Avoidance strategies involve the tactics and techniques people use when they don't wish to be influenced by others. To investigate the types of avoidance strategies men and women use to deal with an unwelcome persuasion attempt from an intimate partner, undergraduates wrote essays describing how they avoided such attempts. A 24-strategy coding scheme was developed and used to generate the conceptualization of the avoidance strategies. Undergraduates from a second sample completed a 24-item inventory based on the results of the first study, as well as several measures of personality and intimate relationships. Multidimensional scaling analysis showed that strategies varied along two metadimensions: bilaterality/unilaterality, ranging from compromise and objective discussion to withdrawal and ignoring the partner; and compliance/noncompliance, ranging from compliance and divergent compliance to direct or hostile refusal. These avoidance dimensions were correlated with several measures of personality, gender roles and interpersonal dynamics. While the analyses showed a wide range of significant correlations, masculine instrumentality was the variable that was found to be most consistently related to use of avoidance strategies. The findings indicate that use of avoidance strategies in intimate relationships is associated with personality and role variables as well as features of intimate relations themselves. (WAS)