The last time I wrote about the book Attached, I mentioned thinking that I had an anxious attachment style. What I did not explain was that I eventually landed somewhere slightly different: securely attached, but with anxious tendencies.
Before reading the book, if you had asked me what anxious attachment looked like, I would have pictured a jealous person.
Someone who checks her husband’s phone. Someone who feels threatened by other women. Someone who is constantly searching for evidence that she is about to be replaced.
So imagine my surprise when I recognized parts of myself in the description.
Because I am not jealous.
When Robert and I were engaged, my mom and stepdad came to visit us at the house we had recently purchased. We were cooking dinner and visiting when Robert’s phone rang.
There was a woman on the other end.
She was stranded at the Russellville exit after dark and asked if Robert could come help her. She knew he lived nearby. I knew her from the short time I attended Robert’s high school, and I remembered thinking she was beautiful.
Robert wanted to go help her, and I supported that.
As he was leaving, I remember my mom protectively asking, “Are you sending him by himself?”
“Yes,” I said.
In my head, I was thinking, Why would I go? My family is visiting, and I can’t do anything to help her.
My mom apparently felt that I was not being protective enough of my future marriage, so she sent my stepdad with him.
Seems pretty secure of me, right?
About a month later, we were close to getting married. I would soon be moving into our house, so I came to Russellville to decorate while Robert cleaned the gutters.
I remember him standing on a ladder.
And I remember thinking, I hope he doesn’t fall and die.
I told him I could not bear to watch him up there.
At the time, I knew nothing about attachment styles, but I carried that memory with me for the next sixteen years of our marriage.
It made me wonder whether anxious attachment can take different forms.
I do not check Robert’s phone. He has given me his Facebook password at least twenty times, but I could not tell you what it is right now.
I have never spent much time worrying that another woman might take him from me.
But I can cry almost instantly when I think about saying goodbye or about everything that could happen before we are ready to.
The other night, Robert and I were outside working on our outdoor kitchen. Heat, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation had taken their toll on me.
I looked around at everything we had worked so hard to build together, and a thought entered my mind:
What if tomorrow God decided it was Robert’s time to go home?
Suddenly, all of it felt temporary.
The house. The outdoor kitchen. The pool. The life we had spent sixteen years creating.
Without him, I would become the woman who had it all and nothing at the same time.
It was not a fleeting thought. It produced sadness. It created a knot in my throat and brought tears to my eyes.
It also produced an action response.
I went and found Robert a hat. I turned on our enormous outdoor fan. I made sure he was not getting overheated.
And I told him I loved him.
I know that may sound like an enormous emotional leap—from watching my husband work in the heat to imagining life without him—but it is not much different from an anxiously attached person sensing a slight shift in a relationship and imagining its complete demise.
The difference is that I am not anxious about being chosen.
I am anxious about losing what has already been chosen.
I hesitate to say that without clarifying something important.
I do not think my version of anxiety is somehow better, deeper, or more loving than someone else’s.
On paper, jealousy may sound less loving than being afraid of death or separation, but I do not think fear becomes more noble simply because it is not about betrayal.
Anxious attachment is still anxious attachment when the feared rupture is death, an accident, emotional distance, abandonment, or another person.
All of it deserves self-awareness because all of it can lead us to react to fear as though it were fact.
My anxiety may not make me search Robert’s phone, but it can make me search a delayed phone call, a change in routine, or a quiet expression for evidence that something is wrong.
Trusting his faithfulness does not always mean I peacefully trust life.
My fear can also make it difficult to fully enjoy something while part of me remains aware that it will not last forever.
Sometimes I think I try to survive the loss of things before I have actually lost them.
One of the most interesting things I learned in Attached was that people with anxious attachment tendencies can be extremely sensitive to emotional changes.
Because they fear rupture in a relationship, they may become highly alert to changes in mood, behavior, tone, and routine.
Long before I read the book, I knew I was good at reading a room.
I notice emotional shifts before anyone says a word. I watch patterns. I detect changes. I decode them.
Detecting the shift is not usually my problem.
The decoding is where I can get into trouble.
The book describes research in which people with anxious attachment tendencies were often able to recognize that an emotional atmosphere had changed. But when they were asked to immediately decide what had caused the change, their interpretations were much less accurate.
They detected the shift correctly.
Then anxiety filled in the blanks.
When they were told to pause before deciding what the emotional shift meant, their accuracy improved. Their instincts had noticed something real, but they needed time to separate what they observed from what they feared.
Eventually, I began to recognize that pattern in myself.
My boss was quieter than usual, and I wondered if there was a problem with my job performance.
It turned out that they had received terrible news on the way to work.
Robert seemed preoccupied, and my mind whispered that he might be pulling away.
It turned out that he was distracted because he was acting as director while his boss was out of town.
My instincts were not necessarily wrong when they told me something was different.
I was wrong when I immediately assumed the difference was about me or about the security of the relationship.
The most memorable example happened during one of Robert’s outages at the nuclear plant.
A man from the plant had previously died on his way home after working night shift during an outage. A year or so later, I woke up at 7:00 one morning, and Robert had not made it home.
He was normally home by 6:30.
He was not answering his phone. He had not texted to say he would be late, and at that time, I did not have a direct number I could call inside the plant.
The more time passed, the more frightening the silence became.
Logically, I knew that if he had been in a serious accident, the police likely would have contacted me.
But ambiguity is fertile ground for an anxious mind.
Every unanswered question became another opportunity for my brain to create an answer, and every answer was worse than the one before it.
Robert finally called at 7:45.
The person who was supposed to relieve him had been late. Robert could not leave his position or get to a phone until someone arrived to take over.
Nothing terrible had happened.
But my brain had noticed a break in a familiar pattern, and it immediately prepared me for rupture.
That is the anxious tendency I recognize in myself.
It is not, Who is he talking to?
It is, Why is this different?
It is not, Is he going to choose someone else?
It is, Is something happening that could take him away from me?
Understanding this has not made me incapable of anxious thoughts. It has simply taught me not to treat every thought as a conclusion.
Now, when I sense a shift, I try to separate three things:
What did I actually observe?
What story did my mind attach to it?
What else could be true?
Sometimes intuition is telling us that something has changed.
But anxiety is often the voice insisting that we already know why.
The pause between those two things has changed the way I respond, not only in my marriage but in nearly every relationship I have.
I am also not speaking from a place of believing that betrayal or separation could never happen.
I know spouses can leave. Marriages can end. People can make choices that once seemed impossible.
I have just never felt that Robert’s hand was on the door.
I am much more convinced that if he leaves this life before I do, it will not be by his own choosing.
And that is where I land on my attachment style.
Maybe I am secure in my marriage but anxious about its permanence.
I do not believe our story would end because we stopped choosing each other.
What makes our bond special is not that the world contains no one else with potential. We do not choose each other because there are no other attractive, interesting, or compatible people in existence.
We choose each other because we committed to.
No matter where temptation, difficulty, distraction, or disappointment appears, we both know where we are going to end up.
In each other’s arms.
Maybe I was never afraid that Robert would stop choosing me.
Maybe I was afraid that one day, life would not let me keep him.
