Anxious Attachment in Dating: Why Your Nervous System Hijacks the First Few Dates

Staring at an unanswered text after a good date? Tell Figlet what you sent and what you are afraid it means, and it will help you settle before you send another.

You matched. You went on a first date. It was great. Maybe even electric. And now you’re sitting with your phone in your hand, staring at a text you sent forty-five minutes ago that still hasn’t been answered.

Your chest is tight. Your thoughts are spiraling. You’re already drafting a follow-up message in your head, something casual enough to not seem desperate but pointed enough to get a response. You’re scanning their social media. You’re replaying the date in your mind, searching for the moment you said the wrong thing.

Sound familiar? If so, you might be dealing with anxious attachment in dating, and I want you to know something: this is not a character flaw. It’s a survival strategy. One that was wired into your nervous system long before you ever swiped right on anyone.

I’m Figs O’Sullivan, a licensed marriage and family therapist with over 17 years of experience. I work with couples every day at Empathi, and I’ve spent my career studying what happens when attachment systems collide. Most of the articles you’ll find on anxious attachment focus on what happens inside committed relationships. This one is different. I want to talk about what happens before that. I want to talk about dating, specifically, and why the dating phase is uniquely designed to activate every anxious attachment wound you carry.

What Is Anxious Attachment in Dating (and Why Dating Makes It Worse)?

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Let me start with a concept I come back to constantly in my clinical work: in calm weather, everyone looks securely attached.

That’s worth sitting with. When things are going well, when the texts are flowing, when the dates are happening, when there’s novelty and excitement and dopamine, your attachment system is quiet. It doesn’t need to activate. You feel good. You feel confident. You might even think, “I’ve done the work. I’m finally secure.”

If you are trying to pace that early stretch, I wrote about how many dates before a relationship usually feels right, and what your body is really asking for.

And then the weather changes.

A text goes unanswered. A date gets rescheduled. They seem a little distant. They mention an ex. They take six hours to respond when yesterday it was six minutes. And suddenly your nervous system is on fire, and you’re behaving in ways that confuse even you.

This is anxious attachment in dating, and it’s not about being “too much” or “too needy.” It’s about your nervous system interpreting ambiguity as danger. Because here’s the thing about dating that makes it particularly brutal for people with anxious attachment: dating is almost entirely ambiguity.

In a committed relationship, you have agreements. You have history. You have a shared understanding (even if it’s imperfect) of where you stand. In dating, you have almost none of that. You’re building a bridge in the dark with someone who might or might not be holding the other end. For a nervous system that’s wired to scan for signs of abandonment, that level of uncertainty is not just uncomfortable. It’s a five-alarm fire.

The Biology Behind the Panic

I want to explain what’s actually happening in your body when anxious attachment gets activated during dating, because understanding the biology changes everything.

Your attachment system is not a personality quiz result. It’s a survival mechanism. It lives in your limbic system, the part of your brain that’s been keeping humans alive for hundreds of thousands of years. And its primary function is simple: keep you connected to the people you depend on for survival.

When you were an infant, this system was literal life or death. If your caregiver didn’t respond, you would die. Your brain learned early and fast what it needed to do to get a response. Some babies learned that reaching harder, crying louder, and escalating the protest brought the caregiver back. Those babies developed an anxious attachment strategy.

Fast forward to adulthood. You’re sitting across from someone at a wine bar, and they check their phone mid-sentence. Your rational brain knows this means nothing. But your limbic system just picked up a signal: this person is pulling away. And it does what it’s always done. It sounds the alarm.

I describe this in my clinical work as the nervous system building a “time machine.” When your attachment system fires, it doesn’t just react to the present moment. It time-travels back to the original wound, the first time you reached for someone and they weren’t there. It merges past and present, and suddenly you’re not reacting to a slow text. You’re reacting to every moment of abandonment your body has ever recorded.

This is why your reaction feels so disproportionate. It’s not about the text. It was never about the text.

The Relentless Lover: How Anxious Attachment Shows Up on Dates

In the Empathi framework, I call the anxious attachment strategy “The Protester” or “The Relentless Lover.” Here’s why.

The person with anxious attachment is, at their core, someone who believes that love requires constant proof. Not because they’re insecure in a superficial sense, but because their nervous system learned early that connection could disappear at any moment. So they protest the distance. They reach. They pursue. They fight for closeness with an intensity that can feel, to the other person, like pressure.

