Anxious Lovers: Understanding Attachment Anxiety
The internet is a buzz with articles on anxiety and attachment. Okay, well, perhaps it is my highly biased news feed giving me exactly what I want. I was raised in a puritan environment. Parents that never separated, seldom argued, and always, at least appeared to always, act in unison. I was initial exposed to attachment anxiety, so I thought, reading Bowlby’s attachment theory in my first college psychology class. I vaguely knew abuse and neglect existed from stories that somehow penetrated my protected childhood. In general, I knew that the world was not always kind, relationships weren’t always perfect, and love sometimes hurts. However, with a clearer view, I discovered I was an anxious lover.
The college textbook theories eventually jumped to life. A long difficult marriage, divorce, and late return to dating was a shocking exposure to reality. I discovered my own insecurities and the powerful influence they played in the unfolding of my life story. Twenty-five years in law-enforcement, with several years dedicated to family crimes, also broadened my knowledge, piqued curiosity, and washed away childhood ignorance.
​The world is full of imperfect relationships. Many people blindly land in commitments that hurt rather than heal, finding themselves trapped between fear of abandonment, emotional abuse, and glorious hopes of change. The anxious lover stays in relationships they should leave, runs from opportunities they should pursue, and commit to people they marginally know. Their romantic anxieties not only disrupt love, but also self-perpetuate, creating more fear and less security.
Key Definition:
Anxious lovers refers to individuals who experience a form of attachment insecurity characterized by a fear of abandonment, a desire for closeness, and heightened sensitivity to perceived threats to the relationship. Anxious lovers often exhibit a tendency to seek reassurance and validation from their partners, while also being prone to feelings of inadequacy and a strong need for emotional intimacy. This attachment style can influence the way individuals approach and navigate romantic relationships.
Relationships and Wellness
We rely on relationships throughout our lives. Connections create, more than anything else, the experience of living. Our dependence on primary relationships (parents, lovers and children) create strong emotions. John Bowlby, one of the early contributors to attachment theories, wrote:
“In high degree indeed, a person’s whole emotional life—the underlying tone of how he feels—is determined by the state of these long-term, committed relationships” (Bowlby, 1988).
As long as these primary relationships are running smoothly, we are content; when connection is threatened, we are jealous, anxious and even angry; when we act in ways that are destructive to the connection, we feel shame and guilt; and when the connection is broken, we feel sorrow and despair (Bowlby, 1988).
Insecure Attachment Styles and Depression and Anxiety
Many studies have shown that insecure attachment styles are associated with depression and anxiety. In a 2012 study, insecure attachment styles were discovered to have a broad connection to psychopathology beyond depression and anxiety (Jinyao et al., 2012). The anxious lover has a variety of challenges arising from the foundations of their turbulent attachment style.
Daniel Goleman describes the link between relationships and well-being as “a double-edged sword.” He explains:
“Nourishing relationships have a beneficial impact on our health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies” (Goleman, 2007, p. 10).
The feeling affects of interaction resonate loudly within our being from infancy to the grave. The stings and joys that accompany early primary interactions form a working model that we employ on all future relationships.
​We adapt early to the given environment of childhood to extract as much joy and minimal pain from the situation. These patterns engrained deep in our psyche are both self-perpetuating and stubborn. Typically, without major interventions, a secure child grows into a secure adult; an anxious ambivalent child grows into an anxious ambivalent adult; and an anxious avoidant child grows into an anxious avoidant adult.
See Attachment Styles for more on this topic
Childhood Impact on Attachment
We internalize the healthy or chaotic Childhood environments. These adaptations mold our perceptions of future relationships, creating a foundation to understand our adult connections. Those who had chaotic and inconsistent childhood relationships approach adult relationships differently than those that had consistent living relationships. The situations forces the child to extract as much nourishment as possible from the impoverished environments. Accordingly, they place protective boundaries to limit hurt and engage in active tactics to fulfill emotional and physical needs.
While more formable in childhood, ‘attachment injuries‘ can occur in any relationship at any age. When these injuries are severe, they disrupt our sense of self, motivating a deployment of defensive protective strategies. The injury represents an occasion when we intensely need the other for comfort and the other wasn’t emotionally available or responsive (Gottman, 2011).
​The emotionally parched history of anxious lovers creates an array of fears. The anxious lover’s history of unfulfilled needs leaves them frightened that their needs will be dismissed in the present. Accordingly, they demand constant presence of lovers to calmly cuddle their frightened inner child to reassure and comfort them. The frequency of these demands, unfortunately, create constant opportunity for more attachment injuries—a harrowing and self-perpetuating cycle.
Anxious Attachment​
​The anxiously attached must struggle with the diverging paths between healthy behaviors and misguided feelings pushing for protection. The experiences with relationships has taught them that emotional needs must be bitterly fought for with war like tactics.
