If you’re reading this, you might identify as either anxious or avoidant. And if you’re more anxious, you might be wondering why do I attract avoidant partners?
In case the concept is new for you, attachment styles are the strategies different people use to connect to people they care about and the needs they have in close relationships.
Early experiences in relationships with other people, starting with the dynamics someone observes in their family of origin in early childhood, teach people what they have to do to get close to people when they need them.
The ways that people try to get close to others when they are under stress and the underlying needs they express are categorized into 4 different types of attachment styles:
- Secure– send clear signals when they need their partner + have trust in them
- Avoidant attachment– have a hard time relying on others + uncomfortable getting too close
- Anxious attachment– fear they won’t be able to reach their partner + need a lot of reassurance
- Disorganized– send mixed messages of their needs + and have a hard time trusting
The most common pairing of romantic couples, is when one partner is anxious and the other is avoidant.
The Secure Relationship tackles the question of how these people find each other in the first place. I’m going elaborate on that wisdom, grounded in Emotionally Focused Therapy, and share with you why it’s almost inevitable that anxious and avoidant individuals find and attract one another.
Plus, I’ll give you some steps regarding what you can do if you find yourself in this pattern of relationship.
Why Do Anxious and Avoidant Attract?
Here are some of the components that lead to anxious and avoidants attracting one another.
Avoidant Partners Make Anxious Partners Feel Wanted
People with anxious attachment styles tend to have a deep emotional need to be wanted, seen, and important to someone. They may constantly wonder- why do I attract avoidant partners?
When avoidantly attached people pursue anxiously attached people at the beginning of the relationship, they can fulfill this need, making the anxiously attached partner feel special and unique in the eyes of the other.
People who are anxiously attached have often not experienced healthy, secure relationships in their lives. Those that offer consistent stability and assurance. As such, they don’t really know what to look for in a partner.
They may mistake the initial pursuit as love and care that will carry the relationship, only to realize that the sustainable support they need is a different need that the avoidant partner feels unequipped in providing.
Anxious Partners Make Avoidant Partners Feel More Alive
For avoidant partners, emotions can be so overwhelming that they actually haven’t felt a lot of their own experiences. These are people who don’t lean into closeness with others. Those who numb out their emotions with substances, and avoid expressing their thoughts and feelings.
When an avoidant partner links up with an anxious partner, the anxious partner might feel and express so much that the avoidant partner actually starts to feel, vicariously through them. It helps them to get a taste, albeit from a distance, of their own emotions and experiences. Which of course, is the central thread of feeling alive.
Avoidant Partners can Provide a sense of Stability
Anxious partners often feel so many emotions so frequently and have not learned how to organize, manage, or process them.
Anxious Partners Make Avoidant Partners Feel Worthy
Avoidant people often have a sense of not being enough, not being able to get it right, and not being able to fix or be useful.
When anxious partners offer their emotions and inner thoughts to avoidant partners, avoidant partners may read this as them having done something right, to be worthy of this openness.
The Reasons they Attracted to Each Other Become their problems
Eventually, avoidant partners become overwhelmed with the emotions and needs of anxious partners. Which deteriorates their sense of “getting it right.”
Likewise, anxious partners become deprived of the emotional validation and connection they need. This makes them feel more alone in the relationship.
They Both Push Security away
So we understand how anxious and avoidant attachment styles can attract at the onset. But what keeps either of these attachment styles from bonding with a securely attached person first?
Anxious partners tend to have an unworthy view of their self as deserving of love. When security comes along, it may feel foreign (or “boring”) to them and they reject it. They instead choose the person who can’t show up the way they need them to, but feels more familiar to dynamics they have experienced in their life.
An avoidant person used to avoidant relationships might be used to this feeling of others needing them and not knowing what to do about it. They aren’t comfortable, but they assume this is how relationships work. And they coast as long as they can, because deep down, they know they do not want to be alone.
Secure partners have experienced functional close relationships. As a result, they are uncomfortable with anxious, insecure, and overbearing partners, as well as numb and unengaged ones.
This all happens on the subconscious level. Meaning, no one says out loud or to themselves “I don’t want to be in that relationship because they present a secure pattern and that feels unfamiliar to me.” Instead, you will often hear people saying that secure partners feel “boring” or that they lack a “spark.”