In dating, this shows up in very specific ways:

You move fast. Not because you’re impulsive, but because ambiguity is painful. The undefined space between “we’re dating” and “we’re together” feels like standing on a fault line. You want to lock it down, get the commitment, define the relationship, because the undefined space is where your nervous system panics. You might find yourself bringing up exclusivity on the third date, not because you’re clingy, but because the not-knowing is genuinely unbearable for your body.

If you are already in that undefined space with someone and want more, I wrote about turning a situationship into a relationship by asking clearly, once.

It helps to know what you are actually waiting for, so I have written about when dating becomes a relationship and why your body usually crosses before anyone says the word.

You over-communicate. You send the double text. You write the long message explaining your feelings after the second date. You reach out first every time, and when they don’t match your energy, you interpret it as withdrawal. The irony is that you’re often a phenomenal communicator. The problem isn’t your ability to express yourself. It’s that your nervous system is driving the timing.

You read into everything. The emoji they used. The way they said goodnight. The fact that they posted an Instagram story but haven’t responded to your message. Your brain becomes a detective, constantly scanning for evidence that confirms what your nervous system already believes: they’re leaving. This is what I call the “murder board” in my clinical work. Your mind builds a wall of red strings connecting every piece of “evidence” that this person is about to abandon you. And the evidence is always there, because when you’re looking for proof of rejection, you will find it.

Once the dating phase turns into a committed bond, I see this same detective work settle into the deeper anxious attachment style in relationships.

You test. Maybe you pull back to see if they’ll chase you. Maybe you say something provocative to see if they’ll stay. Maybe you create a small crisis because, paradoxically, conflict feels safer than silence. At least in conflict, you know where you stand. At least in conflict, they’re engaged with you. The silence is where the monsters live.

Protest Behaviors: The Self-Defeating Loop

Here’s the part that’s hardest to talk about, and the most important to understand.

The behaviors I just described? They’re called protest behaviors. And they are remarkably effective at pushing away the exact connection you want.

Think of it like this. Imagine you’re in a Chinese finger trap. The harder you pull, the tighter it gets. The only way out is to soften, to push inward instead of yanking apart. Protest behaviors are the pulling. They feel urgent and necessary in the moment, and they make the trap tighter every time.

When you double-text someone who hasn’t responded, you’re protesting the distance. But the other person doesn’t experience your protest as a bid for connection. They experience it as pressure. And what does pressure do? It makes people pull away. Their withdrawal triggers your alarm system even more. You reach harder. They pull further. And now you’re caught in what I call The Waltz of Pain, a reinforcing loop where both people are drowning in shame, fear, and misinterpretation.

The cruel irony of anxious attachment in dating is that the strategy designed to keep people close is the very thing that drives them away. Your nervous system is throwing emotional boomerangs. Every move it makes to protect you from abandonment ends up creating the exact abandonment it fears.

I see this constantly in my practice. Someone comes in and says, “I always end up alone. I always get ghosted. People always leave.” And when we look at the pattern, what we find is not that they’re unlovable. What we find is that their survival strategy is running the show, and it’s running it right off a cliff.

Why Dating Is Uniquely Triggering for Anxious Attachment

I want to be specific about why dating, as a phase, is so much harder for people with anxious attachment than being in a relationship. Because this distinction matters.

There are no norms. In a relationship, there are (hopefully) agreements about communication, response times, exclusivity. In dating, there are none. Is it okay to text every day? Who initiates? Is seeing each other once a week enough? Every single one of these questions is an open wound for the anxiously attached person, because each unanswered question is a space where abandonment could live.

The stakes feel enormous before they should. One of the signature features of anxious attachment in dating is that your nervous system assigns relationship-level significance to dating-level interactions. You’ve been on three dates, but your body is reacting as if this person has been your partner for three years. The fear of losing them is real, vivid, and consuming, even though, objectively, you barely know them.

You’re performing and panicking simultaneously. Dating requires you to present a version of yourself while your nervous system is melting down behind the curtain. You’re trying to be charming and relaxed while your limbic system is screaming that you need to secure this bond immediately or you’ll be abandoned. It’s like trying to give a TED Talk during an earthquake.

Ghosting culture is an attachment nightmare. Modern dating has normalized disappearing without explanation. For someone with secure attachment, ghosting is rude and confusing. For someone with anxious attachment, ghosting is a nuclear weapon. It confirms every fear your nervous system carries: people leave without warning, connection is fragile, and you can never truly be safe.

