How do I approach my crush who is an avoidant??

Well, I guess that I reply because I'm interested in the topic and I can assume that the diagnosis is correct for the sake of argument. It's hypothetical but people that really do have AvPD could be in this type of situation and be interested in talking about it. I don't feel that comfortable about talking about this on a real dating site and this is a more appropriate place for it.

I don't know if it's particularly helpful to say to someone that their ex was probably just a horrible person because they exhibited similar tendencies to someone with a diagnosed personality disorder. Half the people on here are probably self diagnosed and most of the ASPD forum are probably just trolling or deluded. If I get involved with someone that's paranoid I think that I'm probably going to be a better judge of that than they are and if they try to murder me I'm going to call them a bloody psychopath.

NoM8s wrote:I don't know if it's particularly helpful to say to someone that their ex was probably just a horrible person because they exhibited similar tendencies to someone with a diagnosed personality disorder.

I don't know if you say so because you think it soils the reputation of normal people or the reputation of people with personality disorders? I just don't want people superficially learning the traits of disorders and projecting them on normal people. Not only it misrepresents the disorders and leads to no better understanding of us by society, but it gives such disorders a bad reputation.

NoM8s wrote:Half the people on here are probably self diagnosed and most of the ASPD forum are probably just trolling or deluded.

I think it makes a big difference if the one you self-dianose is yourself whom you know intimately, rather than a complete stranger, like in most "dating" posts. Even if the self-diagnosis isn't 100% correct, you can be sure that the self-dianosed person is close to it. Maybe it's social anxiety instead, maybe something else, but it's at least close. However, in posts about strangers it's almost certain that people misinterpete someone's behavior to avoid acknowledgeing the truth.

I think it's just as dangerous to try to self-diagnose yourself with AvPD based on 12 lines it the DSM as it is to diagnose someone else. People truly can't see what's going with themselves most of the time. If they knew what the problem was, they would fix it, or stop repeating whatever self-destructive behavior.

And if you google a list of aspects about yourself, that's even worse. No one would say they have cancer because they looked up "fatigue, changes in bowel habits, and hoarseness." That's way more likely to be a sign of a hangover, but they're also listed as general symptoms of cancer online. And yet if someone googles "why do I avoid people?" they immediately accept the label that pops up.

You can't objectively tell how much it's affecting you, especially compared to the standard for a PD. You don't know if you have something else entirely. There could be something that doesn't bother you enough for you to look up that is the hallmark of a whole different diagnosis. You need someone who has studied the whole book, not just a paragraph online, to correctly identify what's going on.

And most maddening of all, you could "self-diagnose" with AvPD, which has no treatment and no cure, and stop right there, when in fact you really could have something else that could be cleared up with a daily pill or a short course of a specific therapy. If that's the case, and you cling to your "self-diagnosis" (which really means there is no diagnosis) then you're cheating yourself out of your whole life.

But it's a real handy excuse. It absolves you of any responsibility of working to get better. And like the OP, who hasn't shown up again, which means she probably got a clue that it wasn't AvPD in the first place, she can pretend "it's not me, I'm not uninteresting, I don't have deal breaker qualities that my crush will never be able to look past, THEY are the one with the problem, and I'm a martyr for looking past it."

Lilac, I do reply to some of the dating threads in the other forums here and it doesn't really matter if the people they're diagnosing really have a mental illness or are just awful people because my advice is going to be the same. We're not allowed to confirm a diagnosis here and all that we can do is to say that it's possible if we think so on the basis of the evidence that they provide.

Wouldn't it be nice if it were easy for people to be just honest. Ofcourse honesty means you may end up having to listen to 1000 excuses to why it wont work but there is a chance that over time the other person may come around. Just for me I dont see myself as dateable, yet alone someone to hang out with, so if someone pays me extra attention my first thoughts are "what are they expecting from me? Are they just being nice out of pity?". So, for me, if someone made their intention known, verbally, I would be able to think about it. An example of how blind I can be, shortly after graduating highschool, a very nice, sweet, funny guy used to kiss me every time we hung out. I took it as I was a tool for his... ? .. I wasnt sure what. 5 years later he came out as gay, so I was proven right [I was a tool], but I still feel like a different person, who doesnt think the way I do, would of tried to lock that down, because he seemed he was an amazing person, all around.

What inverse said.

Though with

I don't know if you say so because you think it soils the reputation of normal people or the reputation of people with personality disorders? I just don't want people superficially learning the traits of disorders and projecting them on normal people. Not only it misrepresents the disorders and leads to no better understanding of us by society, but it gives such disorders a bad reputation.

it is tempting to think of "normal" people as somehow fundamentally different from those with personality disorders and to do it from both sides of the aisle. In fact normal people have some of the same traits those with a diagnosed disorder do but they are either undiagnosed or tend to express in specific circumstances only instead of regularly as they do in people with disorders.

So making the distinction in the first place becomes one of the more damaging things people can do to exacerbate the problem further. I am not sure about the solution to this but maybe seeing the similarities along with the differences between the two groups would help. And, no, I don't think that is going to happen any time soon.

What is this thread all about again?

The thing is, I've had at least one girlfriend that was diagnosed with a personality disorder and since I've read up on it I strongly suspect that a few other women that I dated had it too because that would explain so much and I'm not just talking about them dumping me without explanation or not being into me in the first place. I am talking about obvious red flags that fit into a sort of pattern, so that I'm just waiting for the sad story about their unhappy childhood and daddy issues when I'm dating these women.