The Theory That Explains All Your Failed Relationships

Could it really be this simple?

As a professional writer, I spend a lot of time researching articles. Some are ideas I’ve had that I want to follow up on while some are assignments I’ve been given. It’s interesting the personal revelations that come out of so much of my deep dive into various topics, particularly as it pertains to personal growth and healthy relationships.

If I’m honest, I haven’t had a lot of healthy relationships. I’ve attached myself to emotionally unavailable partners and even found myself in a relationship so toxic that it took me a year of unraveling it to figure out that the word I needed wasn’t toxic but abusive. I’m hardly the poster child for relationship goals.

Yet, I keep trying even though it often ends with me picking up the pieces of a broken heart. Perhaps, reading this, your theory is that the problem is me. In one way, that’s true. I’m responsible for my choices. But a theory about human behavior and early childhood development might just be behind every single one of my failed relationships — and yours, too.

My assignment is on attachment theory — what it is, how to determine your style, and even how to fix it. I’m a former therapist with a master's degree in Counseling. I know about attachment theory without the deep dive into the literature. Yet never before have I felt so personally attacked by a psychological theory.

Let me give you the quick summary in layman’s terms. Attachment theory originally described how children related to caregivers. You know all those people who tell you to let your baby just cry it out without responding to them? Well, these people might not like to learn what this does to the child later in life.

Attachment Styles

In short, how we learn trust in people and the world around us comes from how responsive our caregivers were in the first five years of life.

• Securely attached people had consistently responsive caregivers who provided love, comfort, and dependability through those formative stages.
• Anxiously attached people, on the other hand, had parents or other caregivers who were inconsistent in responding to their needs.
• Avoidantly attached people were shamed for having needs and showing emotions.
• Then, we’ve got the Fearful Avoidants who have the worst of everything. They’ve got the inconsistent parenting combined with a fear-based parenting style.

Long-Term Impact

What researchers found is that the way we attached as infants and children follows us throughout our lives. Secure people tend to develop secure, healthy relationships. Anxious people tend to be fearful in relationships and may sabotage them by clinging or never quite trusting their partners. Avoidant people are the commitment-phobes and emotionally unavailable partners dodging relationships left, right, and center. And fearful avoidants want relationships, crave them, and yet fear rejection with a terrible intensity. The fearful avoidants are the ones most likely to pull you in and then push you away.

Did you recognize yourself in those descriptors? Believe me: you’ve got one of them. Happily, you can become securely attached even if you weren’t in childhood. It’s good news. But the bad news is that it’s really hard to learn to trust people and the world when your innate response is distrust and/or fear.

I’m brushing up on my research when all the pieces begin to fall into place. I have an anxious attachment style, but I do have some avoidant tendencies. While I don’t meet most of the criteria for Fearful-Avoidant attachment, I never fully realized how the self-protective tendency of avoidance plays into my choices.

Truth Hurts

Let me be very real with you. I pick emotionally unavailable men. I’ve always done so. I just haven’t always known why. I want the intimacy of a healthy relationship. I have a strong desire for communication, compromise, commitment, and all the parts of a long-term relationship.

But I also don’t trust them to last. I absolutely assume they’ll fail because being left is what happens. It’s just what people do. At the end of the day, I don’t trust other people to stay, and the underlying reason is that I don’t feel worthy of that kind of love and commitment.

I’ve worked my ass off for the level of progress I’ve made in my personal development. I’ve built self-love from the ground up. It’s hard to say that there’s a small part of me — but an essential part — that still feels unlovable. It also doesn’t help that I’ve chosen partners who have confirmed that feeling by not loving me and making that about me rather than about them.

Strangely, I am comfortable in casual relationships. When I know all the rules, I relax. My anxiety dissipates. I know what I’m doing, what is required of me, and exactly where all the lines are drawn. If I know the rules, I can play the game.

