How to Choose a Good Romantic Partner- Attachment Style A) The Anxiously Attached Style

October 25, 2025

Choose someone who can really give of themselves emotionally. And by that I mean pick someone without significant attachment issues. For decades, psychologists have studied the different ways people attach to each other. Although I have seen it categorized in different ways, it can be summarized into three categories for our purposes here.

There are three types of people. The first type are “Securely attached.” As you might expect from the name, these are the best people to partner with. Then there are two types of insecurely attached people, “anxiously attached” and “avoidantly attached.” Generally speaking, Insecurely people are more workable in a relationship than avoidantly attached people.

Securely attached people can develop strong and healthy bonds with other people.  They have a general expectation that the people they are close with will be there for them. They do not implicitly feel they will be left or abandoned. If they are left or abandoned, their inherent inner security makes them feel they will survive, although it will certainly hurt, but they know they will eventually be ok. And therefore they can afford to have an open heart. Twenty years ago I had a girlfriend who spoke Cantonese, and she told me the word for happiness translates as “open heart.”  Securely attached people understand and live this.

Anxious and avoidantly attached people have an implicit belief that they cannot count on other people. They both usually unconsciously don’t know they are doing it, although sometimes it is conscious. The anxious and avoidant attachment styles are the ways they attempt to protect themselves from what they see as the likely possibility of getting hurt, rejected, and/or abandoned.

Because they are often not aware of their attachment difficulties, don't expect them to validate your perceptions and experiences of them. If they are not aware of their attachment styles, they will not, indeed cannot, admit that they are acting that way to you, because they don’t even realize it themselves.  You must rely on your own judgement.

Anxiously Attached People

Anxiously attached people require and seek out constant reassurance that their partner is still there for them. If they don’t hear from you, such as not receiving a text soon enough, they will become very anxious, perhaps even go into a panic.  Outwardly, they may become very critical of you because they feel you are not there for them, or that you are undependable or untrustworthy.  But behind that criticalness and anger is the helpless  and anxious feeling that they have been abandoned.

Another thing that anxiously attached people may do is play a game- which is to withdraw more from you than they believe (often inaccurately) you have withdrawn from them. In this way they try to “turn the tables” on you, and regain a sense of power.

And so, with an anxiously attached person you often end up in a relationship in which you constantly get the feeling from them that you can’t do enough. You can get unfairly blamed and criticized. Who needs this? Isn’t life short enough?

The good thing about anxiously attached people is that, at least for some of them, if they are with a partner who is securely attached, they can become more secure and reassured- and therefore calm down and function like securely attached people. If they can calmly express their concerns and work with you, you probably have a partner who can handle their anxiety in a constructive and workable manner.  They may even grow into a more securely attached person, but one can’t count on that. As I said in my list on choosing a romantic partner (#4) you must be willing to accept the person as they are and not expect them to change if you want to be with them. No fixer-uppers. But if they are able to feel safer with a partner who is consistently there for them (not perfectly, as there is no such thing, but consistently), sometimes they can become good partners.