Avoidant: How to Love (or Leave) a Dismissive Partner

I grew up in the Midwest, child of a schizophrenic father and a hardworking single mother. At 12, I was deemed brilliant but uncontrollable, and I was sent to a private psychiatric hospital, where I was grilled about my sexual fantasies (which, not surprisingly, made me acutely uncomfortable). But this experience had me spending a lot of time with psychologists and psychiatric residents, which got me interested in the topic. I studied computer and cognitive science at MIT, and wrote programs modeling the behavior of simulated stock traders and the population dynamics of economic agents. Later I did supercomputer work at a think tank that developed parts of the early Internet (where the engineer who decided on ’@’ as the separator for email addresses worked down the hall.) Since then I have had several careers-real estate, financial advising, and counselling. In attachment terms, in high school I was behind in social development (this was not surprising since my mother worked all day and my father was AWOL) and had to learn about people to catch up. So I started my 20s mildly anxious-preoccupied, had two lengthy but imperfect relationships, and finally matured into a more secure type. Now married and definitely secure. I recently visited the Mormon genealogical web site, which shows me as a descendant of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Edward I Plantagenet (King of England!), William the Conqueror (who you might remember from such historical events as the Norman Conquest of 1066), and Rollo the Viking. It appears that my ancestors in between lost track of their money, lands, and power, so I was brought up in ＂reduced circumstances.＂ Visit my web site for more: rail guns, Nazi scientists, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the 1980s AI bubble, and current research in relationships, attachment types, diet, and health.