How can I date with avoidant attachment style?

Do you find yourself turning away from closeness in relationships? When things are going well, does it signal to you that it’s time to leave? Are you afraid of losing your independence and self-reliance if you’re with someone else? And at the same time, do you also long for intimacy and partnership?

You’re not alone. What you may be feeling could be an avoidant attachment style, or a specific kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) called Relationship OCD, or ROCD, says April Kilduff, MA, LCPC, LMHC, a therapist and clinical trainer at NOCD. Here’s how to know the difference between the two, and get the help you need.

What does it mean to have an avoidant attachment style?

Attachment theory was founded by the British psychologist John Bowlby in the 1970s. He studied infants’ relationships with their caregivers and noted that they tended to mirror their adult partnerships later in life. Bowlby’s attachment theory has since been built upon by various other researchers.

He and his contemporaries identified what’s called a “secure” attachment style, as well as a few “insecure” types, including the avoidant attachment style. A secure style indicates stability, safety, trust, a lack of anxiousness or fear surrounding the relationship, and an ability to balance both intimacy and independence. 

Insecure attachments, on the other hand, involve avoidance behaviors and/or anxiousness. You may be emotionally unavailable, inconsistent, or worry about abandonment. And you might see yourself and others as highly independent—equating emotional and physical intimacy with a loss of that independence, which prompts you to avoid closeness. For example, you may:

• Avoid committing to official relationships and date around instead—out of fear of losing independence 
• Feel anxious when someone tries to get close
• Avoid next steps in relationships, such as moving in together or getting married
• Have trouble or even disdain for having emotional conversations or being transparent about your feelings

While it’s true that your relationship with caregivers can influence your adult attachments, it’s not the only factor. Others include innate personality characteristics, genetics, and life experience. Moreover, other relationships can affect attachment style, too, including friendships.

So what does this mean for you and your dating life? Read on for some answers.

How can you date with avoidant attachment style?

According to Kilduff, a great first step is to develop awareness around your attachment style. Try asking yourself: What am I feeling and thinking when I make the choice to turn away from closeness? 

“Attachment styles can evolve and change—they’re not set in stone,” she adds. “Research shows that attachment styles shift over time in ways that align with your desires, which suggests that you can work to change the way you approach relationships and strive for one that is more secure and less fear-based.”

Here are some ways to do just that:

• Don’t act on impulse. If you’re really excited about someone, and then suddenly have a gut instinct that it’s not right, ask yourself if you’re really just trying to shut yourself off from the possible connection.
• De-emphasize self-reliance, and focus instead on mutual support. This sense of reliability actually allows you both to feel more independent, knowing that support is available when needed.
• Do fun activities together that allow you to distract from your fear or worry about closeness. That way, you can allow feelings of love and connection to rise to the surface. 

When it might be something more than avoidant attachment

“If you have avoidant tendencies in relationships, it’s worth exploring if you have an avoidant attachment style, but also what else may be motivating that behavior. For instance, avoidance is an unhelpful coping mechanism in those with OCD,” says Kilduff.

ROCD can cause you to have doubts about your feelings for your partner, your partner’s feelings for you, the “rightness” of the relationship as a whole, or whether you are in love enough or attracted enough to one another.

Like every theme of OCD, it consists of: 

• Intrusive thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, or urges (this is the obsessive part of OCD)
• Intense feelings of distress over those intrusions, such as anxiety, panic, guilt, shame, fear, and embarrassment.
• Physical and/or mental actions that are done to try to relieve the distress you feel (compulsions). 

Everybody experiences intrusive thoughts from time to time, but what sets someone with OCD apart is a deep concern that these thoughts “mean” something, and that you must solve them. 

Some examples of intrusive thoughts include:

• What if my partner cheats on me someday?
• What if there are giant red flags that I’m missing?
• What if I’m not enjoying physical intimacy enough?
• What if we are doomed to break up?
• Should I break up with my partner? 
• Can I really trust them?

