The Persian poet Rumi is known all over the world today for his ecstatic love poetry, much of it inspired by Shams of Tabriz, the enigmatic mystic who entered his life one day and later disappeared without a trace. The extraordinary encounter between Rumi, who lived a conventional married life as an Islamic jurist and scholar with many devoted students in Konya, and Shams, a wandering dervish, has been well documented and mythologised in books and films. Their intense relationship transformed Rumi profoundly, and after Shams’s final disappearance, he spent the rest of his life writing divine poetry to express the overwhelming love, grief, and spiritual spark it ignited within him.
This meeting is often described as a spiritual initiation for which Rumi was ripe, though scholars and readers have long debated whether their bond transcended the purely spiritual into something more romantic. Whether it was one or the other, or a mixture of both, the 13th century was long before attachment theory gave us a language for understanding patterns of intimacy and separation. But the question I would, perhaps rather irreverently, like to ask today is whether Rumi and Shams might have been caught in what we now call the “anxious-avoidant trap.”
In attachment theory, individuals who experience emotional inconsistency or ambiguity early in life may develop an anxious attachment style. In relationships, they can become hyper-focused on their partner, overfunction, and crave frequent reassurance. And often, they find themselves drawn to their polar opposite: the avoidant. Avoidant attachment, by contrast, can develop in response to emotional neglect, coldness, or over-control. As a result, people may learn to rely heavily on themselves, withdrawing or shutting down when emotional intimacy feels overwhelming. To an anxious partner, this distancing can feel like a stream of mixed signals.
And guess what? These two styles tend to be magnetically drawn to one another. When they meet, it often feels like fate: familiar, magical, as though they have known each other across lifetimes. They can fall in love fast and hard, their psychological defence mechanisms fitting together like a key into a lock. Best of all? Most of the time, neither has any idea what is actually happening beneath the surface. They simply believe they have found their soulmate, or their “twin flame” in modern spiritual terms.
Needless to say, these dynamics can be highly dramatic: the anxious partner pursues while the avoidant withdraws. It quickly becomes a push-pull cycle that can end with the avoidant vanishing completely, “ghosting” the anxious partner without a trace. Now, of course, Rumi and Shams didn’t have mobile phones, but if they had, Rumi would arguably have texted relentlessly after Shams left, while Shams might have blocked him or thrown his phone straight into the Meram Creek.
For people who haven’t done much inner work or understood these dynamics, and even for many who have, the cycle simply repeats with different partners. The avoidant often gets labelled a narcissist, the anxious gets written off as needy, and both go hunting for new partners who seem completely different at first, but aren’t. The pattern continues until one or both finally wake up, see it for what it is, and begin the hard work of healing and growing.
In the absolute best-case scenario, a deep personal transformation occurs that can even culminate in profound spiritual awakening. This seems to be precisely what happened to Rumi, regardless of whether Shams was an avoidant, a great spiritual teacher, or both. Rumi was utterly and irrevocably transformed by the meeting, or more accurately, by his loss. Shams’s sudden departure was the catalyst that cracked Rumi’s heart wide open with grief, leaving him to weep, write thousands of desperate, ecstatic love poems, and wander the streets in search of his absent beloved.
In modern psychological terms, this looks like a case of extreme “anxious activation.” The beloved disappears suddenly after an intense period of togetherness, and the partner left behind spirals into despair and obsessive longing. Shams, on the other hand, makes an irresistible candidate for the ultimate avoidant archetype: he showed up, completely disrupted Rumi’s structured life, according to legend threw his precious books into water to test him, became central to his emotional and spiritual world, and then… vanished into thin air. Twice!
It looks remarkably like avoidant ghosting, if you disregard the rather significant alternative theory that Shams was actually murdered, possibly by people within Rumi’s circle. Yet through a mystical lens, his disappearance has instead been understood as part of Rumi’s lesson in divine love and detachment.
Irreverence aside, I think that we can learn a lot from the mystical love story between Rumi and Shams. I feel that, as a society, we have gotten romantic love fundamentally wrong. For many, it has become a transactional agreement that two people enter into to get their needs met. So many things that have little to do with love enter the equation: finances, social status, passion, security, fear of being alone, and more. What is so often lost is what I believe to be the true core of love: growth. The sincere commitment to one’s own evolution, and the deep desire to support a partner’s growth emotionally, psychologically, and, above all, spiritually.
Unfortunately, this kind of growth often seems to happen through loss or grief. When our hearts break wide open because someone leaves us, dies, or betrays us, we can become soft and open enough to grow. If we manage to stay with ourselves through the pain, rather than distracting ourselves with other love interests, work, or substances, this is where transformation can take place.
But a transformation such as the one Rumi experienced can only happen when we learn to become present with ourselves, and when we develop the courage to look clearly at ourselves and at the deeper symbolism of a meeting. That is precisely what Rumi did. He could have attempted to return to his former life and brushed the meeting with Shams aside as a temporary infatuation. But he could not do this, because he had experienced a glimpse of the divine with Shams. Their union, however brief it might have been, had a quality and a depth that changed him forever. It showed him what was, and what wasn’t, important in life.
Rumi did not turn away from the grief. He felt it profoundly and poured it into poetry so exquisite that it still touches millions of people around the world today. Through it, the longing transcended into the ultimate recognition: that there was no separation between him and Shams, that they were one and the same, and that he had been looking for himself all along. That became his greatest teaching.
As in Rumi’s case, the disappearance is not necessarily the end of the story. What Rumi became through the loss is the story. Shams disappeared, but the transformation he had set in motion continued for the rest of Rumi’s life.
And, on a more mundane level, perhaps we can learn to see our own difficult romantic encounters through this lens. They always show us something about ourselves, very often something that we don’t want to see. They reveal our wounds, our patterns, our expectations of love, and the places where we still abandon ourselves in order to hold on to another person.
This does not mean that every painful relationship is a great spiritual initiation, or that we should romanticise people who treat us badly. But perhaps the more useful question after a relationship ends is not only, “Why did they do this to me?” but also, “What has this encounter come to show me about myself?”
Sometimes the person who breaks our heart is not the person with whom we are meant to spend our life. They may simply be the person whose presence, and eventual absence, forces us to become someone we could not have become without the meeting.
You might be interested in reading a related post called Inanna’s Descent: Why Real Transformation Costs Everything
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