But in a relationship, the rules get murky fast. I like a healthy balance of togetherness and space, but I am hyperaware of emotional fluctuations in relationships. A bad day by a partner doesn’t feel like a bad day. In my mind, it signals that the person is losing interest or no longer wants to be with me. I’m constantly taking the temperature of the relationship and assuming the worst.

Know Thyself

I’ve been able to recognize that I am anxiously attached, but because I’m an open person, I didn’t think there was even a drop of avoidance in me. But looking back, I can see all the ways that I kept my true feelings to myself out of fear of rejection.

It doesn’t help that I have a neuro-endocrine chronic illness that basically tanks my self-worth once a month and cuts off my access to the happy hormones that make for healthy people. For half of every month, I have to refuse to believe whatever my brain is telling me because I’m not getting all the information I need. It sucks for my partners, too, and until the last year, I didn’t even know I had it.

The Truth About Dating the Insecurely Attached

Even if you remove my invisible illness, you can look at my entire relationship history and see how attachment theory could have predicted the end. I was an anxious avoidant who has loved avoidants and fearful avoidants, and — surprise, surprise — it doesn’t end well.

Here’s the thing: it absolutely could. The healthiest relationship I’ve had was with someone whose attachment style is fearful-avoidant person. If he’d been willing, we could have learned to be secure with each other. In fact, for the first few months, I was a securely attached partner. I trusted him. I relaxed. Then, his own attachment style got activated, and he began to withdraw, which set off all the alarm bells in mine. The self-sabotage — not mine for once, thank goodness — was real.

We can all learn to become secure in our relationships, but it takes two people willing to do the work. The problem is that most relationships just don’t go deep enough. We’re not communicating about the real issues. We just brush the surface and keep moving.

I wonder sometimes what would have happened if we’d both been able to recognize how our attachment style was contributing to stress in the relationship. Would we have been able to take a step back and figure out how to navigate the emotional responses that were so deeply ingrained in us? Would he have been able to give me the assurance I needed while I gave him the space he needed? Could there have been compromises that would have helped us both feel loved without feeling that underlying sense of distrust and betrayal? Your guess is as good as mine.

How Fear and Avoidance Sabotage Relationships

I learned that the reason avoidants and fearful-avoidants appeal to me is that they’re always going to keep me at a little bit of a distance. I don’t want to save them or change them. That’s not the motivation. I want to save me.

A little distance feels like a protection. It feels like anyone who keeps me an arm’s length from them can’t hurt me as fully as someone who has held me close. I wonder how long I’ve been taking this protective measure, and then the answer hits me. Always. I’ve always done this. But I don’t want to do it anymore.

Instead, I’m reviewing attachment theory and looking at all the ways I can learn to be securely attached. Being self-protective is simply a block to intimacy that never works the way I hope it will. I still get hurt. I partner people likely to self-sabotage and, in doing so, sabotage myself. The love we’re all looking for stays elusive because it’s hard to say why we are the way we are and to find partners who are willing to navigate the path to secure attachment with us.

Every failed relationship I had comes down to attachment theory. It’s in the people I picked, the way I responded, and the ways these former partners responded to me. Some of them were just poor matches, but the underlying motivation for the choices just might come down to this theory.

Secure Relationships, Healthy Relationships

Becoming aware of the pattern is necessary before we can change it, but awareness isn’t where the work stops — it’s where it begins. I think of what I want in a relationship. I want someone who makes me laugh and is happy to go on adventures with me. I want a partner who shares my values and can step up for me when my hormones tank once a month and I need extra support to get through it. I want a healthy relationship where we both feel secure not necessarily because we were raised with that attachment style but because we developed it.

We can develop it. First, we just need to see it and to recognize that we can’t protect ourselves in relationships. Healthy relationships require courage and vulnerability, a willingness to open ourselves up even if it means we’ll get hurt. For the fearful and avoidant, this goes against our every instinct. But to find love and feel secure in it, we’ll have to brave our innate reactions and try.