The Lover Archetype in Men: Are You A Love Addict Or An Intimacy Avoider?

In other words, did your childhood relationship with your parents or significant carers – OK, let’s face facts: most likely with your mother – turn you into somebody who becomes extremely dependent in a relationship (a love addict), or somebody who avoids intimacy in a relationship (an intimacy avoider)? In other words, do you have a balanced Lover archetype or one that is way out of balance? How does this fundamental male archetype show up for you?

I’ll give you a clue: most likely, if you’re a man, the unbalanced Lover tends to show up as intimacy avoidance… in other words, you probably tend to avoid intimacy. We’ll see why in a moment. But first, Robert Moore’s view of the balanced Lover.

The Male Archetype of the Inflated Lover – The Love Addict

A love addict is a person who’s been set up in childhood to believe they can’t take care of themselves, and they’re looking for someone who can do the job instead.

In essence, the love addict falls in love with someone they see as a rescuer, and it’s true the rescuer often feels an intense initial connection to the love addict. This gives meaning to the love addict’s life. But the problem is that the love addict is just seeing a fantasy, an image they created in childhood of a person who would rescue them from the hell of their childhood emotional deprivation. The rescuer becomes this idealised figure, not a real partner.

Love addicts are, in short, using the fantasy of an ideal relationship with an intense emotional connection to the loved one to escape the intolerable reality and pain of their childhood abandonment, whether emotional or physical.

And so love addicts see what they want to see and not what’s actually there, which is why the initial phase of their relationship is often extremely passionate and romantic: it feels glorious, magnificent, like all their dreams have come true. It’s a high temperature, sexual, romantic furnace. This is, of course, fuel to the Lover archetype’s innermost desires.

As they begin to feel safer in the relationship, they naturally show more and more of their neediness: and that’s the cue for their partner, the intimacy avoider, to start withdrawing faster and faster.

Initially the love addict will ignore the obvious fact that the love avoider is walking away and putting more and more distance between them… but as their denial crumbles, and the evidence of (yet another) “abandonment” is increasingly clear, the love addict is likely to begin to try to control their partner: perhaps even with aggression, manipulation, sexual seduction, threats of violence… in fact, every strategy under the sun that’s available to the desperate Lover archetype, whose energy may know no reasonable boundaries.

Of course the final, inevitable realisation that something is more important to their adult partner than the relationship may plunge the love addict back into a childhood nightmare. A nightmare in which the image of the person who first abandoned them in childhood – mother, father, caregiver – becomes firmly implanted and mixed up with the personality of their current partner.  You can see how the Lover archetype can be truly the most immature male archetype when a man’s childhood experience has been so negative. 

Love addicts can manipulate extensively, emotionally, sexually, or physically, but the problem is that all of the coping methods they learned as an abandoned child are dysfunctional or abusive or self-defeating, and the relationship inevitably becomes more and more toxic.

As time goes by it becomes impossible for a love addict to deny the obvious fact that their partner has withdrawn from them and they collapse into withdrawal, pain, fear, anger or some desperate combination of these emotions.

While this is going on, the intimacy avoider doesn’t usually experience intense emotions: in fact, he or she is still trying hard to avoid the intimacy of the relationship!

So the love addict’s feelings of childhood abandonment can be activated and then made worse because they are combined with feelings about being abandoned in the here and now. This leads to a sense of being overwhelmed, a sense that their emotions are unmanageable, which in turn usually manifests in anger or depression – sometimes quite extreme rage or suicidal tendencies.

Caught in the throes of their withdrawal pains, love addicts often start obsessing and may plan obsessively about how to get their partner back. They may even act out these plans in a compulsive and self-defeating way (stalking being one example). Such behaviour can be seen as the combination of the male archetypes of the Magician and Lover conspiring together as they develop these unreasoned plans of action.

Love addiction is a powerful and unhappy state of mind in which inappropriate behaviour from another person is tolerated alongside an increasing sense of dependence on that person: it involves them feeling abused by their partners and being abusive towards their partners; all the while, the love addict’s low self-esteem can even make it impossible for them to accept the slightest of compliments or to see how unreasonable and difficult they are to live with.

Love addicts abuse their partners by demanding that their partner should become enmeshed with them, that they should be taken care of, yet they think of this as evidence of love and trust. And they think of the intimacy avoider’s need to get away from them as abnormal and quite threatening.

Robert Moore’s view of the deflated and inflated Lover archetype in men and women

The Deflated Male Archetype of the Lover — The “Intimacy Avoider”

Intimacy avoiders tend to avoid any kind of intensity within their relationship by creating intensity in activities or addictions outside their relationship (think of porn addiction here: it’s controllable, unlike a real person). They don’t allow themselves to be known within the relationship, so they can protect themselves from involvement and emotional control or manipulation by the other. And they avoid intimate contact with their partners by using some very subtle distancing techniques.

One of the fundamental traits of relationships involving intimacy avoiders is their capacity to abandon. They conduct life from behind protective emotional walls and generally try to control the people with whom they are in partnership.

