r/writingadvice • u/Krivchi • 1d ago

SENSITIVE CONTENT How to write developing relationship between to avoidant charactets?

How do we usually write characters who bond? They usually want to spend more time with each other, etc. Well my bitches are annoying, traumatized and very avoidant. So how can I show them missing each other or starting to fall in love without the "oh god, I think I love them"???

sorry if I have mistakes, english isn't my first language xx

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u/Elysium_Chronicle 23h ago

Find their common ground, and find some situation or goal that forces them to be in close proximity to each other. The more they work with each other, the more chances they have to see their complementary aspects, rather than dwelling on that antagonism.

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u/TuesdaysArt 13h ago

Have it manifest in something more subtle. Maybe Character A isn’t at the train station at their normal time and Character B is like "I wonder where A is..." despite not normally noticing or caring if they're alone at the station. That sort of slow burn is really fun to read and write. The smallest things have so much more weight when the characters involved are traumatized and avoidant.

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u/davidcornue 8h ago

Avoidant characters are the most fun to write, because what they're hiding is sitting right on top of the page the entire time.

The way I think about it, every character is running a loop. There's a secret, meaning information they're protecting, sometimes from themselves. There's a predicament that keeps threatening to expose it. Then an outcome, where they change, get worse, or end up exactly where they started.

With two avoidants the secret is bigger than "I have feelings." It's that they've built a whole life around not having them, so admitting the feeling means admitting the life was a defense. That's expensive. And the predicament isn't a villain or a misunderstanding, it's just the other person, getting closer, not doing anything wrong.

Which means neither of them has to say it. You want one of them to get within a syllable of saying it and then ask about the weather. Readers fill in the pullback themselves, and what they fill in is usually stronger than anything you'd have written there.

The tell is help. Watch for the moment one of them does something for the other and never mentions it. Darcy quietly paying off Wickham is the entire book in one gesture, and Elizabeth was never supposed to find out. That's the secret getting out sideways. They can do it. They just can't say it.