It’s impossible not to feel anxiety when each moment is a battle to gain approval and avoid disapproval. The world of relationships is confusing, exciting angst in a continual nightmare of attachment. The mind constantly swirling with fear of rejection while the heart yearns for connection. The overburdened mind of anxious lovers quickly turns to disconnection, clinginess, anger and jealousy. But this quiver of arrows determined to force love has a flawed design that only creates destruction.
Anxious Lovers and Emotional Swings
The dramatic swings from elation to biting fear characterize anxious love. The extremities of emotions motivate unhealthy reactions—abstaining from love, fleeing from connection, manipulating attention, or settling for non-threatening and unfulfilling partners.
Carl Hindy, Ph.D., J. Conrad Schwartz, Ph.D., and Archie Brodsky conducted extensive research on anxious and obsessive attachments. Their book, If This is Love, Why do I Feel So Insecure?, is an enlightening and extensive examination of the topic. They describe the emotional roller-coaster ride of romantic insecurity as a “tempestuous experience.” Involving both “excitement, joy and sexual arousal” and “distress, fear, shame, anger, contempt, and disgust” (Hindy et al., 1990).
Behaviors necessary to build love seem counterintuitive to anxious lovers. Giving attention, affection, and acceptance while opening up to vulnerability would have been disastrous in their chaotic past. Feeding the relationship with necessary trust and individual freedoms is nightmarish when we are starving. Only through the painful march through the imposing desert of vulnerability with a healthy partner can the anxiously attached attached find the emotionally rewarding relationship they desire.
See Building Love for more on this topic
Anxious Lovers and Belonging Needs
Taking care of our own needs first makes much more sense from the narrow view of fear where the threat of abandonment looms. Anxious lovers lives in a lonely unfulfilling cocoon of protections, gnawing through the fortifications. However, most can’t abandon romantic relationships all together. They need the security of belonging. Staying with broken relationships is the only way to fill the connections they desperately seek.
John Cacioppo (1951-2018) and William Patrick, experts on the science of social connection and loneliness, wrote:
“Given the special importance of ‘other human beings’ as a category reflected in our neural wiring, it makes sense that the most basic rituals of human societies everywhere reflect the importance of social context” (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008).
Anxious lovers often misconstrues the cause of their anxiety, blaming a partner for triggering the emotions. Certainly, it’s possible. Some lovers provoke anxiety. Their lack of consistency, purposely withholding of love, and non-committed connection is worthy of worry. The inconsistent lover has mastered the art of periodic rewards, driving maddening fluctuations between hopeful feelings of love and desperation of abandonment.
​The broken love maps of anxious lovers make navigating these differences impossible without help. Healthy relationships effectively mesh consistency with flexibility, allowing for unsuspected deviations, while keeping them within manageable boundaries. Trust falls within these continuums of consistency and flexibility.
See Blaming Our Partner for more on this topic
Strengthening Relationship Bonds
To strengthen bonds, a couple must work through the deviations. Many years ago, I intervened in a heated exchange between an anxious lover and his girlfriend. She returned home from work an hour late (deviation). He was livid (a response to his anxiety). She explained that work was busy, and she had to work overtime. Fear that she was cheating, he screamed, “I have to know.” His fear of abandonment overwhelmed his system, leaving no room for trust. There is no way to always “know.” If knowing is the only path to relieve the anxiety, then all current and future relationships are doomed to fail.
A mourning young man, recently left by another potential lover, wrote to Psychology Today’s relationship expert. He explained that he is insecure in relationships and this insecurity tends to create the failure he desperately seeks to avoid. He needed help. Her response was blunt but on point. Hara Estroff Marano honestly replied, “Insecurity is an unattractive trait” (Marano, 2013, p. 38).
When early interactions with a new potential partner are marred with insecure behaviors, a secure person seeking a mutually fulfilling relationship, typically pulls back. The overwhelming demands to quell the seemingly never-ending storms leaves the less anxious lover’s needs unheard. Displays of confidence and self-sufficiency broadcast a more hopeful possibility of a mutually benefitting connection, where trust and vulnerability can eventually be integrated.
See Relationship Vulnerability for more on this topic
Anxious Lovers and Abusive Partners
The anxious lover’s style of loving limits partner choices, often attracting other anxiety ridden lovers and narcissistic predators. These romantic choices have power to further spoil development, creating environments that are not well-enough to support growth, eventually leading to another anxiety filled ending that further mars security. The abandoned lover is left to recruit a new level of ego protecting defenses just to survive.
Predators have a knack for coming on strong. Handsome or beautiful and full of romance. They are full of adoration and non-stop contact. This is exactly what the anxious lover feeds on. They feel rescued from a life-long battle of not being good enough. According to Noelle Nelson, Ph.D., an American clinical psychologist, this is a warning sign of a narcissistic predator—a dangerous lover (Nelson, 1997). Once in the predator’s snares, the whirlwind lover transforms, insensitive to needs, pushing against boundaries, and manipulating with emotional abuse and often violence.
