Why relationships can make you feel anxious when nothing else does
You can give a presentation to two hundred people without breaking a sweat. You can navigate conflict at work, handle your finances, manage a family crisis and arrange the girls’ trip down to the finest detail.
But the second you're dating someone, or two months into something that feels like it might become a relationship, you become unrecognisable: you check your phone obsessively, you analyse your tone in texts like you're doing forensic fucking linguistics, and you lose hours trying to find reassurance… All of which achieves absolutely nothing except making you feel worse.
And the thing that makes it truly maddening? You know it's irrational. You know you're overreacting. But knowing doesn't stop it.
So what the hell is happening?
Maybe you're not "an anxious person"… Maybe you're relationally activated
As strange as it may seem: this isn't about anxiety.
It's likely all to do with your attachment blueprint, and it only shows up in contexts where emotional dependence is on the table.
Think about it. You don't feel this way about your friends. You don't obsessively monitor whether your colleague is distant today. You don't triple-text your sister and then hate yourself for three hours. That’s because these relationships don't activate the same relational template. They don't tap into the early patterns you learned about what it means to need someone (and whether you can trust them to stay).
This type of attachment anxiety is contextual. It gets triggered when intimacy, dependence, and the possibility of rejection or abandonment meet. And when it does get triggered, your whole system goes on high alert.
This is why you can be a competent, grounded, self-assured badass in every other domain of your life, and then lose your mind the second someone you're sleeping with takes four hours to reply.
What attachment anxiety actually is (and why it only shows up in relationships)
Attachment anxiety is about what you learned, early and implicitly, about how relationships work.
Maybe you learned that love is conditional.
That closeness requires constant effort, monitoring, pleasing.
That if you're not vigilant, people leave.
That expressing a need makes you too much, too needy, too difficult.
Maybe the people who were supposed to be consistently available… weren't. Or they were available, but only when theyneeded something from you. Or their availability was so unpredictable that you learned to stay hypervigilant just to survive the relationship.
Those patterns don't stay in childhood. They don't conveniently dissolve the second you become an adult with a degree and a mortgage and decent friends.
They get reactivated every time you let someone matter to you. Every time you risk depending on someone. Every time intimacy (whatever that looks like to you) brings the possibility of loss back into focus.
Your anxiety in relationships certainly isn’t irrational. It's a way your nervous system responds to a perceived threat based on old relational data.
The problem is, the threat isn't current, it's historical. But your body doesn't know that.
Why your nervous system treats relationships like a threat
When you care about someone, I mean really care, not just casually dating, your attachment system comes online.
And if your attachment system learned that closeness equals danger (rejection, abandonment, engulfment, betrayal), then intimacy can feel destabilising. Not consciously, and not in a way you can think your way out of (I see you, intellectualisers 👀). But viscerally.
Your body truly believes: I need this person. I am vulnerable to this person. I could lose this person.
And then the alarm goes off.
This isn't you "creating problems" or "self-sabotaging", but it is an adaptive response to what your nervous system has categorised as relationally ‘unsafe’.
The sad thing is, the behaviours that follow like hypervigilance, reassurance-seeking, emotional labour, or self-monitoring, often push away the very closeness you're trying to secure. Because anxious attachment doesn't just make you feel anxious. It makes you behave in ways that confirm your worst fears.
You become the "needy" one. The "insecure" one. The one who's "too much." And not because that's who you are, but because that's what happens when your relational blueprint is activated and you're trying desperately to manage the terror underneath.
The compulsive behaviours that follow
Let's be specific about what this actually looks like, because it's not just feeling anxious.
It's obsessively checking whether they've read your message.
It's re-reading your own texts to see if you said something wrong.
It's scanning for signs of distance, disinterest, or withdrawal (even when there aren't any).
It's performing. Adapting. Trying to be the right version of yourself so they don't leave.
It's saying yes when you mean no.
It's pretending you're fine when you're not.
It's doing enormous amounts of invisible emotional labour to keep the relationship stable because if you don't manage it, it might fall apart.
It's second-guessing your own needs. Minimising your own feelings. Convincing yourself that wanting reassurance makes you pathetic, even though you'd never think that about anyone else.
And underneath all of it: the bone-deep fear that if you stop performing, stop monitoring, stop trying so fucking hard, they'll see who you really are and leave.
This is what attachment anxiety does. It makes dating, relationships and intimacy feel like a high-wire act.
This isn't anxiety to manage. It's a relational pattern to understand.
Here's what I really need you to take away: you can't think your way out of this.
You can't CBT your way into secure attachment. You can't meditate it away, journal it away, or positive-affirmation it into submission.
Because this isn't a cognitive distortion, it's a relational injury, and relational injuries need relational repair.
That means understanding why your attachment system is doing this.
What it's protecting you from.
What it learned about relationships that makes intimacy feel so threatening.
It means working with someone who understands psychodynamic and relational process, not someone who's going to teach you breathing exercises or ask you to challenge your thoughts.
It means exploring the unconscious patterns that keep you trapped in the same dynamic, even when you desperately want something different.
It means understanding your defences, your repetitions and your relational blueprint so you can actually change it.
And it means recognising that the anxiety isn't the problem. The anxiety is the messenger. It's telling you something about what you learned to expect in relationships. And once you understand that, you can stop trying to manage the symptom and start addressing the fucking cause.
If any of this sounds familiar
You don't need another app, another podcast, or another self-help book on anxious attachment. You need depth work with someone who gets it.
I work with women who are done performing, second-guessing, and losing themselves in relationships. Women who want to understand why they keep ending up here, and how to stop.
If that's you, click the button below to book an intro call, and let's talk about what's actually happening.