Can Anxious and Avoidant Relationships Work?
If you are wondering why do I attract avoidant partners, hopefully the dynamic is starting to make sense.
The needs and tendencies of anxious and avoidant people create a pursuer distancer dynamic, where couples get stuck in negative patterns of communicating and neither get their needs met.
Attachment systems are deeply engrained, and they are unconscious. Most people do not have conscious awareness of the reasons they avoid or cling to others.
So the good news is, while these dynamics can be painful, they are fixable and can provide couples an opportunity to heal the way they show up in relationships.
How to Make an Anxious Avoidant Relationship Work
Here are tips on how to make an anxious-avoidant relationship work.
Know Your Own Attachment Style
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Carl Jung
The first step in making any change is to create awareness around the current state. When you feel yourself getting upset with your partner, pause and consider:
- What just happened? What triggered me?
- What am I feeling in my body? What sensations come up right before I react?
- What thoughts are going through my mind about them?
- What thoughts are going through my mind about myself?
- How am I feeling?
Your responses to the prompts above will start cueing your into your own attachment style. As your pattern becomes clear, you can make sense of why certain moments are upsetting to you and about what you need in those situations.
Name Your Communication Cycle
In relationships that have a lot of love and connection but feel like they aren’t working, you are likely bumping up against one another’s attachment styles.
Once you have a sense of your own style, work with your partner to understand theirs. Consider their communication tendencies, where they get overwhelmed, and how they react.
Understanding each of your attachment styles will allow you to put together the pieces into a cohesive narrative about the ways you trigger each other and how you get stuck in the same conversations, also known as your negative cycle.
This negative cycle guide will more intentionally walk you and your partner through your current pattern and give you tips on creating a new one.
Attend Therapy
The goal of learning about attachment styles is to create a new environment, one of security where both partners reasonably:
- Feel seen and heard
- Send clear signals about what they need
- Have their needs met
- Meet the needs of the other
Attachment styles are complex. And our own patterns can be difficult to see when we are so close to them.
A neutral, trained couples therapist will guide you and your partner to see the patterns that come up when you get triggered. And will be able to help you see the dynamics you can’t see yourself.
Therapy can help an anxious person find more calm and an avoidant partner become more expressive.
A therapist will also guide you to process your emotions, share with each other, and create a new, secure environment that will sustain and support both partners over time.
They will guide you in how to develop a secure attachment style, love and connection, individually and together.
How To Manage Anxious Attachment
You have tips for making a relationship work. Yet, a huge piece of the puzzle is working with your own system first. The more you can find safety in yourself, the more secure your relationships will be. That’s why learning how to heal anxious attachment style is so important.
If you lean anxious, your nervous system is often scanning for signs of closeness or distance. Anxious attachment does not mean you’re “too much.”
It means your system has learned to organize around your partners fear and fears abandonment. It learned to seek connection and closeness in order to feel safe, especially among uncertainty.
Track Your Nervous System
When anxious attachment is triggered, it can feel urgent and overwhelming. You may notice racing thoughts, tightness in your chest, or a strong impulse to reach out or seek reassurance.
This often shows up when you fear abandonment, even if nothing explicit has happened yet. Start by naming: “My attachment system is activated right now.” Label the changes in your body. This awareness will start to slow the system down.
Separate Emotional Needs From Demands
Anxious attachment often comes with real relational needs like reassurance, but they can get buried under protest behaviors like texting repeatedly, criticizing, or over-explaining.
Practice asking yourself: What am I actually needing right now: reassurance, closeness, comfort, or clarity? This helps you move from reaction to intentional communication so you can send your partner a more direct message.
Find Safety Internally
While reassurance from a partner can help, anxious attachment softens most when you learn to soothe yourself too.
Grounding practices, slowing your breath, movement practices like yoga, or placing a hand on your body can signal safety internally. Over time, this builds resilience so your nervous system isn’t entirely dependent on your partner’s responses.
Practice Direct Communication
Instead of hinting or asking practical questions with emotional subtext, practice naming your need directly.
For example: Rather than saying, “How could you not realize how rude it is to not answer me?”, try “I’m feeling scared and could really use some reassurance right now.”
Clear signals reduce confusion and the others’ need to defend, which will ultimately leave you feeling alone.