Intimacy avoiders consciously fear intimacy because they believe they will be engulfed and controlled by another person – not unreasonably, because that’s what happened to them in childhood: they were engulfed and controlled by somebody else’s neediness, and it’s hardly surprising they don’t want to go through that experience again. Here’s a video to explain this:

As a child, being enmeshed in somebody else’s emotional needs can create a deeply ingrained conviction that intimacy brings misery.  In response, the  energy of the male Lover archetype deflates, because being in love, simply experiencing love, is not a good experience. And yet, at the same time, intimacy avoiders also fear abandonment at some level, usually unconsciously. It’s a fear which comes from being abandoned as a child by their caregiver.

Here’s how that works: when a child is forced to nurture a parent, the parent is actually abandoning the child’s needs to be looked after. And so although abandonment is a less obvious experience for intimacy avoiders than emotional enmeshment with another, it’s certainly real.

And since intimacy avoiders usually don’t have good emotional contact with another person during childhood (the kind of emotional contact that relieves pain and fear), they simply don’t learn that a relationship can relieve a sense of abandonment, isolation or fear. This is of course the obverse of the male archetypal energy held in the Lover: for the unbalanced, deflated Lover seeks separation rather than connection.

It’s this unconscious fear of being abandoned that draws intimacy avoiders towards relationship, even though they then have great difficulty making commitment to, or connecting with, their partner.

A major goal for intimacy avoiders is to keep intensity within the relationship to a minimum, because any intensity feels too frightening and threatens to be overwhelming, just as it was in their childhood, when they were engulfed by their mother (sadly, for men it’s often the mother that causes trouble in their male child’s Lover archetype).

By focusing on something outside the relationship, intimacy avoiders actually abandon the love addict: in a very real way they’re not in the relationship at all. But the great thing for the intimacy avoider is that focusing so intensely on something outside the relationship gives them a real sense of energy and of being involved in life.

But while real intimacy involves sharing information about yourself with somebody who is non-judgemental and prepared to listen, intimacy avoiders are frightened by the possibility of intimate contact with another. They try to avoid being known by the other – because they have a fear of being used or engulfed or controlled or manipulated or shamed when they share themselves with someone else, just as they were in childhood.

This is why intimacy avoiders are reluctant to let partners know what they need or want, or what is going on for them. In childhood, trying to do this would usually produce critical judgements, a denial of their needs, a denial of their reality, or a denial of their very existence. Think toxic shame here, shame about the fact that you dared to even try and exist as a being separate from your invasive parent.

No wonder that in adulthood men with this experience of archetypal betrayal seek to avoid intimate connection with others.

If you’re a man who avoids intimacy you’ll know how it’s done: using walls instead of healthy boundaries, keeping some form of distraction going on, using psychological control, and possibly switching at times into the inflated archetypal energy of  addictive behaviour (giving way to rage, excess drinking, porn, gambling, and even other addictions such as work addiction).

Walls Not Boundaries

Healthy intimate contact between two people comes when their archetypal energies are in balance. Then, one person shares his or her reality with the other, and the other comprehends it without trying to judge it or change it. Healthy archetypal Warrior boundaries are of course necessary to such intimate exchanges: they offer protection so that we can be comfortable hearing someone else’s reality, even when we don’t like it.

But if you fear intimacy, you may use walls to keep people out: they may be walls of anger or fear, where you use strong emotions to keep your partner at a distance. Silence can be a wall, too, one which effectively keeps talking – meaning real communication –  to a minimum. Then there’s a habit of keeping calm at all times and never showing any emotion – which is also a wall, bricked up against intimacy and connection. This is, as you can imagine, a deflated Lover energy. The male archetype of the Lover is shut down. 

And what about being excessively pleasant? Being courteous at all costs, at all times, even to the point of withholding information from your partner about your difficulties, frustrations, and resentments with the relationship – information that might allow the difficulties to be resolved? Sport, work, pastimes – they can all be used as walls. Even shared activities, if there is no communication, can be walls.

The Lover Archetype: Staying In Control

Intimacy avoiders need to be in control. This need arises from the greatest fear of the intimacy avoider: that somebody else will control who they are.

Yet if you’re an intimacy avoider, you still want to be in a relationship. Why? It’s probably your underlying fear of abandonment, mingled with the sense of empowerment that comes from “rescuing” and being adored by a needier person, perhaps an apparently helpless love addict.

But while you want to be in a relationship to feel connected, you have to be in relationship in a very special, protected way because of your fear of being engulfed or controlled by your partner. You have to be in control. 

That’s why the Magician archetype is so important here. The archetypal energy is transmuted into behavioural strategies:  power dynamics, accumulation of  money and withholding intimacy, for example. These archetypally powered behaviours can serve you so well because they give you the upper hand in maintaining control. And of course another technique for control, which a lot of men know, is the desire to be right in all situations.

