anxiously

In the past of the anxiously attached person, there will have been fierce threats to love’s integrity which will have made a vigilant stance feel like the only way to remain safe.

The tragedy is that in their desperation to see if something is solid, the anxiously attached may end up entirely unnecessarily shaking it to pieces.

The phone has in particular grown into a source of suffering for those pained characters known to psychological theory as ‘the anxiously attached’ on the one hand and the ‘avoidantly attached’ on the other.

When there was only the occasional mail coach or carrier pigeon to deal with, an anxiously attached person could take silence at face value while their avoidantly attached partner had only a single letter or two to write every month.