Anxiously attached and afraid I'll never find love.

December 24, 2023 7:44 PM

I'm a 39-year old anxiously attached female and I feel like I'm never going to find a partner who is right for me, and years of toxic relationships with the wrong kinds of guys has really destroyed my sense of trust. I fell in love with this guy who I thought was good for me, he was sweet and nerdy, and things were going well but the moment he sensed I was falling for him, I sensed him pushing me away. I can't stop obsessing over what I did wrong.

I'm worried that my anxious attachment style will keep scaring people away who might have otherwise committed to me. I feel like I text too much or want too much.
This makes me hate myself and lowers my self esteem. I wish I were more avoidant, but I'm not wired that way. I feel so damaged. I used to be more hopeful about love but at this age, the only guys left to date are just as damaged as me.

posted by tabertooths to Human Relations (16 answers total)

How open are you to challenging the premise of attachment styles as a way to understand relationships?

There are criticisms of that approach. But I'm not sure if you'd find that helpful.
posted by Zumbador at 8:17 PM on December 24, 2023 [11 favorites]

the only guys left to date are just as damaged as me

Gently: this is a very harmful mindset in general and an unkind way to think about yourself. Being in a couple doesn’t inherently mean a person is “less damaged.” We all have our flaws and we all have our baggage, whether or not we are partnered. Successfully finding love is often about dumb luck. The narrative that folks who aren’t in relationships have something terribly wrong with them, while folks who are in relationships do not, perpetuates a falsehood that does real damage to the self-worth of single people.

The above isn’t at all to chastise you. There is a strong cultural narrative shoring up that falsehood, supported by centuries of patriarchy. It’s not your fault you feel this way, but it simply isn’t true.

I would encourage you to read Attached and It’s Not You if you haven’t, and to find a therapist with whom you can talk about these feelings and your attachment fears. I’m sorry, I know how you feel and exactly how hard it is to want a partner when you do not have one.
posted by sevensnowflakes at 8:19 PM on December 24, 2023 [13 favorites]

Response by poster: @zumbador - I know that attachment theory is just one framework, and I'm open to thinking through others. Perhaps it's self-fulfilling though?
@sevensnowflakes, I've read Attached but not It's Not You, I will check that one out.
posted by tabertooths at 8:29 PM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Look, I'm probably not going to find love either, but it's not my attachment style, it's more like there's just not that many good dudes out there compared to good ladies, and you have to get lucky. (I note my mother did not get lucky until age 67.) Per reading about attachment styles, most men who are hopping back into the dating pool over and over again are going to be the avoidantly attached ones, so you'll be running into those people again and again. Securely attached guys probably won't be in the pool for all that long. Avoidants are going to keep dating and dumping and dating and dumping no matter what the woman does. You didn't drive him away, he drove himself away. Avoidants vaguely kind of think the "right woman" is going to solve their date-n-dump urges and that's why they keep going through women like TP in hopes that some magic woman cures that, but that never happens.

If the right guy ever comes along, he won't be put off by your, god forbid, wanting to text more often. Optimally you want a guy who isn't put off by you being you. If you wanting affection and love turns a guy off, then fuck him.

I haven't the faintest idea how you find a decent one other than at some point you get lucky, but it's probably them and not you, if that helps any.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:43 PM on December 24, 2023 [19 favorites]

Im currently really enjoying the YouTuber Crappy Childhood Fairy. A lot of her premise is that we subconsciously seek out relationships with people that are emotionally unavailable. Maybe you didn’t do anything wrong except pick the wrong person for you, and maybe if that happens a lot it’s worth reviewing your “picker” so to speak. I hope you get something useful out of that
posted by eastboundanddown at 10:35 PM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

My understanding of attachment style is that it is not a fixed thing but a dynamic that occurs with another person. For example, my ex boyfriend was avoidant and I was anxious. This was a dynamic that occurred between us. At other times and with other partners, I was the avoidant one. When I met my husband, everything clicked into place. He was secure and I was secure. I don't think that labelling yourself 'anxious' is that useful. I think it is more useful to consider why you are anxious with certain types of partners (who are more than likely displaying avoidant behaviours).
posted by thereader at 11:32 PM on December 24, 2023 [17 favorites]

The strongest relationships are first based on friendship. If you don't see your partner as a friend you can tell your deepest secrets too, then maybe it's time to move on.

