When freedom starts to feel like avoidance

A personal reflection on when freedom becomes avoidance, emotional responsibility, and the cost of distance in modern relationships.

For a long time, I thought freedom in relationships would feel expansive. That having more choices would mean less pretending. And in some ways, that turned out to be true. Fewer assumptions. More honesty. A certain lightness I hadn’t expected to find.

But there was something else I didn’t anticipate.

Freedom, it turns out, develops a tone over time. And the tone isn’t always what you expected when you chose it.

I’ve sat with people who entered open relationships with genuine curiosity, real care, real intention, and found themselves overwhelmed within months. Not by the emotions they’d prepared for, like jealousy or insecurity. By the sheer volume of possibility. New connections, new conversations, new configurations, all arriving at once and all quietly demanding something. Instead of feeling free, they felt scattered. Perpetually in motion, but not quite landing anywhere. Because landing had started to feel dangerously close to limitation.

I’ve also seen people reach for openness at moments when something else needed attention. When a relationship had gone quiet in a specific way. When opening things up can look like growth. Like movement. Like a breath of air.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it’s just a way to avoid standing still long enough to feel what’s actually there.

I know this because I’ve done it. There were moments I used the language of freedom to exit a conversation instead of finishing it. I told myself I was respecting autonomy. What I was really doing was leaving early.

I keep thinking about something my father used to do when I was a child in Minsk. He loved taking things apart, old televisions, radios, whatever had stopped working. He’d call me over: “Vika, come here.” And then he’d show me the inside of something. Which wire connected to what. Which tool to use. It was a time of scarcity, and the logic behind it was simple: things were worth fixing. You learned how they worked because repairing them was the only option.

Have you tried opening a modern television? The panels are sealed. No screws meant to be removed, no parts designed to be accessed. The assumption built into the object is that when it breaks, you replace it. Repair was never part of the design.

I wonder sometimes if abundance has done the same thing to how we approach each other.

My friends in Amsterdam ask me versions of the same question. “Why are men here so afraid to commit? Everything is good. We have things in common. We enjoy each other.” And then the moment someone asks for something more defined, exclusivity, clarity, a straight answer, they retreat into language about freedom. About not being ready. About needing space.

I don’t think this is about non-monogamy. The men my friends describe aren’t exploring openness with honesty and care. They’re using the cultural permission that Amsterdam offers, and it offers a lot of it, to avoid a conversation they don’t want to have.

“There is a difference between choosing freedom and using freedom as an exit.”

The difference is whether you’re moving toward something or away from it.

Once you step outside the default scripts, freedom stops being neutral. It becomes something you’re expected to embody well. And if you struggle, if you feel something inconvenient, if you need something that sounds suspiciously like reassurance, the implication hangs in the air. You must still be too attached. Too conditioned. Not quite there yet.

I caught myself, more than once, editing my reactions before they’d fully formed. Not asking what am I feeling, but what would someone who actually understands freedom feel here. That question alone should have been a warning sign. Healthy freedom doesn’t ask you to audit yourself out of your own experience.

There is a version of autonomy that feels genuinely alive. It makes room for people to need things without apologizing, and understands that having a preference isn’t the same as controlling someone. That choice comes with responsibility, not instead of it. And then there is a thinner version, one that hides behind good language, that uses words like space or independence to quietly step away from emotional responsibility. I’ve seen people call distance self-regulation, silence reframed as a spiritual practice. I’ve done both.

The line between autonomy and avoidance isn’t philosophical, it’s practical. You feel it when one person keeps showing up emotionally and the other keeps calling it space. When you’re responsible for your own feelings becomes less a framework for health and more a way of saying: your feelings are not my problem.

We say we want freedom. Sometimes what we mean is: I want not to be affected by what you feel.

But relationships involve impact by definition. You don’t get closeness without consequence. You don’t get to matter to someone and also be immune to mattering.

This is where people start feeling lonely inside relationships that are technically free. Not because they want control. But because they want their presence to register. They want to feel that their emotions don’t dissolve into the structure.

Freedom without emotional responsibility doesn’t feel liberating. It feels hollow. And hollowness is difficult to name when you’ve built your whole self-understanding around the value of choice.

The question I keep coming back to isn’t how free am I.

It’s how available am I willing to remain.

Because freedom that can’t tolerate vulnerability isn’t freedom.

It’s distance with good branding.

Victoria Onken is a relationship coach based in Amsterdam, working with individuals and couples navigating relationship change, consent, and sustainable love.