The Dichotomy of the Anxious/Avoidant

When Chaos Feels Like Chemistry

Anxious and Avoidant text overlapping Dichotomy in bold, distressed font on a stormy gray to calm blue gradient background, symbolizing toxic relationship chaos

Chaos is not chemistry, it’s chaos.

“You arouse all these deep feelings within me, but that does not mean it’s good.”

We grow up learning, soulmates are people who’ve made you suffer. Or at least, suffered because of.

We’ve learnt to interpret strife, unease and anxiety as chemistry. Chaos is our definition of passionate love that burns, so when we step into fire we feel thrilled and honored that a love of such intensity has found us.

And so we stay, we stay. We stay.

Through the intense arguments because we are assured the reconciliation would just be as intense. It usually is. The greatest low does not compare to the greatest high that comes when all is finally well again. The sense of accomplishment, the proud feeling of glee in knowing you’ve “won” something, beat all odds and proven everyone wrong when all is good again. But it’s fleeting.

We stay, through the bickering. No one else has seen us this way, so twisted up out of shape. We convince ourselves that’s our true form, so we must feel gratitude that they’ve given us the chance to be our truest self. It’s not. We are not the worst version of ourselves. We are not our truest self when we’ve been manipulated, lied to, toyed with and abused. When we act out of character, out of frustration is not when our real selves shine the most. Instead, it is when our most unhappy selves show up.

We stay. Even as we wipe our tears, we enjoy it. We coddle it.

Because for them to have this much power over us that no one else seems to have, for them to activate a deep burn within us when others could’ve barely lit a spark is thrilling, is rewarding and evidence that we are simply meant to be. How else could it be explained? What else could be the reason?

With other people even when we push them away or managed to drown the urge to run from the intimacy and safety net they provide, we still feel bored.

Empty. There is no passion with other people, no spark with someone else, there is no chemistry because we’ve convinced ourselves chemistry is chaos. We’ve mastered a blueprint that declared love is pain and so when there is no pain we do not feel any love. We feel boredom.

When there is no confusion, no mixed signals to interpret, no one to chase after and plead not to leave, it feels boring, because that’s when we are finally forced to realize we only know what to do with the ideal and not the reality.

What do you do with a person you do not have to beg when all you’ve been taught to do is plead? How do you accept intimacy, when you’ve spent all your life entertaining individuals who could not give you any.

And intimacy? Intimacy feels uncomfortable. The certainty that someone’s not leaving is awkward when you’ve already put on your running shoes to chase. Do you take them off or keep them on just in case and hope? What do you do when you’re forced to take them off, sit and communicate?

What do you do in the silence when there’s no argument, what do you do in the freedom when there’s trust, what do you do in the seeking when there’s connection? How do you handle something you’ve never held?

So we tell ourselves no, we declare there is no chemistry, simply because we feel bored. Because in our heads we’ve only envisioned rewriting the scripts of our past experiences with individuals we’ve cast in familiar roles, individuals who exhibit the same traits as people we’ve known that we know nothing to do with individuals we can not act with, we know nothing to do when the camera is no longer rolling in our heads. Chaos is not chemistry, it’s chaos.

And chaos is unhealthy, in the way it dysregulates us and pulls us out of character, in the way it keeps us glancing over at our phones mid online-argument seeking a distraction but yet unable to really look away, in the way it steals our special moments and makes it about an inevitable argument that did not have to happen and would not have even happened if our special moment wasn’t near, chaos triggers an increase in heart rate and sends our blood pressure up the roof even when we do not know when. Chaos claws at our bodies, stirring storms in our blood, leaving an imprint on our chest, sometimes physically and often emotionally, clawing at us from within. Chaos is not chemistry. It is chaos.

And chaos, kills.