Learn Through Books
If you are interested in diving deeper into attachment theory and uncovering your own tendencies and style, here are some books I recommend:
Attend Therapy
Therapy methods like IFS therapy can help you explore the root of your anxious attachment.
Your therapist will guide you to reflect on where fears and beliefs originated in childhood or other impactful moments so that you can properly heal existing wounds and move forward with a present mind.
How To Date Someone With Anxious Attachment
Dating someone with anxious attachment often means dating someone who deeply values closeness and emotional connection, but whose nervous system gets activated easily.
Be Consistent
Reliability matters more than grand gestures. Following through, being predictable, and communicating changes clearly helps calm anxious attachment and reduces partners fear of being left.
Respond to Emotion First, Logic Second
Anxious partners usually need emotional acknowledgment first. Even if you disagree or don’t fully understand, starting with empathy (“That makes sense you’d feel that way”) helps them feel safe enough to settle. You can move into problem solving later.
Validate Their Need For Reassurance
Reassurance-seeking often comes from a place that is fearful, not intentionally manipulative. When reassurance is met with irritation or withdrawal, the anxious cycle intensifies. When it’s met with care, it often decreases over time.
How To Deal With Avoidant Attachment
If you have an avoidant attachment style, it doesn’t mean you don’t care about relationships. It means your nervous system learned early on that closeness can feel overwhelming, pressuring, or unsafe.
Avoidant attachment is organized around staying regulated by maintaining distance, autonomy, or control when emotions intensify.
The work isn’t about forcing yourself to be more emotional. It’s about understanding what closeness activates in you and slowly building tolerance for connection.
Observe Your Needs
Taking space can be a healthy way to regulate when emotions run high. For avoidant attachment, distance often helps calm the nervous system and restore a sense of control.
The key is learning to notice when space is helping you settle versus when it becomes a way to avoid discomfort altogether. You can practice staying connected while taking space by naming it (“I need a bit of time to settle, but I’m not leaving”) rather than going silent or shutting down.
Explore Your Discomfort With Closeness
Closeness often activates fears that aren’t obvious on the surface. You may notice thoughts like:
- I’m going to disappoint them
- I’ll be expected to fix this
- I’ll lose my independence
- I will fail
Instead of judging these reactions, get curious about them. Ask yourself what closeness has cost you in the past. Avoidant attachment often formed in environments where emotional needs felt burdensome, unsafe, or unmet, so distance became protective.
Build Tolerance Slowly
Avoidant attachment isn’t about a lack of emotion, it’s often about being flooded by emotion and therefore needing to numb. When feelings rise, the system deactivates to avoid overwhelm.
Rather than pushing yourself into deep emotional conversations, practice staying present in small ways. This might look like noticing a sensation in your body, naming one feeling instead of many, or remaining engaged for a few extra moments before pulling away. Capacity for closeness grows gradually.
Attend Therapy
Modern approaches to therapy like IFS and EMDR therapy can help you explore where emotional and relationship patterns stem from early in your life. Therapists can help rewrite unconscious beliefs that may be driving avoidant behaviors in a relationship.
How To Date An Avoidant Attachment Style
Dating an avoidant partner can feel confusing, especially if you value emotional closeness. Understanding their attachment strategy helps reduce personalization.
Below are highlights, and here are 11 more tips on how to date an avoidant attachment style.
Don’t Chase
Pursuing harder when an avoidant partner pulls back often escalates the cycle. Pausing, grounding yourself, and naming what you feel (instead of reacting) can help regulate both sides of the dynamic.
Communicate and Contain
Avoidant partners often miss indirect cues. Naming needs clearly, calmly, and without criticism increases the chance they can respond without feeling attacked or inadequate.
Notice the Pattern
Anxious and avoidant partners are often drawn to each other because they temporarily regulate each other’s systems. Over time, this can flip into chronic disconnection unless both partners work toward security. Awareness of this pattern is one of the most important steps toward change.
Relationships are the mirrors that help us all to see our own opportunities for growth- it’s how relationships work. Hopefully this context can help piece together why do I attract avoidant partners.
Whether you are anxious or avoidant, if you can both hold the perspective that the relationship is offering both of you a ground for healing and moving into emotional connection, the work will take you far.
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