The disconnect between physical closeness and emotional closeness — present in one, absent in the other. If intimacy with a dismissive avoidant has left you confused, you are not imagining it.
Short answer: for many dismissive avoidants, sex and emotional exposure are different things, and one can feel far safer than the other. Being physically close while pulling back from the tenderness around it is a recognised pattern, and it is about what closeness stirs rather than about you.
Physical intimacy can be manageable while everyday affection, being reached for, being held on a slow morning, feels like more than the system can hold. It can read as coldness. More often it is self-protection showing up in the gap between the physical and the emotional, and the book covers why the two split and what shifts as the pattern eases.
Which side of the gap is hardest varies from person to person, and the pattern says nothing about how they feel toward you. It also sits alongside ordinary questions of desire, health and compatibility, so the explanation is a starting point rather than the whole story.
Ask for one small piece of ordinary closeness at a time, named plainly and outside the bedroom: ten minutes on the sofa, a hand held on a walk. Small, repeated, low-pressure closeness is what this pattern can actually learn from.
Go deeper
The Dismissive Avoidant maps the whole pattern from both sides — how the fortress was built, what it protects, what it costs, and where the door is — with 179 real questions answered.