On Attachment

#207: Why You Feel Secure When You’re Single (But Anxious When You Start Dating)

• Stephanie Rigg • Season 1 • Episode 207

Share episode

If you’ve ever felt calm and confident when you’re single, only to find yourself spiralling into anxiety the moment you start dating, there’s a good reason for it.

In this episode, I share why this shift happens — and why it’s completely normal if you have an anxious attachment style. Attachment patterns are relational, which means they tend to lie dormant when we’re on our own. But as soon as we have something (or someone) at stake, we feel more vulnerable. The more we care, the more our protective strategies kick in — sometimes in big, overwhelming ways.

This episode is a reassuring reminder that there’s nothing “wrong” with you for feeling this way — it’s simply your nervous system doing its job in trying to keep you safe when things start to feel risky. 

🔥 Save 40% on my Healing Anxious Attachment course for 72 hours only! 🔥

Highlighted Links

Additional Resources

Speaker 2:

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, I am answering the question of why you feel secure when you're single, but anxious when you start dating. So this is one that I get a lot People will reach out to me, whether students in my programs or people on Instagram or elsewhere with this experience of like, I feel great when I'm single. I feel like I'm totally in control and I've got my shit together and I'm good at my job and it feels like life is kind of going well. everything is smooth sailing. And then as soon as I start seeing someone start talking to someone on an app that I'm interested in, maybe I go on a couple of dates and I lose the plot. I am, totally beside myself with anxiety. I spiral into this anxious mess and I hardly recognize myself what is going on? I thought that I was making strides and I was suddenly secure. And then actually I feel really disheartened because it turns out all of my anxious patterns were just lying dormant beneath the surface, waiting to be activated by some new connection. So what, what gives, what's going on? Why is that happening? So maybe that's something that you relate to. I know that it is really common, and I'm gonna be sharing some thoughts today on why that actually makes perfect sense. That is not at all confusing or perplexing to me. That is exactly what I would expect to happen. So I'm gonna be talking about why that makes so much sense and perhaps more importantly how you might relate to that experience and what you can do to try and feel a little bit more grounded, rather than making that experience a problem and kind of panicking and going this is bad. I shouldn't be feeling anxious. I was feeling fine before. What does it mean that I'm not feeling fine now? because obviously all of that meaning making on top of the anxiety that you might be experiencing, can take it from bad to worse and can leave you feeling not only insecure and full of doubt, but then like spiraling about the spiraling. So that's what we're gonna be talking about in today's episode. Before we get into that, just a reminder, if you are someone who struggles with anxious attachment, as I know most of my listeners are, uh, and you haven't yet checked out my free training on how to heal anxious attachment and finally feel secure in life and love, all my anxious attachment starter kit. Both of those are really wonderful free resources that you can find in the show notes and on my website. I really, really encourage you to check those out as a starting point. And particularly if you're someone who has this tendency to judge your anxiety as being wrong or bad, and the instinct to just try and get rid of it, to make your anxiety stop or go away. Those free resources that I've just mentioned will be really helpful in explaining to you why that might actually be keeping you stuck, that mindset, and what you can do instead to meaningfully shift the relationship you have with your anxiety, which in turn tends to actually soften some of the anxiety. ironically, the more we try and control it and make it go away, the louder it gets much of the time. Okay, so let's talk about this. Why would you feel totally secure while single, but suddenly an anxious mess when you start dating someone. so if we take a step back and look at what attachment theory and attachment styles is describing, and you might've heard me say before that my preferred way of distilling down the crux of attachment styles is what have we learned? To fear in relationships and how have we learned to respond to the fear or what are the things that we experience as stressful when it comes to a relationship? And how have we learned to manage the stress? And those habituated patterns of stress and fear and protective strategies are essentially attachment styles, right? so someone with more anxious attachment patterns has learned to fear disconnection, abandonment, rejection, rupture. And the ways that they've learned to manage that are by clinging, gripping, controlling, information, gathering, people, pleasing, fawning, all of those protective strategies. Whereas someone who's more avoidant has learned to fear being smothered, being criticized, being a failure, being overly dependent on, in a way that feels like it's out of their depths. Being trapped, having their autonomy infringed upon. and the ways that they've learned to protect against that are by shying away from emotional depth or intimacy, trying to keep things, more casual, by resisting commitment, all of those things can be part of the protective strategy of someone with more avoidant patterns. So why is it that you'd feel secure when you're single, but suddenly be propelled into all of your protective strategies in whatever direction. And I should have said at the outset, the question was about anxious attachment. but the same will be true for people with other insecure patterns, right? you might feel really secure when you're single and suddenly very not secure when you start dating someone. and the very simple answer is that when you are single, you are not being brought into contact with relational stresses. Right. And if we think of attachment styles and your anxious attachment patterns or your avoidant attachment patterns, or people avoidant attachment patterns for that matter, as being the things that you do in response to relational stress, there's just no trigger when you're single. so there's nothing for those patterns to be responding to. So you might be feeling totally in control when you're single, but you're not in the arena when you're single. Right? It's only when you. Develop an attachment to someone that all of those patterns and all of those fears start to register as being relevant to the situation they get brought to the surface because that's what they're in response to. They're in response to relationships. That's where they were formed. That's where they play out Now you might be wondering and listening to that, does that mean that I can only heal when I'm in a relationship if all of these patterns are just gonna lie dormant, until I get into a relationship no matter what I'm feeling when I'm single? does that mean that certain things can only be healed there? And I've done a whole episode on this, is it better to heal while single or in a relationship directly addressing that question? So you can go and listen to that if you want to go deeper. But, The short answer is I think there are certainly things that will only come up in relationship and so can only be healed in relationship. So certain fears around intimacy, right? If you're someone with more avoidant patterns, you are not gonna heal your intimacy fears by being single because you're just not being brought into contact with those intimacy fears. If you are maybe having casual sex with people or you've got kind of surface level friendships or whatever, you go to work, you catch up with someone for a drink none of that is bringing you face to face with your deepest fears about intimacy and vulnerability. so you're able to keep that locked away and for as long as that's locked away, it's still there. it's only when we turn towards those parts of ourselves that we have maybe locked away in the basement, that we can develop a new relationship with them and ultimately free them from the burdens that they might have been carrying for a really long time. The same is true for someone with more anxious attachment patterns. You're not gonna be face to face with your abandonment fears. If you're not in a relationship, you might be feeling. Insecure about not being in a relationship, but it's not gonna be to the same degree as when you are really invested and the stakes feel so high because suddenly there's someone that you're very attached to, and you're scared of losing them. That's a completely different set of circumstances to being single and wanting a relationship. So there are certain things that we'll only really be brought into contact with when we're in a relationship and when we are invested and when the stakes do feel high, and when we do feel like we've got a lot to lose because that's where we're risking so much and so much is on the line. So naturally our fears and our protective parts are gonna be on high alert in those circumstances. With that being said. I still think that there's a lot of work that you can do, when you're single or between relationships in order to better prepare yourself to do that work once you get into a relationship at whatever future point. so it's not to say that time spent between relationships is wasted. And you know, you, you can't be doing any meaningful work on yourself. I think the opposite is true. particularly if you're someone with more anxious patterns. There's huge value in learning to build a beautiful, fulfilling rich life, between relationships because your starting point

