Anxious Attachment Isn’t an Excuse to Be a Shitty Partner

In relationships, I’ve often felt anxiously attached. When I’m romantically involved with someone—even if they’re wonderfully reassuring—I become this worried, overthinking, needy version of myself. And up until recently, I’d use the idea of my “anxious attachment” to declare, “Well, this is just who I am.” Turns out, this doesn’t exactly fly in a healthy relationship.There have been many times during my current relationship where I’ve started arguments because my boyfriend didn’t text back fast enough or his tone seemed “off.” But it eventually got to a point where he basically told me that while he would make an effort to reassure me, it wasn’t his responsibility to deal with my anxious attachment more than I would. While the feelings that came up for me were real and valid, the way I was treating my partner as a result was unfair.“Attachment styles are legitimate and important to understand, but they are also much more complicated than simply categorizing someone,” licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Rachel Rengifo tells Cosmopolitan. “It shouldn't become another label we use to define ourselves or other people.”So while your avoidant style may make you want to ghost your partner and your anxious attachment may want to make you put a tracker on them—it’s not an excuse to actually go ahead and do that.How Not to Use Your Attachment StyleUnderstanding your attachment style can be helpful to an extent, like when it helps you notice patterns about yourself: what happens to you when you feel vulnerable, when someone gets close to you, or when you’re afraid someone might leave or reject you. Dr. Rengifo explains that this is constructive when it makes you more curious about how you behave and react in your closest relationships and why those patterns might be there.“Attachment theory gives us a really useful framework for understanding those patterns,” she explains. But it becomes detrimental when the label starts to become more significant to you than understanding the patterns behind it.Knowing that you’re acting a certain way because you’re anxiously attached to your partner doesn’t magically make that behavior healthy.“It can also become an excuse for behaviors that hurt another person,” Dr, Rengifo says. Knowing that you’re acting a certain way because you’re anxiously attached to your partner doesn’t magically make that behavior healthy or absolve us of responsibility for how it affects another person—especially because your attachment style isn’t exactly an end-all-be-all explanation of who you are.Research shows that people can experience attachment differently across relationships. “Someone might feel very secure in their friendships and have meaningful, trusting connections, while feeling more avoidant in romantic relationships and struggling with intimacy and closeness,” Dr. Rengifo says. So you may be in fact just reserving your shitty behaviors for your partner—which isn’t very cool of you.Navigating Your Attachment Style Successfully In a RelationshipIf you’re taking note of your attachment style and the way you act as a result, one of the healthiest things you can do is to share those findings with your partner.“Your partner is not meant to understand or respond perfectly 100 percent of the time, but having a sense of what gets activated for you in your relationship—and being able to talk about it—can really bring you closer together,” Dr. Rengifo says.For example, if you see yourself as more of an avoidant attachment style, you should let your partner know how vulnerable you may feel in a relationship. You want to give them more of an understanding as to why you may become defensive or be tempted to pull away.But of course, this still doesn’t mean that your partner is responsible for fixing this. “It isn't fair to say, ‘This is my attachment style, so you need to behave in a certain way so I never feel uncomfortable,’” Dr. Rengifo explains. “Instead, attachment can give couples a language for understanding what happens between them and figuring out how they can respond differently together.”Sure, this is going to take a lot of discussion, practice, and understanding—for both you and your partner. It’s important to try to meet each other halfway while knowing it still may get messy from time to time.Listen, I understand how disconcerting it can feel to become a totally different person in a relationship, especially when you realize that your brain has go-to unhealthy behaviors for whenever you get close to someone. But your attachment style—whether it’s anxious, avoidant, or secure—does not dictate the kind of relationship you’re going to have. That, my friend, is up to you and your partner.“Ultimately, that kind of mutual understanding and responsibility is what creates deeper connection,” Dr. Rengifo says.