Why do anxious and avoidant attachment styles attract?

If every relationship or situationship has resulted in you wondering (or crying) why you keep meeting the same kind of person, your attachment style might have something to do with it, and this post is for you.

What are attachment styles?

First, a brief overview of attachment styles (more detail in this post), or skip down if you’re already familiar:

Attachment theory  is a psychological theory designed to explain how what we experience in childhood with our primary attachment figures (parents or caregivers) form how we think, feel, and behave in our subsequent adult relationships.

Romantic relationships have similar traits to child-parent relationships in terms of the emotional closeness, vulnerability (and thus capacity to be hurt by), and direct influence on your day-to-day and wellbeing.

So, your romantic relationships (more casual or serious) are easily able to push your attachment buttons installed in childhood.

The two attachment styles I’ll be discussing today are anxious attachment (properly called ‘anxious-preoccupied’, but we’ll use just ‘anxious’ for ease) and avoidant attachment (proper name ‘dismissive-avoidant’, but we’ll go with ‘avoidant’).

Anxious attachment

People with an anxious attachment style generally learned as children to cope with inconsistent parental care by seeking response, attention, or soothing.

In adult relationships, this looks like a desire to be close to a partner in order to feel steady and safe. People with an anxious attachment style are on high alert for signs that their partner might leave or be unhappy with them. They often seek reassurance as to their partner’s commitment to them, but also their mood, what’s on their mind, and so on. When there are ruptures in the relationship, they want them repaired as quickly as possible to restore closeness as they find any distance very unsettling.

Avoidant attachment

People with an anxious attachment style generally learned as children to cope with cold or harsh parental care by minimising their own emotionality and needs.

In adult relationships, this looks like a desire to maintain emotional distance in order to feel steady and safe. People with avoidant attachment are on alert (but often unaware of how alert they are) for signs that their partner might want more from them emotionally or in terms of commitment, or seem to be encroaching on their independence. People with avoidant attachment respond to relationship ruptures and growing closeness in the same with — by withdrawing.

Why do anxious and avoidant attachment styles attract?

You’d think that anxiously attached people would seek each other out, and avoidantly attached people might — well, maybe not seek each other out, but bump into each other out in the world — recognise someone who will love them the way they want to be loved, and feel that spark of attraction.

Instead, people seem to (masochistically) do the exact opposite.

The reasons for this seem to be twofold (or more, there’s always a number of theories to explain human psychology, complex and mysterious as the brain is).

The home/familiarity reason

As adults out in the world of dating and relationships, we are often attracted to what is familiar. What is familiar feels like home, and home represents our first mental model of love and care.

One theory is that as young children, we imprint what we observe and experience with our primary attachment figures as our model of love — even if it wasn’t that loving on reflection. Children don't question their parents' motives and aren't able contemplate that an adult might have challenges of their own that make them less able to provide for a child's emotional needs. As a small child with a developing brain and no real ability to compare or discern healthy love, we take what we grow up with at face value.

What we learn over the first decade or so of life, when our brains are especially malleable, becomes deeply ingrained.

For an anxiously attached adult, this might have meant being raised by an inconsistent parent or caregiver. Sometimes one or both of your parents might have been loving, attuned to you, and available. Other times, they might have been preoccupied, cold, or harsh. Or you might have had a parent that left, or you saw only occasionally. This makes the hot-cold behaviour of an avoidantly attached partner familiar, and that familiarity is attractive.

This home/familiarity reason is less common for someone with avoidant attachment, but could occur if you were raised with a parent that was dependent on you (you were ‘parentified’), or with an intrusive parent (one who didn’t allow you much privacy or struggled with your growing independence). The strong desire of an anxiously attached partner who wants to be increasingly close to you feels similarly. The brain is attracted to the familiarity, but simultaneously finds it a source of stress.

Proving/disproving beliefs

If you grew up in a household that didn’t feel especially safe — with lots of conflict, or outright abuse, or had a parent up and leave and disappear — you might be shaking your head, thinking “That’s not me. What feels like home doesn’t safe”, or “I always vowed I would never have a relationship like my parents treated each other” or “I’d never act like my parent.”

So for you, perhaps it’s another common reason: We want to disprove what we already believe, while unconsciously seeking out situations that confirm it. This pattern shows up across the range of human behaviour, not just in romantic relationships.

For those with anxious attachment, your childhood experiences of inconsistent or unavailable love might have created core beliefs that you are unlovable and that people will leave you. You are attracted to partners who seem just out of reach, sometimes especially so — if you can just get that one to love you, it will finally disprove this painful idea about yourself.

Instead, as human brains seem wired to, we seek out or even unconsciously create situations that align with our view of ourselves and each other. An avoidant partner keeps you at arm’s length, or lets you start to get close but then they retreat. When someone is anxious to an extreme, the intensity of their behaviours (attempts to seek reassurance to feel more secure) can also push even more securely attached partners away. Belief confirmed: You aren’t lovable, people always leave, there’s something wrong with you.

Sometimes anxious attachment arises as a result of overly-attuned parenting — where a parent remained a child’s sole source of comfort and emotional regulation, and provided very intense, consistent love that no adult relationship can match. I’ll write about this more in another post.

For adults with avoidant attachment, childhood experiences of cold or distant parenting create similar beliefs of your own unlovability and the unreliability of people who are supposed to care for you. You are attracted to anxiously attached people who are so willing to finally be there for you — maybe you are lovable, after all.

But the belief is still there underneath, that relying on and getting close to others will only lead to the pain of rejection — despite all the attention and reassurances of an anxiously attached partner. Withholding emotionally, acting out, or fault finding with a partner are all unconscious ways to drive a wedge between you and confirm the belief that love and attachment can’t be stable and safe.

Learning to recognise what might be driving your own attraction, choices and actions gives you the opportunity to try and address the issues at their core, as it’s not always as simple as just trying to pick a different kind of partner.

Whether your relationship history has been shaped by seeking our familiarity or the inner conflict of proving and disproving your core beliefs, the anxious-avoidant relationship dynamic is difficult for everyone involved. Understanding yourself and taking steps to heal old wounds and update beliefs from childhood provides a firmer footing from which to have healthier, more fulfilling relationships.