Eloise Bridgerton Can’t End Up With An Avoidant: Why Netflix Must Save Her From A Relationship That Will Destroy Her

Eloise has always been the true heroine of ‘Bridgerton’ since the beginning, embodying all of the qualities that make for a legendary Regency romance. Witty, cerebral, introspective, and impulsive, she’s literally the Lizzie Bennet of the series.

But after reading To Sir Phillip, With Love, when I tell you it’s full of red flags, I’m not exaggerating.

Eloise gets married to a man with an avoidant attachment style, and it’s the absolute worst thing that could ever happen to our favorite character.

If you’ve ever survived the torture of dating an Avoidant yourself, or simply identify with her character personally, you’ll know that a full rewrite is an absolute must before cameras start rolling.

What Is An Avoidant?

WebMD reports that a study of over 5,000 American adults found that roughly 20% have an Avoidant Attachment style, with men being more likely to have this style than women. If a romantic partner has ever tried to convince you you were too needy, too demanding, or too dramatic simply for begging for the bare minimum, it’s possible they are an “Avoidant”.

Here’s what it looks like in practice: individuals avoid emotional intimacy and dependency on others. These responses tie back to experiences with a caregiver who was emotionally unavailable, dismissive, or unresponsive during their childhood, which drives them to “avoid” disappointment and rejection in adult life.

A Relationship Built On Letters

Avoidants are triggered by intimacy, but can really shine in the beginning of a relationship when the stakes are low and pressure is almost non-existent. In To Sir Phillip, With Love, Eloise falls for her cousin Marina’s widower after exchanging a series of letters (the Regency text message), and yes, this is Colin’s Marina from the series—with some major plot changes, mind you.

Eloise is feeling lonely and vulnerable after Penelope’s marriage. She’s rejected six different suitors, and is teetering on the edge of spinsterhood. Though it could destroy her reputation (and ultimately does force them to marry) she accepts an invitation to Sir Phillip’s home and runs off alone in order to size him up for herself without all of the Bridgerton clan interfering.

But almost immediately upon her arrival, she notices that Sir Phillip isn’t the person she knows from his letters in person. He is shy, quiet, awkward, avoids talking to her, and OH!, he completely forgot to mention that he has twins!

TL;DR: Our girl gets full on love bombed and walks into the messiest situation completely unprepared as a result, risking everything for the carefully crafted persona Phillip manufactured for her. She’s been majorly misled.

Subjecting Eloise to a cautionary tale that needs a trigger warning is the ultimate slap in the face for the character as well as her fans. Especially when the reality of the amount of therapy and self-reflection needed to work through this issue is completely ignored.

Keep That Trauma Bottled Up

Everyone has trauma, Eloise included. We wouldn’t condemn her love interest (or one of our own) simply for having baggage, and we get a front-row seat to Phillip’s as he co-narrates the novel with loads of poignant, but at times cringe-worthy inner monologue and flashbacks while he’s dealing with three major sources of shame and trauma:

His wife Marina attempted suicide by trying to drown herself in a lake on their estate. He barely managed to save her, but she fell ill and died from “lung fever” (aka pneumonia?). She was depressed for most of their loveless marriage, and they only married because her fiancé, Phillip’s elder brother George, died at Waterloo.

Phillip’s father was physically abusive, and this makes him terrified and incapable of parenting his own unruly and disobedient children. He avoids them out shame, fearing he too will resort to physical punishment in a fit of rage.

As an Avoidant, Phillip “deactivates” to numb, suppress, and block his negative emotions and completely avoids certain situations and triggers entirely. His main escape as a botanist is to spend all day in his greenhouse, even while Eloise is a guest in his home for the specific purpose of getting to know him better.

You can’t cope with something you’re avoiding entirely. That’s just plain denial. And when that denial becomes omission, then manipulation, then outright gaslighting—dragging Eloise into a mess he refuses to acknowledge—that’s just plain cruelty. No one deserves that. Not our girl. Not us.

A Solution To All His Problems

Phillip doesn’t really care about Eloise as a person or see her as an equal. He wrote to her with the specific intention of finding a mother for his children and a woman to run his household, so that he could finally be unburdened by both. His intense physical attraction to her comes as a surprise, but that too is just another problem for her to solve—his incredible horniness.

He places her in the boxes of housewife, sugar daddy (Eloise ends up managing all of the finances), and mistress without really pausing to think about what he might offer her in return, or even what she might want out of life or marriage. She’s simply a surrogate for all of the areas in his life where Phillip doesn’t want to be present himself.

This is by far the shittiest part of Phillip’s personality, and it permeates the majority of the book, as he is constantly confessing his true selfish intentions towards his future wife, dripping in misogyny, directly to the reader. If any of the Bridgertons deserve to be loved, seen, respected, and appreciated for who they are—it’s Eloise. She got Cressida Cowper to read Mary Wollstonecraft. I mean even Anthony got Kate for f*ck’s sake.

