You know what’s funny? Most people come to me after they’ve been down the rabbit hole on the internet reading about attachment theory, and they’re terrified. They’ve diagnosed themselves as anxiously attached, diagnosed their partner as avoidant, and now they’re sitting across from me thinking there’s something fundamentally broken about one or both of them.
And I have to stop them right there.
Here’s what I actually believe: attachment theory is not a diagnostic tool. It’s a compassion tool. The moment you use it to label yourself or your partner as damaged goods, you’ve used it wrong.
So let me tell you what attachment theory actually is, in plain language.
Attachment is just another word for emotional bonding. Which is just another word for love. And this need to be loved, to be emotionally bonded to another person, is not a personality quirk. It is millions of years old. It is built into your physiology. You cannot opt out of it. You cannot meditate it away. You cannot hustle past it.
Here’s the part that gets me every time, because I’ve said it a thousand times and it still lands: you can be a grown adult with a successful career, money in the bank, a car, an iPhone, a mortgage. Look at you. Killing it at adulting. And the moment your partner doesn’t respond to your text the way you hoped, or turns away from you in a moment when you needed them, your nervous system goes into full existential threat mode. Because underneath all that competence, when it comes to love, we are still babies. Every single one of us.
Your nervous system is scanning, constantly, for one answer to one question: is my person there for me? And if the answer looks like no, even for a moment, even because of a misread tone or a slammed cabinet, you freak out. Not because you’re broken. Because you’re human.
And here’s the part that explains almost every fight I’ve ever witnessed in 20 years of sitting in this chair: couples don’t fight about dishes. They don’t fight about money or sex or whose turn it is to call the plumber. They fight because they love each other. Because the person across the table is so important to them that when it looks like that person isn’t there for them, or when they feel like a disappointment to that person, it registers as a threat to their survival.
There are really two core fears underneath almost everything I see:
One: you’re so important to me that when you’re not there, I am terrified.
Two: you’re so important to me that when it looks like I’m a disappointment to you, I am terrified.
Both of those are love. Both of them look like a fight.
And the tragedy, the thing that breaks my heart a little every week in my work, is that both partners are hurting at the same time, for the same reason, and their ways of trying to protect themselves from that hurt end up hurting the other person in exactly the spot they’re most wounded. That’s what I call the Waltz of Pain. One person reaches, the other retreats. The reaching person reaches harder. The retreating person retreats further. And they’re both completely convinced the other one is the problem.
But here’s the truth: the problem is not you. The problem is not your partner. The problem is the system you’ve built together between you.
You don’t need 147,000 solutions for 147,000 different fights. You need to understand this one emotional process underneath all of them. Because once you can see it clearly, once you can say “oh, we’re doing the thing again,” that’s when something starts to shift.
That’s what attachment theory is actually for.
Where Does Your Relationship Stand?
Take the free Empathi Wisdom Score assessment. In 5 minutes, get a personalized snapshot of your relationship patterns and what to do about them.
Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Attachment Styles in Relationships: How Your Love Pattern Shapes Your Bond
Explore More Topics