Anxious Attachment in Early Dating: What the First Few Weeks Look Like

The hardest stretch is usually the very front edge: the first match, the first date, the weeks before anyone has said what this is. Attachment wounds do not wait for commitment to start whispering. They show up in the first text exchange, on the first date, in the moment you catch yourself liking someone.

Here is what anxious attachment in early dating tends to look like from the inside:

• You are monitoring response times within forty-eight hours of matching. A reply that took nine hours instead of nine minutes does not register as a scheduling difference. It registers as a threat.
• You draft, delete and redraft. You screenshot the conversation and send it to three friends for analysis. You watch the typing dots appear and disappear and feel your heart rate spike.
• You send a Representative on the date. The breezy, low-maintenance version of you who never asks for too much and absolutely does not text first.
• Relief feels like love. When the warm text finally lands after a long silence, the flood of relief feels like chemistry. It is the slot machine effect, and your body confuses the relief with love.

Texting makes all of this louder. Text strips out tone, facial expression and the warmth in a voice, so your brain fills the gaps with the worst case. “They used a period instead of an exclamation mark” becomes “they’re losing interest.” Your brain evolved to read faces, not to interpret emoji frequency.

Why you feel anxious after a first date that went well

This one confuses people more than anything. The date was good, so why is your stomach in knots the next morning? Because a good date means something now matters. The absence of anxiety in early dating usually does not mean you are secure. It often means you are not invested yet. When someone looks at you like they might mean it, your whole system lights up like a fire alarm, and the morning after is when it goes looking for a certainty nobody can give it yet.

When you are afraid of dating at all

For some people the alarm fires so early that they stop dating altogether. The protection shows up in quieter forms: finding a fatal flaw by date two (an exit ramp dressed up as a deal-breaker), losing interest the moment someone shows clear interest in you, or disappearing when the vulnerability spikes. That is not discernment. It is protection, and it was probably earned honestly. If the fear has kept you off dating for months or years, or it comes with panic attacks, your system is asking for more support than an article can give. I go deeper into the body side of this in my piece on dating anxiety and what your body is doing on a first date.

When an old wound shows up at a new dinner table

I had a client, dating again after her marriage ended, who described this perfectly. She said, “He just looked at his phone during dinner, and suddenly I was back in my marriage. I was invisible again.” Her new boyfriend was not ignoring her. He was checking a work notification. But her nervous system did not care about context. It cared about pattern recognition: phone comes out, partner disappears, I am alone. That sequence had been burned into her body over ten years with a man who was emotionally absent.

If you are dating again after a long marriage, I wrote about dating after divorce and how old wounds show up in new beginnings.

Her new boyfriend was nothing like her ex. In that moment, her body could not tell the difference. This is what I mean when I say trauma is the past merging with the present. You did not pick another one just like the last one. Your nervous system turned a different person into a familiar shape, and seeing that clearly is what lets you stay at the table.

The “Calm Weather” Trap: When Early Dating Hides Your Patterns

Here’s something I see that’s worth its own section, because it trips people up constantly.

The first few dates often feel amazing for anxiously attached people. There’s novelty. There’s attention. There’s the dopamine hit of someone new being interested. And in that calm weather phase, your attachment system is quiet. You feel secure. You might even feel more confident than usual, because attention from a potential partner is the one thing your nervous system has always craved.

This creates a dangerous illusion. You think, “This feels different. This person is different. I’m different this time.” But the attachment system hasn’t been tested yet. You’re not seeing your patterns because the conditions that activate them haven’t arrived.

The first real test comes when uncertainty enters. When they’re less available. When the novelty fades slightly. When the gap between what you want and what you’re getting becomes visible. That’s when the storm rolls in, and that’s when you discover that your attachment style hasn’t changed just because the early dates went well.

I tell my clients this all the time: the first month of dating tells you almost nothing about compatibility. What it tells you is that two people enjoy novelty, which is not the same as two people being able to weather a storm together. Anxious attachment in dating only truly reveals itself when the calm weather breaks, and it always breaks.

The Gasoline Problem: Why Logic Doesn’t Work When You’re Triggered

If you’ve ever had a friend say, “Just relax, it’s only been two dates,” you know how unhelpful rational advice is when your nervous system is in overdrive.

