Bruce and Selina: The Only One He Almost Lets In

Here's what's different about Catwoman: she doesn't want Batman. She wants Bruce.

Every other significant relationship in Bruce Wayne's life is with the Bat. Joker fights Batman. Bane breaks Batman. Talia loves the warrior. Alfred enables the mission. The rogues gallery orbits the symbol.

Selina Kyle is the only one who treats the billionaire playboy as the real person and the cowl as the mask. She's the only one trying to have a relationship with the man underneath.

That's why she's the closest he gets to vulnerability. And that's why he can't fully let her in.

The Distinction That Matters

Batman/Catwoman is a cat-and-mouse game, theft and pursuit, rooftop flirtation between predators. It's sexy. It's fun. It keeps safe distance through the costumes.

Bruce/Selina is something else. Two people with trauma sitting in a room trying to connect. No masks. No performance. Just the terrifying possibility of actually being seen.

This distinction shows up in how they talk to each other. On rooftops, there's banter—innuendo, verbal sparring, the performance of attraction without the vulnerability of actual desire. In civilian clothes, sitting across from each other at a table, the conversation gets real. Harder. More exposing. The rooftops let them play at intimacy. The daylight demands actual intimacy. Batman can flirt with Catwoman forever. Bruce Wayne having a real conversation with Selina Kyle is excruciating.

The comic runs that understand this distinction are the great ones. Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's Hush arc. Tom King's run, especially the proposal in issue #24 and the wedding-that-wasn't in #50. These stories know that the stakes aren't whether Catwoman escapes with the diamonds. The stakes are whether Bruce Wayne can be in a real relationship.

What She Offers

Selina offers Bruce something no one else can: recognition of both selves without preference for either.

Alfred loves Bruce but serves Batman. The mission comes first. Alfred will patch wounds and provide alibis, but he's not going to tell Bruce to quit.

The rogues love Batman—the fight, the game, the meaning he provides their existence. Bruce Wayne is irrelevant to them. A disguise. The boring part.

Selina sees both. She knows the billionaire is a performance. She knows the vigilante is a trauma response. She loves the person underneath who's neither fully Bruce nor fully Batman—the integration that doesn't quite exist yet but could, maybe, with the right partner.

That's the promise. That's the threat.

The Avoidant Push-Pull

Watch how Bruce handles Selina across decades of comics. The pattern is textbook avoidant attachment:

Pursuit when she's unavailable. When Selina is working a job, running with the wrong crowd, or actively pushing him away, Bruce is all in. He'll chase her across Gotham. He'll make speeches about seeing the good in her. He'll be emotionally present in a way he never is when things are stable.

Withdrawal when she's close. The moment Selina commits—the moment she's actually available and wanting connection—Bruce finds reasons to create distance. The mission needs him. He can't put her in danger. He's not good enough for her. The excuses vary. The pattern doesn't.

Sabotage before permanence. Tom King's run makes this explicit. Bruce proposes. Selina accepts. The wedding approaches. And then—through a combination of external manipulation and internal terror—it doesn't happen. Bruce doesn't fight for it. He lets it collapse. Because permanence means permanence means being left, and he was left once and it broke him.

This is how avoidant attachment operates. The avoidant person wants intimacy—they're not robots. But proximity triggers fear. So they structure their lives around near-misses. Almost-relationships that could have worked if not for bad timing, external circumstances, duties that call. The avoidant person is never the one who walks away for no reason. There's always a reason. The reasons are always bullshit.

The neural mechanism is straightforward: intimacy activates the attachment system, which in avoidants is wired to early trauma. Get close to someone and the nervous system reads it as threat. Not consciously—the person isn't thinking "this feels dangerous." But the body responds as if danger is present. Heart rate increases. Cortisol spikes. The impulse to flee becomes overwhelming. The avoidant creates distance not because they want to, but because staying close feels physiologically intolerable.

Bruce experiences this with Selina again and again. Every time they get close, he finds a way out. Not because he doesn't love her—because loving her activates the system that's organized around never being that vulnerable again.

The Rooftop Dynamic

The rooftops are safe. Batman and Catwoman can meet on the rooftops and be almost-intimate in a way that requires nothing.

They can flirt because flirtation isn't commitment. They can fight because fighting is safe distance disguised as intensity. They can kiss and then one of them can disappear into the night and neither has to be present for the boring parts—the morning after, the conversation about feelings, the negotiation of actual partnership.

