Anxious Attachment in Relationships: Part Two — The Analysis

(If you haven't read Part One of this story, start there, then return).

They want space, as always. It doesn’t really make sense, how are you supposed to figure things out about a joint future without talking to each other? It doesn’t seem to matter how much you promise not to get mad, they won’t talk.

The distance tears you up inside. You try and keep a light connection going, send funny reels, ask how their presentation went at work so they don’t forget how well you always take care of them and how well you two usually get along. Every couple argues, and really you’re just fighting for the relationship. You get some responses to your messages, but you can feel the difference in the energy even through the screen.

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They break up with you. You are heartbroken. They deliver the "It’s not you, it’s me" line like they invented it.  They tell you that you deserve someone better, someone who can give you what you need, but it’s not them. It feels like a cop-out and when you push back on it they just sigh and say they don’t think relationships should be this hard. Your heart tells you that if they really wanted to — if they really wanted you — they would put in the work. You can’t imagine ever feeling this way about someone again.

In the weeks that follow you replay the relationship over and over in your mind, looking for the point at which it turned. How it went from feeling like you were meant for each other to being nothing to them. You watch your ex’s stories (what a bitter tasting word ‘ex’ is in your mouth) and they look like a different person. You see the work colleague in one of them in the background. You knew it. You send an angry message. Ok, you send five. They get you blocked.

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At some point they must unblock you because six months later you see they watched your stories too. Your heart skips a beat, but it’s too late. You’ve met someone else, someone completely different to them. It’s only been a few weeks but they are so available, you spend hours talking into the night. When you think about what it was like trying to get your ex to talk — pulling teeth, honestly! — this is so much better. You can tell it’s going to be different this time.

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If you’re anxiously attached, or have been in a relationship with someone who is, you might recognise some of the feelings and interactions in this story.

People with an anxious attachment style often feel like they keep attracting the same type of partner but feel powerless to change it, because the beginning of each relationship seems so promising with no indication of what is to come. Even people with a more avoidant attachment style are often well engaged in the early stages of dating — the energy and enthusiasm with which they show up at first is genuine, but dissipates when their attachment fears are later activated by the increasing closeness or having to navigate conflict.

Similarly, someone with an anxious attachment style may find it easier to feel more relaxed at the beginning before the connection has deepened. If they have been through this before and vowed to handle their next relationship differently, or even if they have done a lot of work on themselves and their attachment style in between relationships, they can be surprised by the strength of their own anxious reaction when their next partner seems to be pulling away.

In this side of the story, the central character (we’ll call them Robin) enters a relationship with someone who is more avoidantly attached (Alex, from the companion posts (1, 2) to this one). Let’s look at examples from the story that illustrate Robin’s anxious attachment.

You’re so excited to introduce them to your friends. It takes a few requests since they have so much work on at the moment (always) but they agree in the end. And they’re so good socially, your friends love them, you’re so happy to have the people you love in the same room getting along so well. Another good sign. It’s only been a few weeks but it feels so right.

People who are more anxiously attached can be on a conscious or unconscious quest to find ‘their person’. Most people like the idea of being in a happy, healthy, long-term relationship when they are ready for it, but someone with an anxious attachment style might feel especially adrift and unsettled without it.

The idea of ‘signs’ or being ‘meant’ for each other can also show up in how an anxiously attached person looks at a relationship. It’s this trait that can mean a person like Robin glosses over early warning signs while zeroing in on indications that the person they are dating might be “the one”. While it’s appropriate to ensure that someone you are interested in dating is a good fit for you and your life, anxious attachment can make people feel especially focused on signals that fit the narrative of the hoped for happy-ever-after.

Using the word ‘love’ after only a few weeks is another indication of anxious attachment. At this stage of the relationship, both people are still naturally on relatively ‘good behaviour’, and feelings are intense. This isn’t disingenuous — it’s part of the normal arc of relationships that helps people bond — but isn’t sustainable as a relationship develops and matures. While Robin feels strongly about Alex, describing it as ‘love’ before they have really seen more of each other represents the rapid attachment common in people with a more anxious system.

On the way home from the hangout they seem a bit weird. You’re so good at reading body language and changes in people, it’s something you pride yourself on… The next weekend you don’t see each other for the first weekend since you started dating. They see their own friends both days. And both nights. Your alarm bells are going off, and your alarm bells are very reliable in your experience. You check their Instagram followers for anyone new but don’t spot anyone.

People with an anxious attachment style are often highly sensitive to changes in behaviour from others. Anxious attachment often forms in childhood in response to a parent who was inconsistent in their responses and availability (Parent B in Robin’s background story). Robin senses that Alex is pulling away, and the resulting internal distress compels them to look for the source of the distance.

When it’s good, you feel like you’ve finally met the person who completes you. When it’s not good, it’s awful. You can’t eat properly, sleep properly, think about anything else. At first your parents (well, one of them anyway) gives you lots of support when you call to talk things through. Then you start to feel embarrassed about how much you’re fighting so you decide to keep it to yourself. You don’t want your parents to think badly of them when you’re standing up there on your wedding day.

Someone with an anxious attachment style can find that their entire sense of wellbeing is dependent on the stability of their relationship. While it’s natural to feel impacted when one of your most important connections is unsteady, the distress of an attachment rupture can feel overwhelmingly physical and strong for someone anxiously attached until connection is restored. People with a more avoidant style can feel this too, though their default will be to retract further.

