On Attachment
Say how you feel and what you want. - Ken Page
Xander Dunn, 8 August 2025
Attachment Theory
The categories of attachment theory can be roughly simplified to:
- Secure: Comfortable with intimacy and autonomy.
- Securely attached people easily and freely say how they feel and what they want. This sounds very simple and it would be easy to gloss over that sentence and never think about it again, but I think it's actually the single most important takeaway from this whole article: say how you feel and what you want. Not how someone else feels. Not only positive feelings. A securely attached person knows how they feel, both positively and negatively, and communicates that.
- With a securely attached person it is always crystal clear where you stand with them. You never have to wonder how a securely attached person feels about you, or thinks about you, or whether they want you, or why they want you.
- Securely attached people feel like the world is full of people who can meet their needs. The world doesn't feel like a place full of landmines and evil people to be avoided. The world feels largely easy to navigate.
- Dismissive / avoidant: Values independence to the point of avoiding closeness or emotional connection.
- Not reciprocating makes dismissives feel safe. A dismissive avoidant likes to receive positive feelings, but they balk at the need to reciprocate feelings.
- Rejection of negative affect: Dismissives are particularly avoidant of any negative feelings, especially any discussion about "us"
- Dismissive avoidants feel valuable through their accomplishments. They need to achieve in order to feel valued.
- Dismissive people want intimacy too, but not too much. They hold it at arm's length. Not too close. "Women are crazy" says my dismissive friend when he starts to feel overwhelmed by the intimacy he's receiving from the woman he's been dating for 6 months.
- Dismissives aren't very self-reflective. If someone does manage to drag a dismissive to therapy, they find that a single session was all they needed, or they "graduated from therapy" after a few sessions. They don't need to ever deal with therapy again.
- Perfection is an avoidant tactic. Holding out for "The One," the perfect match, the "11/10," the supermodel, are all dismissive avoidant tactics. Indefinitely delaying/ignoring/disengaging because there's always something better is a way of avoiding intimacy here and now.
- Not reciprocating makes dismissives feel safe. A dismissive avoidant likes to receive positive feelings, but they balk at the need to reciprocate feelings.
- Preoccupied / anxious: Craves closeness and approval but fears abandonment and rejection.
- Like dismissive people, preoccupied people aren't authentic with their feelings. Unlike dismissive people, they are overly involved in others' feelings. They become so caught up in other people's feelings they have difficulty disambiguating their feelings from someone else's feelings. They would rather pretend for the sake of the other person than to clearly say how they feel and what they want.
- The worst thing you can do for a preoccupied person is solve the problem. Preoccupied people relate to other people via problems, so if there are no problems then they have no way to relate.
Both types of insecurely attached people often do alright at the start of a relationship and then have difficulty as things start to become "serious." The avoidant person will become overwhelmed with the situation and run away from it, whereas the preoccupied person will double down and engage in even more premature intimacy in an attempt to feel safe about the relationship. Securely attached people give a little bit of trust, see how it's handled, if it's handled well they give a little more trust, etc...
Securely attached people tend to be receptive to the idea of improving themselves. I've found securely attached people often don't assume that they're securely attached when thinking about it for the first time. Dismissive people believe they are already secure and they will tell you they are securely attached without doing any work to actually investigate themselves. They have no interest in self reflection. And then preoccupied people will see that they're not securely attached and want to expend great effort on it without actually changing. Having the problem is the goal for the preoccupied.
Rather than perfect trinary buckets, these categories should be thought of as smears on a continuous spectrum, where secure sits in the middle with the two opposites on either side. Attachment doesn't seem to be set in stone, either. Being around securely attached people, particularly a securely attached significant other, increases one's own security. Being around insecurely attached people makes one more insecurely attached. There may also be solo practices that bolster secure attachment. See more on that below.
Attachment theory spends a lot of time investigating parental causes of attachment, but that's outside of my scope. Ultimately I can't care too much why someone is insecure, I have to take them for who they are at face value. I'm looking for symptoms here rather than causes.
The Good
I've found attachment theory extremely helpful for understanding very confusing dates that I've been on. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started dating a decade ago, and attachment theory gave me a framework to understand why people were doing what they were doing.
These are direct quotes each from a different first date I've been on. See if you can identify the theme:
- "I'm not honest with my therapist."
- "I'm not good with feelings." / "I don't do conflict." / "I would teleport out [if there's a fight]" / "I don't say how I feel as a defensive mechanism."