I use this analogy in my clinical work: trying to think your way out of an attachment trigger is like throwing gasoline on a fire. The prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that does rational thinking, goes largely offline when your limbic system is activated. You cannot access logic when your body believes it’s being abandoned. Your friend’s advice isn’t wrong. It’s just being delivered to a part of your brain that can’t hear it right now.

This is why the standard dating advice (“play it cool,” “don’t text first,” “wait three days”) is actively harmful for people with anxious attachment. That advice assumes a regulated nervous system. It assumes you can simply choose not to feel the panic. You can’t. What you can do is learn to work with your nervous system instead of against it, and that’s what I want to talk about next.

How to Date with Anxious Attachment (Without Burning It All Down)

I’m not going to give you a list of rules. Rules don’t work when your body is running survival code. What I’m going to give you instead are frameworks for working with your nervous system, not against it.

1. Name the activation, not the story

When your attachment system fires, it instantly creates a narrative: They don’t care. They’re pulling away. I’m going to be alone. That narrative feels like truth, but it’s not truth. It’s your nervous system’s interpretation.

I teach my clients to use what I call the “flashlight” technique. When you feel the panic rising, instead of pointing the flashlight outward at the other person (analyzing their behavior, building the murder board), turn it 180 degrees. Point it inward. What’s happening in your body right now? Where is the tension? What does the sensation actually feel like?

This isn’t meditation fluff. This is neuroscience. When you shift from narrating to noticing, you engage different neural pathways. You give your prefrontal cortex a chance to come back online. You create a tiny gap between stimulus and response, and in that gap is where choice lives.

2. Slow the protest, don’t silence it

I’m not telling you to suppress your needs. Your needs are valid. The need for reassurance, closeness, and consistency is not weakness. It’s human.

But there’s a difference between expressing a need and detonating a protest behavior. The need says, “I’d love to hear from you today.” The protest behavior says, “Why haven’t you responded? Do you even want to see me again?” Same underlying feeling. Completely different delivery.

The goal isn’t to stop reaching. It’s to slow the reach long enough to choose how you extend your hand. A regulated bid for connection looks completely different from a panicked protest, and the person on the other end can feel the difference instantly.

3. Build a tolerance for not-knowing

This is the hardest one, and it’s the most important. Dating requires you to sit in ambiguity. You will not know where you stand after three dates. You will not know if they’re “the one” after two weeks. You will not know if they’re going to ghost you or marry you.

For the anxiously attached nervous system, not-knowing feels identical to being abandoned. But it’s not the same thing. Not-knowing is a neutral state. Your nervous system has coded it as dangerous, but you can, slowly, teach it that uncertainty and unsafety are not synonyms.

How? By staying present in the experience without fast-forwarding to the outcome. By noticing that right now, in this moment, you are okay. The relationship hasn’t ended because it hasn’t fully begun. The absence of certainty is not the presence of rejection.

4. Watch your pacing

If you find yourself wanting to define the relationship, meet their friends, or plan trips together within the first few weeks, pause. Not because those desires are wrong, but because your nervous system may be driving the acceleration.

Ask yourself: “Am I moving forward because I genuinely want to, or because slowing down feels unsafe?” If the answer is the second one, that’s your attachment system talking. Real intimacy is not built by speed. It’s built by staying present in each phase long enough to actually experience it.

5. Track your body, not their behavior

Stop monitoring their response times. Stop refreshing their profile. Stop building the murder board.

Instead, start tracking your own internal state. When you notice the chest tightness, the racing thoughts, the urge to check your phone for the tenth time in five minutes, that’s data. That’s your attachment system talking to you. And if you can hear it without obeying it, you’ve just done something profoundly important: you’ve created space between who you are and what your survival strategy is telling you to do.

If any of this is landing close to home, you can talk it through right now with Figlet, Figs’ AI relationship coach, and get an answer about your own situation in seconds. Ask Figlet about waiting for that text.

6. Get honest about what you actually need (versus what your anxiety demands)

Anxious attachment creates a paradox: it makes you believe you need constant contact, instant responses, and total certainty. But what you actually need is the ability to feel safe inside yourself, even when external conditions are uncertain.

The person you’re dating cannot, and should not, be your nervous system regulator. Not because your needs don’t matter, but because no human being can fill a wound that lives in your biology. That wound needs your attention first. Then, from a more regulated place, you can invite someone into a partnership rather than recruiting them as an emotional first responder.

How to Ask for What You Need Early (Without a Protest Attached)

The single biggest shift I can offer anxiously attached daters is this: learn to share your vulnerability without attaching a request to it.

