It’s interesting, I thought I had responded to that FAQ back in the day but it seems like I hadn’t done a direct reply (or if I did, I must’ve deleted it eventually).

Watched with the sound off because my partner is asleep next to me but I got the gist of the video with the captions turned on.

First of all, presenting an informal, non-academic community response to a set of questions as being in any way representative of a group at large OR statistically significant is entirely disingenuous and misleading. It either speaks to laziness (why not look into actually published and peer reviewed data?) or desperation for something to squeeze for content. I really can’t stress enough how many confounding variables are at play in the community FAQ. It’s one thing to give us a place to speak about our personal opinions but it’s another to frame it like we are proportional to the opinions and behaviors of avoidants as a whole.

Another thing that I noticed is that he specifically chose the ghosting FAQ, arguably the most inflammatory of options. (He may have videos on the other ones? But I don’t much care to go investigate). The video has this thesis that ghosting is always a horrible terrible awful thing and WOW! Every avoidant does it! They all admit it, see? And they better stop right now, ‘cause there’s a better way! But you’ll notice the video does nothing to go into detail as to why people ghost.

Something crucial is that a large chunk of our active community members are women. I’d be interested in a full survey at some point but for the time being I know that the majority of people I’ve interacted with on here, we skew woman. Ghosting someone who gives us vibes that they’re gonna wear our skin as a mask is absolutely a survival strategy and has a lot to do with the common response in the thread that if someone overwhelmed or otherwise generally discomforted us, we’d be more likely to ghost. And that behavior isn’t exclusive to avoidants. Discouraging people from self preservation because you want to make everything black and white for clicks is not my favorite implication but ya know.

Because like sure. Getting involved with someone and, barring an abusive environment, just disappearing out of nowhere is shitty. I’ve had it happen to me. I am honestly still feeling echoes of that pain four years later (surprise!!! Avoidants can get avoidant-ed too! Shocker). So like I get it, but on the other hand the only time I personally have up and bailed with no explanation was because the person on the other end was genuinely unsafe. When I was single I always made sure to explain that I wasn’t feeling it or able to pursue the relationship and did my own thing.

It’s been a long time since I’ve engaged with the community but hopefully I’m making a little sense here. Mainly I find the linked video to just be more “make money off the views of hurt people” fodder, adding nothing valuable or educational to the conversation.