See Leaving a Narcissist for more on this topic
Two Anxious Partners
When two anxious lovers embark on a relationship, their initial mutual obsession relieves much of the anxiety. They also move quickly, proclaiming the discovery of a soul mate and forever Love. They rush into commitment, perhaps to secure a relationship before their shame is exposed. The total immersion in love appears to be the cure to their attachment ailments. It feels good. It feels like they finally acquired what they always wanted.
​However, these instant relationships are ripe for nasty surprises. When conflict arises, which inevitably happens in all relationships, the noxious anxiety returns, creating a difficult (but not unsurmountable) challenge for those easily taxed with relationship fears. The emotionally laden responses bounce back and forth between the two anxious lovers, triggering each partner’s sensitivity to abandonment. Anxious lovers often express their anxiety through anger that quickly progresses to contempt and disgust.
Associated Concepts
- Adverse Childhood Experiences: These refer to potentially traumatic events that occur during childhood (0-17 years). These experiences can include various forms of abuse, neglect, witnessing violence, and growing up in a household with mental health or substance use problems.
- Attachment Trauma: This refers to the psychological and emotional distress caused by disruptions in the formation of secure, nurturing relationships during early childhood, particularly within the context of the primary caregiver.
- Risk Regulation Model: This model proposes individuals have an internal regulation systems that individuals use to navigate the intense conflicting demands between self-protecting security and desires for security and belonging.
- Emotional Safety: This refers to the feeling of being secure, supported, and comfortable expressing one’s thoughts and feelings without fear of judgment or rejection. It encompasses trust, empathy, open communication, and the absence of emotional harm or manipulation.
- Entangled Relationships: These refer to relationships where the relationship impairs and prevents growth of the partner. Healthy relationships expand and encourage growth in the partner.
- Fear of Engulfment: This refers to a dynamic in relationships where one individual feels overwhelmed or suffocated by the other’s excessive attention, control, or dependency. This can lead to a loss of personal identity and autonomy, as the individual feels consumed by the relationship.
- Love and Fear: This refers to the opposing emotions experienced by high relationship anxiety during attachment processes. When someone suffering from anxious attachment falls in love, it is also accompanied by intense fear of losing that love.
A Few Words by Psychology Fanatic
A better approach is to filter perspective partners, limiting the probability of a hurtful mismatch. By fighting the urge to quickly commit, slow down and learn. Let’s return to my earlier story of the anxious lover that reached to Psychology Today for advice. Following Morano’s initial bluntness, she provides a treasure of helpful direction to this struggling young man. She follows with this astute wisdom:
“What is universally sexy is the opposite of insecurity, confidence, and it is one of those things that can only be demonstrated, not declared” (Marano, 2013).
Relationships are powerful forces for forming a healthy psyche. They strengthen wellness or bolster pathologies. If our past has complicated this defining force, we need help to bring us back, clearing our vision of ourselves, others and the involved emotions, so we can find people that lift rather than destruct.
​As for me and my anxieties with attachment, I slowed down. I painfully backed out of ill-matched relationships until I found someone who could provide love necessary for development; and I could provide the love necessary for her development. The process was slow and sometimes painful, confronting and separating demons from the past from emotions in the present. However, under the right conditions, we update our love maps, integrating a healthier model of love where we can find trust, not being hurt in vulnerability and able to enjoy the blessings of security.
Last updated: December 6, 2025
​Resources:
Bowlby, John (1988). A Secure Base. Basic Books; Reprint edition. ISBN-10: 0465075975 APA Record: 1988-98501-000
(Back to Article)
Cacioppo, John; Patrick, William (2008). Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN: 978-0-393-33528-6; APA Record: 2008-07755-000
(Back to Article)
Goleman, Daniel (2007). Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. Bantam; NO-VALUE edition. ISBN-10: 055338449X; APA Record: 2006-13172-000
(Back to Article)
Gottman, John M. (2011). The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples. W. W. Norton & Company; Illustrated edition. ISBN-10: 0393707407; APA Record: 2011-06848-000
(Back to Article)
Hindy, Carl; Schwarz, J. Conrad; Brodsky, Archie (1990). If This Is Love, Why Do I Feel So Insecure? Learn How to Deal With Anxiety, Jealousy, and Depression in Romance—and Get the Love You Deserve! Fawcett; 1st Ballantine Books Ed edition. ISBN-10: 0449218597
(Back to Article)
Jinyao, Y., Xiongzhao, Z., Auerbach, R., Gardiner, C., Lin, C., Yuping, W., & Shuqiao, Y. (2012). Insecure Attachment as a Predictor of Depressive and Anxious Symptomatology. Depression and Anxiety, 29(9), 789-796. DOI: 10.1002/da.21953
(Back to Article)
Marano, H. E. (2013, July/August). Undone by Insecurity. Psychology Today, 46(4), 38. Website: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201307/unconventional-wisdom-undone-insecurity
(Back to Article)
Nelson, Noelle (1997) Dangerous Relationships: How to Identify and Respond to the Seven Warning Signs of a Troubled Relationship. Da Capo Press. ISBN-13: 9780738204659
(Back to Article)