Speaker:

starting point

Speaker 2:

might be, always needing a relationship in order to feel like you are enough or like your life has value. always orienting your identity around being someone's partner. So learning to stand on your own two feet and learning to feel really good about yourself. I think. Is absolutely valuable and worthwhile work to do when you're single. but that's not to say that you're gonna have a really smooth transition back into relationships, and I think that's an important kind of reality check and expectation realignment that a lot of people need. that. Even if you've done a lot of work, when you get into a relationship, your stuff is gonna come up. And that's probably true even for secure people, right? That relationships are uniquely triggering and they're kind of designed to show us all of our stuff and designed to push us to our edges, and show us where our work is. And obviously there are healthier and less healthy containers for doing that work. It's not to say that it's, a great idea to get into a super triggering relationship just so that you're in the arena and you have the opportunity to be confronted with your triggers. but expecting to never be triggered in a relationship just because you've been doing the work while single is not realistic either. So, all of that to say, don't panic if you start dating someone and suddenly you're feeling really anxious. Um, that makes perfect sense because. That is just your nervous system doing its job, doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to say, Hey, this thing reminds me of that other thing and that other thing was painful or scary, or we got hurt, then are you sure we shouldn't try and do all of the things to protect ourselves that we did before? and that's. Just the the program that it's gonna run. And you don't have to make meaning out of that. You just have to notice it and turn towards yourself and go, okay, what do I need? I'm noticing that I'm feeling anxious about this person that I've connected with. That makes sense. I'm excited about them and being excited about them means it's vulnerable, means I've got something to lose. I've got some skin in the game. So naturally my fears around that are going to be brought to the surface. How can I best support myself to move through this period that feels a little edgy, that feels a little vulnerable in a more grounded way? And that is how we actually shift our patterns, is by showing up to triggering or challenging experiences in a different way to what we might have in the past. that is really where our growth lies, and that's what shows our system. There's another way we don't have to default to those old habituated patterns of self-protection, which might be, texting someone incessantly or stalking them. We're doing all of the things to try and create reassurance for ourselves at a time when we're feeling unsure. So that's really the growth edge here. That's the opportunity is to not make ourselves wrong for feeling anxiety, but get curious about it and get curious about what we might need in order to stay somewhat grounded through that experience and really support ourselves to show up. As the person that we wanna be. and I should say, I do have other episodes on anxiety in early dating and how you can manage that, things to do and not do to support yourself through that experience. Okay. I really hope that that's been helpful in answering this question and demystifying it a bit, because as I said, it's actually not a mystery at all. It makes perfect sense if that's your experience. If anything, I'd be more surprised if you weren't experiencing anxiety in early dating. because it's an anxiety inducing experience for people with anxious attachment patterns that is absolutely par for the course. So rather than making that a problem, we just wanna manage it as best we can, and learn better ways to support ourselves through that experience. Okay guys, thank you so much for joining me. I really hope this has been helpful and I look forward to seeing you again next time.

Speaker 3:

Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you wanna go deeper on all things, attachment, love, and relationships, you can find me on Instagram at Stephanie under Reig or@stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review on a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again soon.