If you've spent much time on therapy Instagram, TikTok, podcasts, or dating apps, there's a good chance you've come across attachment styles. Secure. Anxious. Avoidant. Disorganized. You may have taken a quiz, diagnosed yourself, diagnosed your partner, diagnosed your ex, and started to make sense of your entire relationship history through the lens of where everyone falls.
There is something genuinely useful about having language for these patterns. If you've spent years wondering why you feel relatively grounded and capable in most areas of your life, only to become consumed by whether someone is pulling away from you, learning about anxious attachment can feel like someone finally handed you an explanation. The problem comes when an explanation slowly turns into an identity: I'm anxiously attached. This is just what I do in relationships.
I'm not sure our attachment works quite that neatly.
Attachment Isn't Something You Pick Out of Your Closet
I had a mentor who used to laugh whenever people talked about attachment styles. She would say it made attachment sound like something we walked into our closet and picked out for the day. Anxious today. Avoidant tomorrow. Secure for brunch.
She preferred the word strategy, and that distinction has stuck with me.
Most of us probably do have attachment strategies we reach for more readily than others. When a relationship feels uncertain, you might reach toward the other person, look for reassurance, become hyperaware of subtle changes in their behavior, or try harder to restore the connection. Someone else might retreat, become fiercely independent, intellectualize what they're feeling, or convince themselves they didn't really need the relationship in the first place. These strategies didn't come from nowhere. Somewhere along the way, they helped us manage the vulnerability of needing other people.
Thinking of them as strategies also leaves room for something the attachment-style conversation often misses: the person in front of us matters.
A person can become incredibly anxious with a partner who is inconsistent and feel remarkably secure with someone who is responsive and available. The same person who spent years chasing closeness in one relationship can find themselves pulling away in another. Someone who has always thought of themselves as avoidant can discover that there are relationships in which closeness doesn't feel nearly as threatening.
This doesn't mean our attachment histories disappear depending on who we're dating. Our histories absolutely matter. They shape what feels familiar to us, what we expect from other people, what kinds of relationships we're drawn toward, and what we tend to do when connection feels threatened. Still, attachment is happening between people. Whatever strategy we bring into a relationship is interacting with someone else's history, needs, fears, and strategies too.
I'm much more interested in what happens to you with this person than in deciding which attachment style you are.
Anxious Attachment Isn't the Opposite of Fear of Intimacy
One of the things I find particularly interesting about the way attachment has entered popular culture is how differently we talk about anxious and avoidant people. We love to shit on avoidants. The avoidant person becomes the one who is afraid of intimacy, won't commit, won't communicate, and keeps everyone at arm's length. The anxious person, meanwhile, gets positioned as the one who desperately wants intimacy and simply keeps having the bad luck of falling for people who can't provide it.
There is certainly truth in the idea that avoidant strategies create distance. I think we're missing something, though, if we assume that reaching relentlessly for closeness means there isn't also a fear of intimacy underneath it.
Anxious attachment can involve desperately wanting closeness while repeatedly reaching toward people who, somewhere beneath our conscious awareness, we already know cannot fully meet us there. The longing is completely real. So is the heartbreak, the anxiety, the desire to finally feel chosen, and the conviction that if this person would just come a little closer, everything inside of us could finally settle.
At the same time, there can be something strangely familiar about longing for someone who remains just out of reach. When so much of our energy is spent trying to get another person to come closer, we never have to fully confront what might happen if they actually did.
Because real intimacy is vulnerable in ways that longing for intimacy isn't.
Being deeply known means there is something to lose. It means expressing what we need without knowing how another person will respond. It means allowing ourselves to depend on someone without disappearing into them. It means receiving love rather than constantly trying to earn it, prove ourselves worthy of it, or convince someone else to give it to us.
Avoidant and anxious strategies can look completely opposite from the outside while protecting us from some of the same vulnerability underneath. One creates distance by stepping away from intimacy. The other can create distance by repeatedly reaching for intimacy where it isn't fully available.