The Intimacy Trap

The only thing Phillip does offer Eloise is a crash course in sexual awakening. Contrary to internet hot takes that accused Phillip of forcing himself on her, I saw Eloise as a surprised but willing participant to their premature physical relationship. But there’s a huge power imbalance at play.

Phillip knows what he’s doing, but it’s all new to Eloise. Whatever expectations she may or may not have had for physical intimacy, it’s clear that sex with Phillip is devoid of true love and understanding (at least at the beginning).

When Eloise is forced to marry Phillip to avoid ruin (for staying in a man’s house without a chaperone), she turns to him for some kind of reassurance that he harbors any shred of emotional attachment towards her. Instead of answering honestly, he whisks her off into Sophie’s study for her first org*sm while four of her brothers are waiting for them outside. It’s not sweet or loving or tender. It’s a “bone”-a fide Sex Ed. science experiment. Literally.

After the wedding, Phillip ignores Eloise during the day while she tends to his house and children, and engages in passionate sex with her at night. Any time she tries to talk to him about something serious, he just initiates physical intimacy, until she finally sets a boundary, telling him there needs to be more to their marriage than sex, causing him to shut down completely.

As an Avoidant, he is perfectly content with their level of intimacy because there is no emotional component to it, yet. He is already so deactivated from his own emotions and triggered with shame that the discovery of her dissatisfaction completely overwhelms him. He gets defensive. Tells her not to blame him. He’s been celibate for eight years. Then he completely stonewalls her.

I Think I’ve Seen This Film Before

If you’ve ever dealt with an Avoidant, this pattern is painfully familiar. Having your needs or desires immediately and consistently shot down and rewritten as “attacks” is the ultimate form of gaslighting. Attempts at true connection become excuses to ignore you for hours, days, or weeks at a time.

At first you try patience and understanding, certain that gently explaining away the tension can bring back the version of the person that you know and love, until eventually, you’re doing all the emotional labor, all of the household management, all the parenting, while your partner retreats further and further into their “greenhouse” of choice—work, hobbies, friends. Anything but you.

You realize you’ve been stuck in the same cycle for years and no amount of empathy can change the fact that this is who they really are. These are the choices they’ve made time and time again. It’s not an accident or a mistake. It’s intentional.

Why Phillip’s ‘Change’ Is A Lie

The entire timeline of the book is completely unrealistic. At this point, they’ve only been married for two weeks, and the sudden illness of Sophie and Benedict’s son is enough to “snap” Phillip out of his avoidant ways.

How long does avodiance actually takes to unpack in the real world? One case study from the American Journal of Psychotherapy details a woman’s experience in psychotherapy learning to understand her Avoidant Attachment, model healthy coping skills, and gain “Earned-Secure Attachment”. It took her TWO YEARS of weekly visits. Not two weeks, or two months. We’re talking 104 50-minute sessions with a licensed professional.

Phillip, on the other hand, just kind of magically changes his ways, with prompting from Eloise, of course, but ultimately it’s not self-reflection, appreciation, or admiration that serve as his catalyst for true love, it’s jealousy of his children. When Eloise tells Phillip she would never leave because his children already lost their mother once, it’s in that moment he wishes she’d stay for him instead.

“I Can Fix Him”

It’s pure torture to watch someone as confident and quirky as Eloise walk into this situation with Phillip. This is a woman who should have gone to college or traveled the world being forced into marriage and step-motherhood with someone who doesn’t truly respect, support, or challenge her in return. He does provide her with basic comfort and affection at times, but doesn’t a legitimate heroine deserve so much more the bare minimum?

There is absolutely nothing earth-shattering or life changing about their love. Julia Quinn manufactures a happy ending out of literally no-where at the very last minute to cover up what we’d been realizing all along: Eloise settles.

Because without the magic of fiction, a relationship like this would have absolutely destroyed her. Once she forced some conversation out of her new husband, pulling emotional intimacy out of him like teeth, he would have deactivated even further and withheld physical intimacy from her as well. She’d be trapped in a lonely, loveless marriage for the rest of her life with no recourse, burdened with the mental and emotional labor of running his household and raising his children.

Positioning her as this magical Mary Poppins or Maria Von Trapp who walks into a troubled household and “fixes” the cold, emotionally incompetent man is such a unfulfilling storyline for a character so full of life and charisma. She deserved to be seduced, flirted with, challenged, pined over, longed for, and everything in between. To be adored completely for everything she is, mind, body, and soul. She deserved the greatest love story of the entire series.

But, it’s not too late.

Netflix still has time to rewrite this ending.

For all of us who have been manipulated or gaslit. Who tried to “love” an Avoidant into Secure Attachment and failed. Who spent months asking “why would they treat me this way”?

Don’t model this kind of relationship as marriage potential for us, Netflix. We know better. We’ve learned the hard way, ultimately having to leave the person we loved, not because the feelings disappeared, but because the last shreds of care and compassion we were living on like breadcrumbs did. We know the only answer: walk away and choose ourselves.

So either rewrite Phillip entirely, or allow Eloise to do the same. We chose her first, after all.