The rooftop relationship is sustainable precisely because it's incomplete. There's always an elsewhere to return to. Batman has the cave. Catwoman has her apartment, her crew, her jobs. They meet in the liminal space between their lives and then retreat. This is the avoidant's ideal: intense connection with built-in escape routes.

Compare this to what Selina actually wants: a life together. Shared space. Shared routines. The unglamorous daily negotiation of being two people trying to build something. That version requires showing up when you don't feel like it, having the hard conversations, staying when the impulse is to run. The rooftop version requires none of that. It's all peak experience, no maintenance.

The rooftops are the relationship equivalent of living in hotels. All the excitement of being somewhere, none of the commitment of staying.

Bruce returns to the rooftops with Selina for the same reason any avoidant returns to situationships that feel big but demand nothing: it's easier. The intensity scratches the itch. The lack of structure means the lack of vulnerability. You can play at intimacy without risking actual intimacy.

Hush: The Almost

The Hush storyline (Batman #608-619, Loeb and Lee, 2002-2003) is the definitive Bruce/Selina text.

For one arc, Bruce lets himself try. He and Selina are together—not Batman and Catwoman flirting on rooftops, but Bruce and Selina attempting a relationship. He shares his identity. He makes plans. He integrates her into his life rather than just his adventures.

It can't last. The story is structured around it not lasting. External threats intervene. Trust is betrayed (or appears to be). Bruce has his out, and he takes it.

But for a few issues, you see what could be. A Bruce Wayne who comes home to someone. Who has a partner rather than just allies. Who might eventually hang up the cowl because there's something worth being present for.

Hush shows you the almost. That's its cruelty. You see the relationship that could work, and then you watch the avoidant pattern destroy it.

Why He Chooses Mission Over Her

Bruce chooses the mission over Selina the way avoidants always choose obligation over intimacy. Not because the mission is more important, but because the mission is safer.

The mission never asks to be let in. The mission never requires vulnerability. You can serve the mission forever without it ever seeing your weakness or needing your tenderness or asking where this is going.

The mission also never leaves. People leave. People die. People betray you or get hurt because you weren't strong enough to protect them. But crime? Crime is eternal. There's always another mugger, another drug operation, another scheme that needs thwarting. The mission provides purpose without the risk of loss. You can give everything to it knowing it will never abandon you because it can never be completed.

Selina asks where this is going. She wants the daylight relationship, not just the midnight one. She wants Bruce Wayne, not just Batman. That ask—legitimate, reasonable, the ask of anyone trying to have a relationship—is exactly what the avoidant attachment system is built to evade.

She's asking him to prioritize something that could be taken from him. To invest in something finite and fragile. To care about a person more than an idea. For someone whose foundational trauma is "the people I loved were taken from me," that ask might as well be "please hand me the weapon I'll eventually use to destroy you."

So Bruce chooses Gotham. He chooses the never-ending war on crime that provides structure without intimacy, purpose without vulnerability, meaning without being known.

It's not noble. It's not heroic. It's a man too scared to be loved choosing a battle he can never win over a relationship that might actually work.

The Tragedy

Selina is the one who could have saved him. Not saved Gotham—Batman will always save Gotham. Saved Bruce.

She's the partner who could have held both selves, who wouldn't have demanded he choose between the man and the mission, who could have been present for the whole integrated person he's never quite managed to become.

He almost lets her. That's the tragedy. He gets right to the edge—the proposal, the wedding date, the future—and then he finds a way to make it not happen.

The avoidant doesn't reject love because they don't want it. They reject love because they want it too much and the wanting feels like weakness and the weakness feels like death. Better to be alone and strong than together and vulnerable.

Selina waits on rooftops. She's still there. The almost-relationship continues, year after year, neither together nor fully apart.

She waits because she sees something in Bruce that he can't see in himself: the possibility of wholeness. She sees the man he could become if he could integrate Bruce and Batman, if he could let someone hold both selves, if he could choose connection over mission even once.

But seeing someone's potential and having access to that potential are different things. Selina can see who Bruce could be. She can't make him become that person. That choice is his, and he chooses the mission every time. Not because the mission is more important, but because the mission is safer. And safety, for the avoidant, trumps everything—even love, even happiness, even the life they actually want.

That's the punishment avoidant attachment creates: you get to see what you could have had while choosing not to have it, forever.

Part of the Batman Polycule series. Previous: The Lego Batman Movie Understood the Assignment. Next: Batman and Poison Ivy: Parallel Sovereignty