I also wouldn't be fully transparent if I didn't acknowledge that avoidants aren't getting shit on for absolutely no reason. Not because someone is a terrible person for developing an avoidant attachment strategy. These strategies develop for a reason, and usually a pretty understandable one. The problem is that avoidance, by its nature, can make it much easier not to feel the relational impact of what you're doing. If your strategy for managing vulnerability is to disconnect, minimize, move on, or convince yourself the relationship wasn't that important anyway, you may never have to sit with the hurt you're leaving behind. Stereotypically speaking, people who rely heavily on anxious strategies tend to end up in therapy trying to figure out how to make the relationship work. People who rely heavily on avoidant strategies are often more likely to find a new relationship.
That distinction matters.... understanding where an attachment strategy came from doesn't erase its impact. Avoidance can be incredibly painful to be on the receiving end of, particularly when someone repeatedly exits relationships rather than examining the patterns they bring into them. We can have compassion for why a strategy developed while still expecting people to take responsibility for what that strategy does to others.
Secure Attachment Doesn't Mean Not Needing Anyone
I also think we've managed to turn secure attachment into a strangely individualistic ideal. The securely attached person in popular culture can start to sound like someone who is endlessly regulated, never particularly bothered by anyone else's behavior, requires very little reassurance, and is perfectly content to meet all of their own emotional needs.
That's not really the point.
We're relational creatures. Other people affect us. We want to know that the people we love are still there. We need responsiveness, reassurance, consistency, repair, affection, space, and connection in different amounts at different times. Being able to soothe ourselves is important, but secure attachment isn't the achievement of needing nobody.
For someone who tends toward anxious strategies, growth may have less to do with learning how to stop having needs and more to do with becoming increasingly honest about them. Can I know what I need without being ashamed of it? Can I ask for it directly rather than trying to secure it indirectly? Can I tolerate the vulnerability of hearing the answer? Can I pay attention to whether this relationship is actually capable of meeting me?
Those questions tell us much more than whether someone managed to become “less anxious.”
So, What Now?
The bad news is, we're probably going to have to start digging around in your childhood.
I know. You may have had a perfectly fine childhood. You love your parents. Nobody abandoned you in the woods. You have already been to therapy and talked about this. You understand why you are the way you are. Surely we can move on.
Unfortunately, you are not immune to this.
Attachment strategies develop in relationship, and our earliest relationships gave us our first experiences of what it meant to need someone, depend on someone, get close to someone, lose connection, and try to get it back. That doesn't require a terrible childhood or terrible parents. It requires being a human child dependent on other imperfect human beings.
The useful question isn't necessarily What happened to me? in search of some dramatic origin story. I'm more interested in what you learned. What happened when you needed comfort? What did you learn to do when someone you loved was upset with you? Was there room for your anger? Your sadness? Your dependence? What happened when you wanted more closeness than someone else did? What did love require of you?
Then we get to look at where those strategies are showing up now.
Who do you find yourself repeatedly drawn toward? What happens when someone pulls away? What happens when someone actually stays? Can you recognize what you need and ask for it directly? Can you tolerate another person having needs that are different from yours? What happens inside of you when intimacy isn't available, and perhaps even more importantly, what happens when it actually is?
The good news is that if attachment is relational rather than something fixed inside of us, we aren't stuck with whatever strategies we developed early on. New relationships give us new experiences. Therapy can give us new experiences. We can learn that closeness doesn't always require chasing, that space doesn't necessarily mean abandonment, and that needing someone doesn't have to mean losing ourselves.
So, are you anxiously attached? Sure, maybe, maybe even likely. You likely have some go-to anxious strategies. Most of us have attachment strategies we reach for when something important feels threatened.
I'd just be much more interested in understanding what yours are protecting you from, where you learned them, and what happens when you no longer need them in quite the same way.
That, to me, is much more interesting than finding out what style you are.