Addictions

Addictions accomplish several purposes – the first, already mentioned: to create intensity outside the relationship in order to give life an aura of energy and interest. The second is to “medicate” the intolerable reality of life – life being a reality that intimacy avoiders are simply not equipped to face (think drink, drugs and porn, sexual affairs, overeating, chocolate and more). Of course the third purpose of addictions is to get the attention of a love addict, by giving them the message that “there is something more important than you in my life”.

Childhood Archetypal Experiences Of The Intimacy Avoider

 Intimacy avoiders usually come from families which have unusually strong, often unnaturally enmeshed, emotional connections – a very different thing from healthy bonding. Unfortunately, to a child growing up in such a family, this emotional enmeshing, backed by dysfunctional, co-dependent, unhealthy bonds, seems to be the normal way of doing things.  They are archetypally immature, their male archetypes remaining undeveloped because the family environment is not conducive to healthy development of emotional and energetic balance.

Emotional abuse, sexual abuse, enmeshment: they are all forms of abuse which happen because one or both parents draw their child into the midst of an adult relationship in which one or both parents are too immature to sustain an intimate relationship with another adult. Intimacy is simply too threatening for them.

But of course anyone, no matter how inadequate, can be emotionally intimate with, and exploit, a child. (Not that the inappropriate nature of the relationship ever occurs to them.) It’s easy: for one thing, children are vulnerable. A child won’t abandon a parent, because he or she must stay near the parent for survival. That’s how we’re programmed. In fact, a child will abandon himself before he abandons his parents. So what it means is that one or both parents have a relationship with a son (or daughter) which is more important to them than the relationship between the parents. Exploitative, narcissistic, abusive. And the damage is passed on from one generation to the next,  as we know.

Think on this, too: while love addicts usually show little or no emotional neediness, being quiet, “good boys”, and isolated, and not taking anything from the family, intimacy avoiders are punished with a further step in this cycle of emotional violence. Not only do they not take anything from the family but they also have to provide support or nurture to the parents from their own resources. An added insult and further inhibition to the heathy development of balanced male archetypes and archetypal energy.

Is it any surprise then, that children get overwhelmed by the intensity created in this enmeshed relationship? The message they get from the enmeshing adult is: “You are the higher power, and you have my total devotion”; but the real message (unspoken, of course) is “You will be drained dry and engulfed by the emotional intensity of my needs as you sustain me”.

So what this means is that some children (who later become intimacy avoiders) get chosen by dysfunctional parents to be powerful and in control, as they take care of the parent with whom they are enmeshed… and they also become responsible for that person’s life. Here’s more on that  – and advice on how to break the pattern.

And it’s the inescapable sense of responsibility for the welfare of their adult parent that creates an overwhelming sense of being drained — no, being used — for the child.

Male intimacy avoiders have usually experienced enmeshment with and exploitation by their mothers because many women today are love addicts who enter into relationships with intimacy avoiders, only to experience eventual abandonment, at least emotionally, by their husbands or male partners.

In turn, these abandoned women turn to their chosen son and have a relationship with him which is more important than their relationship with their partner. And so in turn another generation of love avoiders is created, for when the son grows up he is also attracted to female love addicts and enters relationships in which he wishes to avoid intimacy, because of his fear of being engulfed and drained.

Both partners in this unhappy situation are equally responsible for the emotional and sexual abuse of their sons or daughters. That’s because instead of facing the problem in their relationship and doing something about it, they maintain the unhealthy emotional dynamic with their children. Conscious or not, it’s a despicable choice.

There’s A Double Bind Here

Intimacy avoiders grow up feeling good about themselves, grandiosity being a key characteristic – how amazing for a child to feel he has so much power, maybe even the power of life and death, over a parent! While we would all recognise grandiosity as an immature kind of archetypal expression, it is one very necessary for the development of a strong sense of self-confidence. However, when inflated in this way during childhood, it presents a serious obstacle to normal emotional development.

Such children feel special – after all, they were taking care of one or both parents – and so they may come to believe as adults that they’re better than others. They may remain deluded about their true self-esteem and competency, making them either grandiose or filled with unrealistic feelings of inferiority, or fluctuating unpredictably between these two states of mind.

Intimacy avoiders may have trouble forming close functional relationships. They are often co-dependent, and have difficulties with boundaries and owning and expressing their reality. They’ve not been taught how to have healthy boundaries, simply because their basic human rights and needs were neither respected nor taken care of by their parents.

And while they may believe they’re better than others, intimacy avoiders often swing into a deep sense of worthlessness, lacking the ability to properly care for themselves emotionally. Maintaining their own boundaries is often difficult for intimacy avoiders: that’s why they can be so emotionally unpredictable. (Read this about emotionally immature parents.)

Some men and women fluctuate between love addiction and avoiding intimacy: but the bottom line is always the same – their ability to form healthy relationships with clear boundaries has been severely damaged by an unhealthy relationship with an abusive, dysfunctional parent.

Read more in Facing Love Addiction by Pia Mellody, published by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2003.