Cautionary tales of Moving from an Anxious Attachment Style to Secure: The One Who Was Secretly In Love With His Friend
He told me directly he was unavailable, and I heard it as a maybe.
Welcome to my new series, Fifty Shades of Unavailable — cautionary tales from almost three decades of dating unavailable people, so that you don’t have to get caught in the anxious attachment traps that I did.
Today’s shade: the person who’s secretly (or maybe not so secretly) in love with their friend.
Friends — DM me if you think you know who this is. Don’t put it in the comments. It could have been a few people.
We’ll call him Stan. This isn’t about throwing shade at him. It’s about my behavior.
How it started
We connected at a friend gathering. We started exploring dating — still very much in the “we’re seeing other people” phase — but I was really excited, really interested.
But he had this friend. Someone he was spending a lot of time with, talking about constantly. At first it seemed like they were just close. But eventually, they got together.
So here are some of the anxious attachment traps I wish I had known then — and why, if you have an anxious attachment style, you’re especially wired to fall into them.
Why anxious attachment makes these traps so easy to fall into
If you grew up with caregiving that was inconsistent — warm and available sometimes, distracted or unavailable other times — your nervous system learned something important: connection isn’t guaranteed, so you’d better stay alert to keep it. That’s not a character flaw. It’s an adaptation. It worked, in the sense that it kept you scanning for signs of closeness or distance so you could act fast to hold onto the relationship.
The problem is that same scanning system doesn’t turn off in adult dating. It gets activated by uncertainty — someone who’s warm one day and pulled back the next, someone who says they’re not available — and instead of reading that as information, the anxious nervous system reads it as a threat to solve. You don’t relax into “okay, noted.” You go into problem-solving mode. And the traps below are what that problem-solving mode looks like from the inside.
Trap #1: I turned his words into a maybe
He’s standing in my kitchen, telling me straight up: “I’m not looking for something serious right now.” And I’m nodding, and I’m smiling, and I’m rewriting it all in my head. He said “not available.” I heard “not yet.”
Why this happens: For someone with an anxious attachment style, a clear “no” or “not right now” doesn’t just land as disappointing information — it can register as genuinely threatening, because on some level it echoes every other time closeness felt uncertain. So the mind does something protective: it softens the message. It finds the loophole. “Not available” becomes “not available yet,” because yet keeps hope, and hope keeps the nervous system from having to sit with loss. You’re not lying to yourself for no reason — you’re managing a very real, very old fear of disconnection.
Trap #2: I turned into a detective instead of a dater
I’m lying on my bed, scrolling Instagram, trying to figure out from a grainy story if she was at his place or he was at hers. Meanwhile, on my own phone — the one where actual available people are texting me — I’m not paying attention to them. I’m spending my time investigating his life instead of building mine.
Why this happens: Anxious attachment often comes with a heightened threat-detection system — sometimes called hypervigilance. Your body is genuinely trying to protect you by gathering more data, because more data feels like more control, and more control feels like safety. The trouble is this system is built for danger, not dating. It pulls your attention toward the one uncertain person and away from the steady, available ones — which is exactly backwards from where your energy would actually be well spent. Detective work feels productive. It’s actually a very effective way to stay bonded to the wrong person while missing the right ones.
Trap #3: I got lost in his sparkle instead of tending to my own needs
A text comes in in the middle of the night. He’s at some great dance event, and I’m excited about his energy — instead of asking the only question that matters: is this man actually meeting my needs? I was so busy admiring his joy, I forgot to check in on my own.
Why this happens: People with anxious attachment often learned early on that their needs were “too much,” or that focusing on someone else’s needs was the safer, more reliable way to stay connected. So attention naturally flows outward — toward the other person’s mood, energy, availability — while your own needs quietly drop off the radar. It’s not that you don’t have needs. It’s that tracking someone else’s state has felt, historically, more urgent and more familiar than tracking your own.
Trap #4: I thought he had something I didn’t, instead of something I’d forgotten I had
Picture him mid-story, hands moving, cracking himself up before he even gets to the punchline. He’s easy. He’s loose. I thought that if I stayed close enough, some of that would rub off on me. I wanted to be with him because I wanted to merge with that part of myself — to experience myself the way I was when I was around him.
Why this happens: This one is less about fear and more about longing, but it comes from the same root. When a quality like ease, playfulness, or freedom feels far away from your own life, it’s natural to locate it in someone else and chase the person instead of the quality. Attachment wounds tend to shrink our sense of what we’re allowed to have or be — so instead of reclaiming a disowned part of ourselves, we try to get close enough to someone who has it, hoping proximity will do the work that our own growth actually has to do.
The secure flip
Watch how they show up right now, not who you’re hoping they’re going to turn into.
Keep filling your dating funnel with fantastic people. I promise you they exist, and you’re missing them because you’re obsessing over the ones who are not it.
And when something in someone lights you up, ask: what part of me wants to be expressed more?
And take people literally — because he told me directly, and I just heard it as a maybe.
None of this means anxious attachment is a life sentence. Attachment styles aren’t fixed personality traits — they’re patterns that formed in response to real experiences, and patterns that formed can also shift. The first step isn’t forcing yourself to stop feeling anxious. It’s getting curious about the moment the pattern kicks in — the softening of a clear “no,” the urge to investigate, the pull toward someone else’s spark — and asking what it’s actually protecting you from. That’s where the real work, and the real freedom, starts.
