For a long time, I carried around a false diagnosis. I had become convinced that I was the one afraid of engulfment—that I was the one pulling back from closeness, sabotaging connection, or somehow wired to fear being swallowed by another person. That story felt plausible because I did feel anxiety when the process of merging nervous systems through intimacy began. But after sitting with my history, my body, and the actual pattern of every meaningful romantic bond I’ve ever been in, I performed a clean forensic audit and saw the truth clearly: the opposite was always the case. I have always deeply wanted to merge—with total transparency.
My natural orientation toward love is merger. Not surface-level companionship, not compartmentalized affection, not physical transaction, not “we each keep our own rooms.” I want full, high-resolution union: no hidden folders, no off-limits sectors, no performance layer between us. I want to remove every barrier until there is only shared, absolute reality—psychic visibility, emotional kernel access, nothing held back. This was never about sex. Sex was never the sticking point; the physical dimension would have continued indefinitely if I had been willing to accept the emotional firewall. What I was asking for, and what I consistently offered, was total intimate emotional merger. Radical visibility. The kind of closeness where two people stop hiding anything from each other. If I had been satisfied with the sexual dimension and never pushed further for merger, the relationships likely would have gone on for much longer than they did. It was actually the instinct to merge and remove all barriers that brought about the end, in every case.
The level of intimacy and transparency I bring is radically intense—and it causes shutdown. When I open at that depth—when I show up with complete willingness to be seen and to see—I am not subtle about it. I go straight to the root directory. I expect the same in return. For someone operating behind partitions, masks, or unfinished structures, that signal is overwhelming. It is not that I was “too much” in some childish or pathological way; it is that my bandwidth exposed the limits of theirs. Every single time I extended that invitation to full merger, the other person hit their internal ceiling and began to avoid. They froze, reframed my request as control or intensity, slowed the pace (“pump the brakes”), or suddenly deactivated. Some stated with words that “no such blockade or barrier is in place,” while demonstrating in real time that they were wholly in favor of its presence. It was the distorted claim that secrets and compartmentalization did not equal a fragmented self. I watched shutdown happen in real time—not because I was engulfing them, but because they could not match the signal.
They lacked the sovereign capacity to be fully seen without their partitions collapsing. They would have 1) an unfinished relationship or connection with another person they did not want to sever because of some financial or emotional entanglement, 2) a sworn oath to some secret society or cult that mandates secrecy of their practices, 3) an orbiting entourage of previous connections, ex-boyfriends, male attention units. In some cases, they would mirror all of my interests in order to appear as a soul mate, causing the intensity to skyrocket quickly in the first month.
I was mistaken in believing I was afraid of engulfment.
For a while, I internalized the avoidance I kept encountering as evidence of my own problem. I eventually came to absorb their projection and adopt the belief that my anxiety meant I feared closeness. But the anxiety was never about the other person getting too close—it was about asymmetrical investment leading to rapid decompression. I was pouring 100% of my vitality, truth, and capacity into a connection that was only returning 10–30%. The sensation of “claustrophobia” or panic was not fear of being engulfed; it was the sound of my own energy escaping into a vacuum, the free fall that happens when you merge with a ghost and the mask finally drops. My nervous system was sounding a calibrated alarm: “This is not reciprocal. This is not safe. You are about to be left holding the full load alone.” That is not engulfment fear. That is intelligence.
The final verdict
I am not fearful of merger—I am built for it. I have high capacity for intimacy, transparency, and depth, and I have spent years looking for someone whose structure can actually hold that volume. The people I encountered were not rejecting me because I was defective; they were shutting down because they could only handle small-town partitions while I was offering full transparency and presence. I no longer apologize for the intensity of what I bring. I no longer mistake the other person’s avoidance for my own flaw. I wanted total union. I offered total union. That is not pathology.
I am finished apologizing for wanting the sun of full transparency. I am finished carrying the false diagnosis. My drive to merge fully was never the problem. The problem was always trying to merge with structures that were never built to hold it. Now I know what I am looking for: someone whose bandwidth matches mine, whose nervous system does not flinch at being fully seen, whose life is not partitioned into secret rooms. Until then, I stay sovereign, unburdened, and uninterested in subsidizing ghosts. The anxiety I once carried was not fear of love. It was my kernel screaming that I was making a bad investment. I listen to that signal now. And I only invest where the merger can be mutual.
The pop relationship psychology promoted by YouTube gurus and self-declared social media experts is poison. It attempts to justify partitions and compartmentalization while falsely stating that meaningful intimacy is still possible. In reality, with partitions and compartments, it is an incomplete circuit and causes people to sustain nervous system injuries.
If you have ever been dragged into a triangle disguised as “I’m separating and ready for full immersion in love,” you will know one version of the avoidant, the triangulator. These are fantasy compartments that serve as emotional fuel for enduring other parts of their life that they want to escape from. The problem is that if you ask the fragmented person to drop the barriers of compartmentalization and become a whole, integrated person, it is revealed that they are a system, not a whole person. Their entire life is a series of roles and masks, one given to each person or group in order to extract the need they wish to service. If you can map their entire system and confront them, they shut down and reframe your anger at their deceptive practice (conscious or unconscious) as pathology.
Anyone who has seen this, be reminded: your desire for full, unpartitioned intimacy is healthy. It is the world and the culture that is sick. Resist it. Stay alone forever if necessary, but never accept compartmentalized intimacy.
Furthermore, resist the mask of “performative stoicism.” These people who play these types of games and invite you into relationships in toxic structures have a fear of being seen as hurt or having emotions. The thing is, if you bond with them, you will absorb this fear through the relational field. The truth is, there is absolutely no shame in feeling the pain of having shown another person—even such a liar or unconscious author of toxic structure—total love and presence. The idea that you must hide this to appear “strong” is performative stoicism, and it is just another mask.
The message to the so-called avoidant, or one who cannot reciprocate, is: “It is you who are afraid to admit that you feel pain, and your chosen method in life is to run from that and avoid growth. This is not my chosen method, and I do not deny it or run from reality. The pain was real, and because I let it move through me without running, it taught me about you and about me. I have no reason to carry shame, but perhaps you do, because you know you are running.”
That is the reality. It is a variation of trolling to point at the partition between the mask of unfeeling and the reality of complete and total feeling. Shame is only effective when a partition is erected to hide the truth in response to being seen. This is disarmed by integrating it and refusing to perform that it doesn’t exist.
It is they who are afraid of being seen, and when you do see them, they attempt to weaponize having seen you. The reality is that this is not a great reveal, because I do not practice compartmentalization and hiding. They assume their internal model of experience is shared by others, thus believing others share the same fears. You can rest assured: they are the ones who hide. Their entire life is a drama of constant performance and partition management.