When you feel that little flicker of are they really here with me?, your instinct is to ask a question of them or make a request. Instead, see if you can name what is happening inside you, without asking them to fix it and without framing it as something they did wrong. Something like: “I notice I’m feeling a little unsure right now, like I’m wondering if I’m landing with you.” No request at the end. You put it on the table and leave it there.

Why does that matter? Because many of the people you will date carry their own wound around am I enough? When you make a request of someone who already fears being a disappointment, it lands like an alarm: I am on my way to failing this person. They shut down before you have finished your sentence. When you share the soft experience instead, their nervous system has a chance to stay present, and a lot of the time they move toward you.

A few early dating versions that work:

• Instead of waiting for them to ask and resenting them when they don’t: “I would love to see you this weekend.”
• Instead of going quiet and letting them feel the absence: “I noticed I got quiet when you mentioned your ex. I think I got a little scared.”
• Instead of “Why haven’t you texted me back?”: “I noticed I felt anxious when I didn’t hear from you yesterday.”

Reaching is not the problem. Reaching while pretending not to reach is the problem. And how someone responds to one soft, honest sentence tells you a great deal about whether they can meet the real you.

When you are ready to look past the alarm, I wrote about the qualities in a partner that tend to last long after the early chemistry fades.

When Anxious Attachment Meets Avoidant Attachment in Dating

I’d be leaving out the most important piece if I didn’t address this: anxiously attached people are magnetically drawn to avoidantly attached people, and dating is where that magnet is strongest.

Here’s why. The avoidant person’s early unavailability triggers your pursuit response. Their slight distance activates your attachment system, which reads distance as a challenge to overcome rather than information to consider. Meanwhile, your intensity triggers their withdrawal response, which makes them pull back, which makes you pursue harder.

The Waltz of Pain, the reinforcing loop of pursue-and-withdraw, often starts on date two or three. Before anyone has agreed to anything. Before there’s even a relationship to fight about. Two nervous systems, doing exactly what they were designed to do, creating exactly the dynamic that will destroy any chance of real connection.

If you notice that you’re most attracted to people who are slightly out of reach, that’s not coincidence. That’s your attachment system mistaking activation for attraction. The spark you feel with an avoidant person is not chemistry. It’s your alarm system going off. And your alarm system has terrible taste.

If you are trying to tell real interest apart from that alarm, I wrote about how to know if you like someone.

If you are dating someone with anxious attachment

Maybe you are here because your girlfriend or boyfriend is the one watching the phone, and you want to understand them. Their reaching is not a verdict on you. Underneath it is one question, are you there for me?, and small, predictable answers calm it far more than big gestures. Say when you will be out of touch and when you will be back, then follow through. If you need space, name it and name your return, because unexplained silence is exactly what their body reads as leaving. I go deeper into the partner side in loving a partner with anxious attachment.

Is It Anxious Attachment or a Real Red Flag?

This is the question I hear most from anxious daters, usually at two in the morning: is this my intuition warning me, or is it my wound?

Here is the uncomfortable answer. When you are activated, “trust your gut” is terrible advice. Your gut, in that moment, is not a wise oracle. It is a smoke alarm that learned to scream at the smell of toast because a house burned down once. The alarm is real. The fire, often, is not. Real discernment does not feel like a frantic search. It feels slower.

So check where your attention is. If it is almost entirely on what they are, what they did and what it proves, you are in what I call the Story of Other, and you cannot read a person accurately from there. Move, even for sixty seconds, into the Experience of Self: the tight chest, the fear, the feeling of being small and old. Then ask: what did this person actually do, and what did they actually say?

Some things are not your attachment talking, and I want to name them plainly. Someone controlling who you see or how you spend your money. Feeling afraid of how they will react. Sustained contempt. A person who can never hear “that hurt” and never takes a piece of responsibility. Those are red flags worth taking seriously, whatever your attachment style. If you are afraid of someone you are dating, safety comes first. A slow reply on a Tuesday is not on that list. I lay out the full difference in how to tell relationship anxiety from a real red flag.

Why Steady People Can Feel Boring (and What to Look For Instead)

Here is a pattern that catches almost every anxious dater at some point. The person who is consistently warm and consistently available feels flat. The one who goes hot and cold feels electric. That is not because boring is bad. It is because your system has confused the chemistry of activation with the feeling of love.

