For Every Shame Avoidant Good-Guy There’s a Good Girl Quietly Abandoning Herself in the Shadows

There’s a relationship pattern so many women are living

and almost none of us realise we’re in it until it’s already cost us ourselves.

I lived it long before I ever had words for it.

A pattern so familiar it almost felt like love.

It goes like this…

A good man — shame-avoidant, kind, tender, wanting so much to be seen as “good” — pulls away the moment something touches an old bruise inside him.

And a good woman — attuned, sensitive, longing to keep the connection intact — feels that pull and instantly tucks herself smaller.

He avoids feeling inadequate.

She avoids loss of connection.

And neither of them knows that the thing breaking between them isn’t loveit’s the space where repair should live.

Most people only see the surface of this dance.

The “reasonable,” steady man who means well but disappears the moment things get tender.

The “strong,” patient woman who holds everything together until she can’t breathe anymore.

But underneath, something older is happening.

When a shame-avoidant good guy pulls back — goes blank, goes quiet, goes foggy — it isn’t because he doesn’t care.

It’s because shame floods him faster than he can feel it.

The slightest signal of impact — your tone, your truth, your hurt, brushes against the part of him he has spent a lifetime outrunning.

And his nervous system whispers: retreat, retreat, retreat… so he does.

And when that happens, the good girl inside you knows her lines by heart.

Your voice drops without you planning it.

Breath tightens in your chest.

The truth inside you gets tidied, softened, made small enough to feel safe.

You reach for him gently, hoping he’ll stay.

And then — without even noticing — you reach past yourself.

Because somewhere long ago you learned that this is what love requires.

That connection is safer than truth.

That being easy is safer than being real.

That your needs should wait quietly in the background while you tend to someone else’s fragility.

And in the meantime he disappears to escape the shame of his inadequacy.

You disappear from yourself to preserve connection.

And the two of you meet not in intimacy, but in absence.

No one teaches us how quickly this dynamic becomes a closed loop.

The more he withdraws, the more you over-give.

The more you over-give, the more he retreats.

Shame seeps out in the space between you, unspoken, unclaimed, shaping the whole relationship with its impenetrable silence.

And you start thinking you’re asking for too much — again,

or he starts thinking he’s failing you — again,

when really — neither of you has ever been shown how to stay present when shame rises.

This is the part no one talks about:

Avoidance and over-giving are not opposites.

They are twins raised in different rooms.

Both come from the same early absence

the repair that never came, that every fibre in your being longs for,

the tenderness that didn’t arrive in the moment you needed it most,

and the truth you learned to swallow alone.

When the shame-avoidant good guy and the good girl find each other,

it feels like recognition, a homecoming,

but it is actually a trauma reenactment.

He cannot tolerate the possibility he has hurt you.

You cannot tolerate the possibility he might leave if you show the fullness of your hurt.

So he shuts down.

And you shut yourself down.

And the relationship slowly loses the one thing it needed most:

two people who can stay with themselves in the moments that matter.

If this pattern lives in your body, you will feel it reading this.

A tightness that’s maybe in your belly, your throat or chest.

A grief that has waited a long time to be named, felt and honoured.

I want you to know that this isn’t about blame.

This isn’t the age-old story of men versus women.

This is way more nuanced than that — because this is about shame,

and the way it shapes intimacy from the inside out.

And if you recognise yourself here, it means something so very important:

Your sensitivity and longing for depth isn’t the problem.

You’re simply someone who learned to love from a place where your own needs went unheard.

You adapted brilliantly so you could survive.

Now, you’re waking up to the cost.

And that matters more than you know.

Because the moment you see this pattern,

the loop breaks.

The spell loosens.

Your body begins to reorganise around truth instead of fear.

You stop shrinking to keep someone close.

You stop disappearing to avoid being “too much.”

And maybe slowly at first, you begin to stay with yourself.

And from there, love becomes possible in a way it never was inside the shadows.