Despite the frequent conflict and distress, Robin is still picturing a future with Alex. It can be difficult for someone with an anxious attachment style to step back and honestly consider whether the dynamic and quality of the relationship is healthy and indicative of a good long-term partnership.

Until that new colleague starts at your partner’s work. You already know their name by the time you see they add each other on Insta. Of course they’re hot. Of course they play that stupid game your partner likes too (you play it as well and act like you like it — because that’s what people do for people they love right? — but it’s so boring). You make a joke about your partner having a crush on the colleague (surely they understand you just need a little reassurance from time to time?) Instead they get annoyed. It makes you more upset.

Frequent reassurance-seeking is a hallmark of anxious attachment. Unfortunately, this strategy for soothing the anxiety often backfires, and it never actually addresses the underlying fear in any lasting way. Partners of anxiously attached people often start to find this wearing (especially those with a more avoidant attachment style, but more securely attached partners too) . It quickly becomes apparent that reassurance isn’t very effective for longer than a moment, and they can begin to feel mistrusted by their anxious partner. Robin is trying to feel closer to Alex by asking for reassurance, but it ends up increasing distance between them.

Robin acting like they like Alex’s favourite game in the name of being a loving partner — despite how boring Robin finds it — is an attempt to make the relationship feel more connected and stable by reducing difference and increase similarity. Learning to allow and feel comfortable with each person having their own preferences as well as shared interests is an important part of the healthy state of interdependence in relationships.

Maybe you pushed them too much. But you’re just trying to talk about the next natural step for a couple. If you didn’t push them sometimes, the relationship would go nowhere.

This reflects the pursuer-distancer cycle many anxious-avoidant pairings find themselves in. Robin is well-intentioned, it’s not unreasonable to want a relationship to progress if you desire a future with a long-term relationship and the common milestones. Anxious attachment can however make a person want to pursue these goals especially quickly, or at least at a faster pace than their partner, or, as described before, even within a relationship that isn’t particularly healthy.

They break up with you. You are heartbroken… they don’t think relationships should be this hard. Your heart tells you that if they really wanted to — if they really wanted you — they would put in the work.

Robin’s thoughts reflect two common lines of thinking for someone with anxious attachment — that no amount of ‘work’ in a relationship is insurmountable, and their now-ex would be willing to do this work if they cared enough about them.

Many people will put in high effort to work through problems in a significant long-term relationship that also has high levels of commitment. Not being willing to do this for a shorter relationship, or one that has been fraught since the early stages, can also be a healthy choice. While people with an avoidant attachment style might find it especially easy to walk away rather than work through conflict, the ability to discern whether it is really the right thing to do is an important part of making good relational decisions for anyone.

The way that anxious attachment develops in children also shows in Robin’s thinking. Young children are referred to as egocentric – they view the world only from their perspective. This is a normal part of child development (and it’s the reason that divorcing parents are encouraged to ensure their children understand that the divorce is not the children’s fault).

With themselves at the centre of their frame of reference, a child can’t understand that a parent’s changeable mood or emotional availability is a result of the adult’s own internal world, not their own loveability or value as a child. This same kind of thinking can be activated in an adult with anxious attachment during relationship difficulties or a breakup, when the only understanding that seems to make sense is “if they loved me, if I was worth it to them, they would want to do what it takes to make this work.”

In the weeks that follow you replay the relationship over and over in your mind, looking for the point at which it turned... You see the work colleague in one of them in the background. You knew it. You send an angry message. Ok, you send five. They get you blocked… At some point they must unblock you because six months later you see they watched your stories too. Your heart skips a beat, but it’s too late. You’ve met someone else, someone completely different to them. It’s only been a few weeks but they are so available, you spend hours talking into the night. When you think about what it was like trying to get your ex to talk — pulling teeth, honestly! — this is so much better. You can tell it’s going to be different this time.

After a relationship breakup, the anxious attachment system goes to work looking for the signs that it missed. This is an understandable response to pain and a defence mechanism to prevent future hurt by spotting problems earlier next time. It’s the same strategy Robin developed as a child when they learned to detect Parent B’s mood by how they pulled the car into the driveway.

The intense pain an anxiously attached person feels after a breakup can cause them to lash out emotionally or desperately. Sometimes the wish is to provoke a reaction from the other person, because any communication is better than the cold silence of no-contact, or the surreal feeling of reverting to friends status with someone you were so intimately connected with.

At the end, Robin has met someone else, and the emotions (and brain chemicals) of a new connection are delicious and strong and convincing. Robin is again looking for signs that this new partner is different and might really be Robin’s person, comparing the end of the relationship with Alex to the beginning of this one.

An important note: Similarly to the avoidant patterns in Alex’s story, intense emotional reactions like those in Robin’s can be experienced in some people’s very first and younger relationships, even without anxious attachment in the mix. Attraction, lust, and love create strong chemical reactions in the brain and the first time(s) a person experiences these they can be all-consuming. Most people will be able to recall the experience of thinking non-stop about their first love. The first breakup of a significant relationship is also extremely painful for many people, with no prior experience to draw on in terms of how breakups feel and what the timeline of recovering from heartbreak involves. Regardless, the hurt felt is very real, whether it comes from an anxious attachment style or not.

Robin’s story is a fictional example of how someone with an anxious attachment might experience a relationship. If you can recognise parts of yourself in the story, or a current or previous partner, this insight can be a catalyst for understanding what is going on inside and why anxiously attached people might do what they do. Identifying this gives you a chance to step out of the reactivity and choose whether you might want to learn to respond differently, show up more effectively, and build healthy long-term relationships on foundations of trust and security.