Is he your friend?
posted by Great Lakes Unlimited at 3:52 AM on December 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you wanting affection and love turns a guy off, then fuck him.

Or, better, don't.
posted by flabdablet at 6:06 AM on December 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm a 40 year old avoidant guy who is put off by women who strongly want an attachment. For me a big part of the problem is the implicit pressure to be "the right guy". I am very anxious about hurting other people, so if they obviously have high expectations for me and I feel like I can't meet them, I sometimes push people away. In working to get better at this but it's hard to change my automatic reactions.

So my advice would be to do things that lower the pressure, both on yourself and on the other person. There are a lot of ways to do this and it depends on the individual relationship. For me I like to talk about this kind of thing explicitly so someone saying "I know I can get a bit anxious about attachment but I'm working on it" would help a lot, but some people don't like that and do better with self deprecating jokes. Setting up a less formal relationship can help, maybe starting as a friendship+sex instead of aiming for a Serious Relationship.

The goal is to lower expectations and pressure, without lowering standards or ending up with a liar who takes advantage of you. Any relationship that makes both people happier/more successful than they would be alone is a good one, even if it doesn't check all of the boxes to be a stereotypical romantic relationship. I feel like the entire concept of "the right guy/the one/soulmate" sets expectations that make relationships harder and I would focus on looking for someone who you can be happy with as there are plenty of them out there. Dating gets harder as we get older but it doesn't suddenly get impossible at some arbitrary date.
posted by JZig at 7:55 AM on December 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: One thing I'd do is consider attachment styles a sort of blunt instrument that gives you a general category for something you've done in the past but not a diagnosis like a medical one that says "this is an immutable thing about you that will determine how you have to do things forever." Anxiously attached people find love and keep it. It happens. If we're to give credence to the popular book about it, it's the most common attachment style and if it were fatal to relationship formation, there would not be a lot of relationships out there. Don't get trapped in this idea/self-concept.
posted by less-of-course at 10:03 AM on December 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: @less-of-course thank you for your perspective, you're exactly the kind of guy I've dated. I never go into the relationship with any expectations, because you know, you never know, but when I get to know someone I can get attached and that's when things start moving faster for me, emotionally. Some guys are ok with that, some are less ok with it and it scares them off. I am trying to pace myself and date multiple people at once but that has backfired bc each of the men I was honest with about that was put off by that. As for friends with benefits, that's usually a pretty one-sided situation and imo not sustainable for more than a month. But these are just my opinions. You will surely differ.
posted by tabertooths at 11:34 AM on December 25, 2023

Best answer: I’m really sorry this is something you’re going through. I recently took an adult attachment assessment and came out in the 90th percentile for anxious attachment which helped explain a lot of the dysfunctional dynamics I have experienced in past relationships. I honestly had no clue how skewed some of my own assumptions and mental frameworks were.

Early life attachment experiences have been shown to have potentially profound impacts on adult relationships.

I lean more towards academic and scientific rather than more woo/intuitive stuff so feel free to take with a grain of salt. There are many many ways to view this kind of thing and no one explanation has to work for everyone in every context.

Chris Fraley is a psychology researcher who studies adult attachment and his research (peer reviewed and replicated) has shown that adults can change their attachment styles to be less anxious and more secure with journaling as one intervention that can really help.