Stable love feels quieter, and to a nervous system trained on unpredictability, almost imperceptible at first. If someone texts back, shows up when they said they would, and you keep finding reasons to feel nothing, ask whether the flatness is about them or about how unfamiliar safe feels.

So what should you actually look for in the first few months? Not a checklist of traits. The Representative on the other side of the table will fade in three to six months, so watch, with curiosity, for who emerges:

• Are they kind when they are tired?
• Do they repair after a rupture? Do they come back after you disappoint them and get curious instead of defensive?
• Can they hold your softness without flinching? Say one honest, vulnerable sentence and notice what happens next.

What to Do Tonight If the Text Hasn’t Come

If your phone is face down next to you right now, here are small steps for tonight. None of them requires you to stop caring.

1. Put a hand on your chest and breathe. Feel your feet on the floor. Take three slow breaths where the exhale is longer than the inhale. You are not calming your mind. You are sending your body the signal that there is no predator here.
2. Name the system, not the story. Say it out loud if you can: “My attachment alarm just went off.” You stop being the anxiety and start being the person watching it.
3. Walk through the Experience of Self. I am affected. This is how (tight chest, racing thoughts, the urge to send seventeen texts). This is the meaning I am making (they have lost interest). This is the fear underneath (I am scared I don’t matter).
4. If you text, send the calm version, then put the phone in another room. One message, the one you would send if you weren’t afraid, with no question that demands an answer.
5. Give the spiral twenty minutes, not the whole night. Set a timer. Replay, analyze, write it all down. When it goes off, do something with your body: a walk, a shower, a call to a friend about anything else.
6. Write down what they actually did. Not what it means. What happened, in the smallest, most accurate words. Read it again in the morning, when your prefrontal cortex is back online.

Common Questions About Anxious Attachment in Dating

How do I stop anxious attachment in early dating?

You do not stop it so much as stop obeying it. Notice the activation in your body before you act, slow the reach long enough to choose how you extend your hand, and say the soft feeling instead of the protest. Every moment where you expected abandonment and received presence instead teaches your nervous system something new.

Can someone with anxious attachment have a healthy relationship?

Yes. Your attachment style is a strategy your nervous system learned, not a life sentence. Humans heal in connection, not in isolation, and a steady relationship where ruptures get repaired is one of the most powerful ways an anxious system learns that love can be reliable.

Should I tell someone I’m dating that I have anxious attachment?

Not as a diagnosis on date one. That tends to become a Representative move in disguise, performing self-awareness instead of being a person. What works better is naming feelings as they arise, in one honest sentence like the ones above. That is specific, it invites a response, and it shows you whether this person can meet the real you.

How long does it take to become more secure?

Earned security is a practice, not a destination. Most people start noticing real shifts within six to twelve months of consistent relational work, whether in therapy, a steady relationship, or both. It depends less on the calendar and more on how many corrective experiences your nervous system gets.

Anxious Attachment in Dating Is Not a Life Sentence

Here’s what I want to leave you with, and I mean this from 17 years of sitting across from people who thought they were broken.

Your attachment style is not your identity. It’s a strategy your nervous system developed to keep you alive in a specific environment, probably an environment where love was inconsistent, conditional, or unpredictable. That strategy was brilliant. It worked. It got you through childhood.

But it’s not serving you in dating. And the good news is that attachment strategies can change. Not through willpower. Not through “just relaxing.” Not through reading one article (including this one). They change through what I call proof of work: the slow, consistent accumulation of new experiences that teach your nervous system a different truth.

That proof of work might come from therapy. It might come from a relationship with someone who is genuinely secure. It might come from doing the hard, uncomfortable work of sitting with your own activation without acting on it. But it does come. The nervous system is not a fixed machine. It’s a ledger, recording every experience. And you can start making new deposits any time you choose.

Anxious attachment in dating is painful. It’s confusing. It makes you feel like you’re too much and not enough at the same time. But it’s also understandable. It’s logical. And it’s changeable.

The first step is seeing it clearly. Not judging it. Not performing shame about it. Just seeing it: This is my nervous system. This is what it does. This is why it does it. And this is not the whole story of who I am.

You’re not too much. Your nervous system is just working overtime. And learning to work with it, instead of against it, might be the most important relationship skill you ever develop.

Related reading: how to make someone fall in love with you (and why chasing backfires) · when to say I love you · signs a girl is not into you · how long the talking stage should last · AI dating coach: what helps and what backfires.

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