- "I dated him for a year but I always knew I didn't really want him."
- "I have difficulty processing my feelings."
If you guessed dismissive avoidant, you are absolutely right! These are all very avoidant statements. They don't like talking about feelings, whether it's their own feelings or someone else's feelings. In every case they avoided plainly communicating how they felt and what they want. Naturally they all ended up either ghosting me or sending confused/mixed signals after some handful of dates. Ghosting and sending mixed signals are great ways of avoiding and dismissing!
These are some of my preoccupied first date experiences:
- Trying to force me to set an exact time for our second date before the first date was even over.
- Sending me repeated messages asking me if I'm ok, then unmatching me on Hinge, and then sending me an email to ask if I'm alright. All within 48 hours of our first date.
Of course I've been on many dates with securely attached people too. The primary usefulness of attachment theory for me has been identifying very early the people who are going to reject my feelings or tell me how I ought to feel and steer clear of them within 1-2 dates. Interacting with those people still hurts, but it doesn't feel like any inadequacy on my part anymore.
The Bad
In 2024 a friend introduced me to Ideal Parent Figure (IPF). It's a meditation practice showing some clinical evidence for increasing secure attachment. This led me to the podcast "I Love You, Keep Going" from George Haas, a prominent IPF practitioner. I listened to an enormous amount of the podcast, which covers attachment theory and has a number of different meditations. I then sought out well-known IPF practitioners and worked with two of them, each once per week for about 2-3 months. They both came highly recommended. I took the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) which is widely considered the gold standard assessment of attachment. I was expecting to come out with some kind of insecure attachment, but to my surprise and delight I scored F5, which is a securely attached category. I couldn't have hoped for much better than that. I shared this result with the person I was dating at the time and his only response was that perhaps I lied on the test. First, what a rude and unsupportive thing to say. Second, one of the amazing properties of the AAI is that it can't be gamed. There are no right or wrong answers. The test measures metacognition, and it's not possible to invent a self-consistent life story of lies fast enough to keep up with the interview.
Despite the AAI's result, one of the IPF practitioners I was working with determined that I was preoccupied, and the other one determined that I was dismissive. They made these determinations the same week, and they both had access to the same AAI results as well as direct access to me over several months. I pushed back on their designations: they disagree with the test and with each other. But they were resolute in their diagnoses.
Imagine if two independent physicists looked at the same data and the same gold standard experimental results, and not only did they each disagree with the gold standard, they also disagreed with each other. So now we have 3 completely different interpretations of the exact same data from the exact same experiment using the exact same theory. In physics, we would call that a crisis. There are only two possibilities: We either need to mercilessly throw the entire theory out the window, or we need to mercilessly throw both physicists out the window. This unscientific impasse left the whole endeavor of attachment theory and IPF irreparably harmed for me.
I always enjoyed the actual IPF meditation both on my own and guided. I visualized my ideal parents as Father and Mother from Raised by Wolves and I still have a positive association with them. However, I felt far worse after the months of discussion I engaged in with these two IPF practitioners. My confidence was damaged and my ability to date during that time was strongly negatively impacted. I felt like I was fed a laundry list of negative narratives about myself. We are nothing more than the narratives we repeat to ourselves, so I didn't find that productive. When I told one of the practitioners that I wanted to end our sessions, he emailed me a critique of every relationship I've ever had without any context or support. That wasn't helpful to me, and it didn't seem professional.
Some further negatives that have pushed me away from attachment as a field:
- One of my IPF practitioners said that questioning the method (IPF or attachment theory) is a dismissive avoidant tactic. If questioning a method is dismissive avoidant, then we must admit that 100% of all science is driven by dismissive avoidant inquiry. It's silly to claim that curiosity, inquiry, and uncertainty around a method constitute an attachment issue. Don't try to place your methodologies on a pedestal above critique. That's called religion.
- Several very prominent practitioners in the IPF space frequently make political analogies. They frequently use various Republican politicians as examples of dismissive avoidants. While that may be true, I assure you there are plenty of Democrats who are also dismissive avoidant. Is your goal to give the people in front of you here and now the tools to self-improve their relationships, or is your goal to proselytize your politics? These are not the same endeavor.
The End
I see attachment as a flawed but useful theory. It's been useful as a tool to understand how people might behave toward me, and I'm looking forward to becoming more securely attached over time. I won't be revisiting IPF practitioners, but I have made peace with those experiences.