Here’s a link to a summary of some of his research on adult attachment and I recommend checking out some of his resources and assessments on ways to become less anxious in your attachments. Something that has been helpful for me is realizing how my anxious behavior actually can fuel negative patterns, so I’m working on ways to be more mindful of those destructive self-defeating thoughts and feelings.

http://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm
posted by forkisbetter at 12:42 PM on December 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Best answer: You're meeting men who are not right for you if they aren't OK with 1. honesty about dating others when you're still in the getting to know you stage. That's actually good that they are scared off so that you don't have to waste time with this type of guy anymore. Even if you aim toward monogamy, someone who isn't OK with you dating multiple people at once can be a red flag and different red flags at that. Of course, there can come a point after a month or two of solid dates with one person where you decide where you want to put more energy in. But at the first or second date, that's a huge red flag.

Read a book called How To Be Single and Happy by Jennifer Taitz. It's worth it. Good luck.
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 1:25 PM on December 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you everyone for your replies. I feel less alone.
posted by tabertooths at 8:57 PM on December 26, 2023

Just as a thought, maybe don't tell guys you're dating more than one at a time. I'm poly-friendly and good lord, people in general seem to assume you're being monogamous from date one somehow and I'm not sure if that's something you should admit to on date one. A lot of dates are disposable anyway.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:04 PM on December 27, 2023

just popping in to agree with a sentiment above that a) attachment styles (admittedly a CONSTRUCT, yes at times a useful and or interesting one/angle, but ..just a construct!) are NOT fixed.. I really really really think this is a dark alley that the whole attachment theory world tends to go down wayyyy to often - it's not like having an attachment style is the same as having brown eyes or wearing size 10 shoes. not only is it changeable, as someone above put it, with effort, it is also NOT AT ALL FIXED across all relationships! I think approach/avoid or distancer/pursuer dynamics in individual relationships at particular moments in time makes total sense and I can get behind it.. but this idea that each of us has one immutable attachment style same as we are like 5'7" or something seems bananas to me. Some of the studies that the attachment lens began with looked at infants and children with extremely disorganized attachment due to the trauma of being raised in orphanages without much human contact.. that's a pretty different starting point compared to where some folks using the language and vernacular of this research have taken it all.

There are attachment quizzes out there that evaluate your style in a four quadrant system based on how you answer questions vis a vis key people in your life. I can try to find the link. But even this is kind of.. silly.. because let's face it, all of this is self assessment - and we all know which answers are going to yield which hat sorting..

Psychologists have two different inventories they use to assess this formally.. both just be administered by a trained professional and one is really long (like.. maybe hundreds of questions) and another newer one is blinded and not chiefly word based -- it has the subject look at a series of narrative drawings with people and describe what's happening in them , then the trained psychologists attempts to infer attachment styles from there. everyone trained to do these assessments has a PhD in their field as far as I know. I will do my best to come back and post links to this content.. but .. and I say as someone who *does* get a lot from non-academics who are theorizing and expounding in this space .. take some but leave the rest. overly identifying with one of four attachment styles to the point that we internalize it as a deeply fixed trait.. humans are just too complex for that, I feel, and, if there is a degree to which it can usefully done, I don't think we ourselves are the best authority based on short quizzes for lay people to self-take. I mean, each their own. and I really do gets its utility as a construct for describing a dynamic in a particular relationship at a particular moment.. but beyond that I think it can really be a recipe for a self fulfilling prophecy, for one, and for not seeing the actions of others around us very clearly, for another - we'd be rightfully more vulnerable to this if we had tricky families of origin or were scapegoats, etc etc. And there's a way in which, for folks who tend to keep themselves on a very short leash and be self critical, this attachment stuff can turn into just another way to do that.

There's a concept out there too, recently, in the field, that some of us might be a bit prone to over-control .. i'll find a link for this one too, but where i'm going with this is.. it's helpful in life to imagine that if we just fix ___ thing about ourselves, then ___ thing in the world wouldn't happen to us. The dilemma is .. some things that are happening have nothing to do with us, however we are, or have much more to do with the other person, and so, they will happen anyway. very scary, but/and and all we can try to do is figure out how to stay grounded in our own stories and perspectives.. which.. really sucks.

I'll post this now in the interest of not-perfectionism, and hopefully get back with some links. i'm a little under the weather and not at my most cogent but.. hope this helps and makes some sense..
posted by elgee at 11:30 AM on January 5