. Can we have twenty minutes tonight with no agenda?" You are still reaching. You are just reaching with an open hand instead of a warrant. And when he shows up for the twenty minutes, do not spend it on the whole backlog. Spend it on him.

1. Withdrawers: narrate the shutdown. You are allowed to need space. You are not allowed to vanish. The difference is one sentence. "I can feel myself shutting down. I'm not leaving, I just need ten minutes." Then come back in ten minutes. Not tomorrow. Ten minutes. Coming back is the whole thing. It is what teaches the pursuer that she does not have to chase, because you return on your own.

1. Build a standing appointment so nobody has to pursue. Fifteen minutes a day, no logistics. When there is a reliable place for connection to happen, the pursuer stops having to manufacture it and the withdrawer stops having to brace for it. My wife and I have done this for years now. Some days it is nothing. Some days it is everything. The point is it exists without anyone having to chase it into existence.

To the men reading this, because statistically it is usually you doing the withdrawing: she is not chasing you because she wants to fight. She is chasing you because you are the person she wants, and you keep leaving. Stay in the room. You do not have to have the answer. You just have to not leave.

A tool for the couple who cannot get the first conversation started

The hardest part of this loop is that the two of you have to talk in order to fix the thing that makes it impossible to talk. That is why I built the Reunite Tool, a free guided conversation that gives both of you a structure to sit inside so neither one has to pursue and neither one has to run. It is not magic. It is a fence around twenty minutes, and a fence is often all you need.

Get curious. Not about who is right, but about what your partner is protecting when they chase, or when they run.

If you would like a third person in the room to hold the fence for you, book a free fifteen minute call. Everything is online, from wherever the two of you are sitting. No pitch, and no sides taken. I was the withdrawer. I know how it feels from in there.