My dear,
When you meet someone you really like, and when they make it clear that they really like you back, that's one of the best feelings ever (I get it). But if we’re being honest, you can sometimes be a bit quick about things. Quick to be in a lot of communication, to spend a lot of time together, to use the language of “we, us, and our,” and “boyfriend” or “girlfriend." Quick to get physical, to “choose” them, to call it a relationship, or partnership, or even love, and to peer all the way into a long and happy (imagined) future together.
The thing is, as an anxious attacher, you are already wired up to have stronger feelings - faster - and to bond deeper - sooner. And what this means is that the need for closeness, continuity, and security will almost surely start to come online faster for you than it will for them.
To be very clear: there is nothing wrong with that need. I’m only drawing your attention to when it shows up in the relationship. In an established partnership, we absolutely do need closeness, continuity, and security - and if those things falter in a big way, we can understandably feel destabilized and upset. Healthy interdependence is a good thing in relationships, but it takes time to establish. So if it’s only been a short while with your new person, it’s just too soon to ask them to be responsible to your wellbeing in that way.
What makes this all so hard is that you can’t see the cliff you’re running towards when you are both still so intoxicated by the falling-in-love drugs, when they are just as infatuated with you as you are with them. But as soon as you hit a speed bump of some kind, as soon as there’s a significant wobble or a gap in their presence or availability, it’s going to trigger insecurity and anxiety in you.
Because you are in the precarious position of being bonded and attached to someone you don’t actually know very well yet.
So you will feel compelled to reach out, initiate conversations “about us,” or somehow “fix” the disconnection, partly because you want to preserve the relationship itself of course, but also partly because you’re just in pain and you want it to go away. Soon, they will be so occupied fielding your offers and requests for connection that they won’t have much time to drop into themselves and initiate connection with you from their own desire. All of this will reveal to them just how strongly you feel, how deeply bonded you are, and that you need them to show up for you like a partner even though you’re not partners yet. That feels like smothering, and a lot of pressure - because at this juncture in the relationship, it is.
Though they may not be able to respond skillfully or gracefully, these behaviors are rightfully a red flag to them, because what you’re unintentionally and unknowingly communicating to them is this:
“I need you to ____, so that I can be okay inside myself.”
That’s not interdependence, that’s codependence: the inability to consistently maintain your own internal equilibrium, your basic sense of self and safety (and then grabbing onto someone else in an attempt to stabilize yourself). This is usually a symptom of unresolved wounding and unmet needs from early life (which, sadly, are usually reinforced by difficult relationships in adulthood). For those who wind up with anxious attachment patterns, it was often that their parents’ availability, love, and care was there sometimes, but not others. Small children experience that as a threat to their very existence, which makes sense given that they literally depend on their parents for their survival.
(And this is ultimately why anxious attachers tend to develop stronger feelings and bond more deeply at a faster pace: their nervous system has been waiting so long for someone to finally show up and give them the safety and security they legitimately needed as a child, but it doesn’t yet realize that they no longer need the same things in the same way. It’s also kind of like how a really, really hungry person would sit down to eat, or perhaps attack, a meal - which can feel pretty terrible for the person who’s being seen as the meal.)
In early life, we experience legitimate dependence: fully relying on others for our wellbeing. Ideally, that goes well, we don’t get the impression that our needs are a bother for others, and those needs are mostly met most of the time. That sets us up to develop independence in early adulthood: taking over the job of providing for those needs ourselves. And that’s just the thing for all folks who struggle with attachment, whether it’s anxious, avoidant, or disorganized: they have a hard time accurately discerning what their own needs are, which means they can’t meet them either. This precludes both full independence and interdependence.
So when they form an emotional attachment with another adult later on in life, and when that adult fails to provide consistent love, attention, and care (as they inevitably will), though they won’t consciously think it’s a threat to their survival, their nervous system will still respond as though it is. Thus the exaggerated fear responses and the panicked attempts to reestablish connection.
But for someone with a solid foundation of independence, the movement into interdependence sounds something like this: I don’t need you, I have needs and I’m choosing to rely on you for some of them (while also becoming someone you can rely on for some of yours). And when that person predictably falters, it’s not experienced as an existential threat because the nervous system knows that it can rely on itself for its survival. It may be frustrating, heartbreaking, or even temporarily destabilizing when someone we trust isn’t able to show up for us, but it won’t bring on the same level of panic as it would for someone with a more precarious internal equilibrium
Our interpersonal needs are natural and healthy, but nearly all of us have some amount of wounding around them as well - and intimacy will bring all of that to the surface whether you like it or not. So when you rush full-speed into intimacy, you’re likely to bring up some of the deepest, most vulnerable, and sometimes, the most wounded parts of yourself - and then you ask someone you don’t know very well to hold it for you and to fix it for you. And that is just never going to work.
So the real work for anxious attachers lies in the domain of healing those early wounds, consolidating an internally-generated sense of self, and learning to trust in their own strength and power to meet their own needs and continue surviving no matter what other people do or don’t do for them. It is also very much about learning how to choose people who are actually trustworthy, reliable, and also themselves capable of interdependence. It’s hard to recognize this in someone else when you don’t have much of it in yourself.
If you take the time to build up friendship, trust, and a deep knowing of one another, it’s like allowing the sapling to grow big and tall before you try to build a treehouse in it. Because It’s only the deep roots and strong foundation of established partnership that can hold everyone’s needs, vulnerabilities, and wounds in a good way.
And further, partner-ING is a skill that most of us need to improve on as well. And even if you think you are already good at partnering, you still need time to learn how to partner THEM and their unique makeup. You also have to be able to teach them how to partner you: how best to love you, how to see you, how to hear and understand you, etc. Neither of you came with a manual, and no matter what those falling-in-love drugs might tell you, we can’t actually read each other’s minds or intuit each other’s every need. There is no shortcut to fully and deeply understanding how to be with, how to love, and how to partner with a unique human being.
A lover is auditioning for one of the single most important roles in your life. It takes a very long time to really CHOOSE someone for that role. Just as it takes a long time to convert infatuation into love, it takes even longer to convert a relationship into a partnership. You need to see them in a wide variety of situations, meet their friends and family, walk with them through some of their life’s twists and turns, and experience them walking with you through some of yours. You need to have all those potentially-awkward conversations about family, money, sex, time, long-term goals, housing, just to name a few - the sometimes un-sexy, vulnerable, and uncomfortable work of braiding two lives into one. Because if you ask a new connection to do stuff that only a partnership can do… well, that’s likely going to be a rough road for you. Trust me, I’ve tried it about a hundred times.