When avoidance is used as a compulsion, it looks like avoiding any activities, people, places, situations, media, or other stimuli that trigger intrusive thoughts. For example, maybe your intrusive thoughts are extra loud during intimate moments, so you try to avoid them. Or maybe they pop up when you go out for a romantic night, making you want to stick to casual, at-home dates instead. 

Here are some other typical compulsions:

• Reassurance-seeking. This is one of the most common compulsions among those with ROCD, and involves seeking reassurance from others, or from yourself, that your intrusive thoughts aren’t true. For example, you may repeatedly ask your partner, “What if we break up?” or you may repeat to yourself, Everything is okay. I am an independent person, so I’ll be fine no matter what.
• Rumination is the process of intense overthinking or overanalyzing. It may feel like getting stuck in a “thought loop” where you replay the same thoughts, images, questions, or worries over and over in your head, hoping that new evidence will emerge that supports or denies your intrusive thoughts.
• Mental review. This looks like combing through past memories for information or evidence to support or deny your fears. There’s a sense that you can’t trust your memories or your prior perception of them. 
• Excessive research. Similar to reassurance-seeking, you might seek validation through the internet or other sources, rather than people. You may read article after article about relationships, take quizzes about whether you’re really in love, or search for stories of people who were cheated on in order to compare your relationship to others.
• Comparison. This looks like comparing your feelings and situation to those of others. For example, perhaps you hear the story of someone falling in love with their partner and ask yourself, did I feel all those things? Would I word it exactly like that? If your experience differs at all, you may take it as evidence that your relationship is not, in fact, “correct” or valid.
• Avoidance. This is the process of steering clear of any stimuli that triggers your intrusive thoughts, including people, situations, places, or even media that has themes of romantic love. You might avoid going on double dates so that you can’t compare your relationship to that of another couple, or you may start avoiding your partner. 

OCD is a vicious cycle—meaning that compulsions bring only temporary relief before ultimately paving the way for more intrusive thoughts and distress. Over time, your brain learns that intrusive thoughts must be taken seriously and that 100% certainty is needed. 

How can you get help for avoidant attachment? 

If it’s in your values to date and even find a long-term partnership, an avoidant attachment style doesn’t have to take that away from you. A trained therapist, particularly one knowledgeable about attachment styles, relationships, and anxiety can help you work through the feelings behind your avoidance. 

One modality a therapist might utilize is called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). It teaches you to accept your current reality, while also gaining clarity on your values and, ultimately, recommitting to those values—helping you stay invested in the closeness of partnership and intimacy. 

If you are evaluated and found to have ROCD, the gold-standard treatment is exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy. With ERP, a trained therapist gradually exposes you to the people, places, activities, media, and other stimuli that triggers you, and gives you tools to help you resist the urge to engage in compulsions. This way, you learn that you don’t need to “do something” about your intrusive thoughts. In fact, you don’t need to give them any attention at all. You become desensitized to the anxiety and other uncomfortable feelings that intrusive thoughts can bring, and that they’re not as dangerous as you may have previously believed.

Because intrusive thoughts and ensuing compulsions are unique to each person, exposures are, too. But here are a few examples:

• If you have intrusive thoughts about being cheated on, you might watch a TikTok of someone telling the story of being cheated on.
• You may write down your central fear—like  I am not attracted to my partner—and read it back to yourself several times.
• If you’re afraid that your partner isn’t “the one,” you may read a personal essay about someone who left a long-term relationship because they realized their partner wasn’t right for them. 

Again, exposures happen gradually, meaning you’ll start with ones that bring low levels of distress and work your way up to those that bring the most. 

ERP is also effective in many cases of anxiety, so if your avoidance stems from generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), for example, it’s possible your therapist would also utilize ERP. 

The bottom line is that you deserve—and can have—a life of fulfilling relationships, no matter your attachment style or diagnosis. 

For personalized guidance on an appropriate treatment plan and possible diagnosis, reach out to a licensed mental health professional knowledgeable about OCD and anxiety disorders.