THE RELATIONAL HUMAN · SKILLS WE WERE NEVER TAUGHT · ISSUE 07
June 2026 · 12 min read
A friend told me, not long ago, that she had decided to stop dating until she was secure.
She said it the way you might announce a sensible decision about money: calm, responsible, faintly virtuous. She had done a quiz. The quiz had told her she was anxiously attached. And she had concluded, reasonably enough given everything the internet had taught her, that she was not yet fit for release into a relationship. She would work on herself first. She would become secure. And then, certified, she would date.
I have thought about her a great deal since, because there was something quietly heartbreaking in it. A grown woman, kind and clever and entirely loveable, had benched herself from connection until she could pass a test that, as it happens, has no passing grade.
Somewhere in the last decade, attachment theory escaped the textbook and entered the group chat, and it has done a great deal of good there. People have language now for things that used to have none. But somewhere in that migration, a subtle and damaging thing happened. Secure stopped being a description and became a destination. A grade. A gold standard. Three styles to be ashamed of, and one to achieve.
We have spent the last two issues taking attachment apart, gently. First, that your style is a strategy and not a sentence, a thing you learned and can therefore unlearn. Then, that when two people clash across the anxious and the avoidant, neither of them is doing it wrong, only differently. This issue is about the quiet cruelty hiding inside the word that was supposed to be the happy ending. Because the way we currently talk about secure attachment is hurting people, and I want to say why, and then offer you a way out of it.
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How a description became a grade
Attachment styles began as observations. A researcher watched how small children behaved when their mothers left the room and returned, and noticed patterns: some settled easily, some clung and raged, some went conspicuously cool. Decades of work built those patterns out into the language we now use. But they were never meant to be a leaderboard. They were a description of strategies, each of which made complete sense given the conditions that produced it.
A description, though, is a calm thing, and the internet does not reward calm. So the four styles were quietly sorted into a ranking. Secure on top, glowing. The other three reframed as conditions: things to be diagnosed, managed, and ideally cured. Type attachment style into any search bar and watch what it wants to finish the sentence with. Not so much what is mine as how do I fix mine.
You can watch this happen in real time in the places people gather to talk about it. Spend an evening in the attachment forums online and you notice something strange: the secure are almost never there. Roughly three in five people are securely attached, and yet the rooms where attachment is endlessly discussed are populated, almost entirely, by the anxious and the avoidant and the fearful. The secure have, for the most part, paired off and wandered away from the topic. Which means the loudest cultural conversation about attachment is conducted by people in distress, about a state most of them have never lived inside, held up as the very thing they have failed to be. People arrive, take a quiz built from a few dozen questions, and leave wearing the result like a diagnosis. Anxious. Avoidant. Disorganised. Filed, sorted, and quietly convinced that the file is the truth of them.
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We foward to trophy on to our children too
None of this is new. We rehearse it on children long before they are old enough to take a quiz.
In a great many classrooms now, feelings are sorted by colour. There is a well-meaning and genuinely useful system that maps emotional states onto a palette: a calm, ready green, a revved-up and frustrated yellow, an overwhelmed red, a low and sluggish blue. It hands children a vocabulary they would otherwise lack, which is a real gift. But watch what happens to it in practice. One colour, the calm green, quietly becomes the right one. The others become states to be corrected, managed, moved out of as quickly as possible. The unspoken goal of the day becomes: stay green.
The trouble is that almost no child lives in green. Most spend their days oscillating somewhere between the low of blue and the too-much of yellow, dipping into red and climbing back out, which is precisely what a developing nervous system is built to do. And so a child who is simply being a child, with a child’s enormous and ungovernable weather, learns a lesson far earlier than anyone intended: that there is one acceptable way to feel, and that their actual inner life is mostly a failure to achieve it.
They carry that lesson into adulthood intact. We just swap the colours for attachment labels. Green becomes secure. Everything else becomes a zone to apologise for.
Here is the correction, and it is the same in the classroom as in the bedroom. There is no wrong zone. Anxiety is not a failure of character. Avoidance is not a moral defect. Even the red of genuine overwhelm, the flooded, furious, cannot-think red, is not a verdict on your worth. A feeling is not a thing you can get wrong. It is weather. It arrives, it does what it does, it passes. You are not graded on your weather.
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The trophy, and the door it teaches you to close
But something has been added to secure that is worse than a grade, and it is worth naming plainly, because it is doing real damage out in the dating world. Secure has become a trophy. And trophies confer status.
In the current telling, the secure are not merely regulated. They are imagined as a kind of higher being: the calm, the wise, the all-seeing, the ones who have risen above the mess the rest of us are still thrashing around in. And once secure is a position of superiority, it stops being something you quietly are and becomes something you brandish. You can see it in the dating profiles now. Must be securely attached. Only dating secure. Phrased as self-respect, as a healthy boundary, as standards.
But look closely at what that filter actually does. It screens out, in advance, anyone carrying a visible insecurity, which is to say it screens out most of humanity, including, on an honest day, the person doing the screening. And here is the gentle irony at the centre of it: holding out only for someone already finished, regulated, trophy in hand, is not really what a secure person does. It is closer to the opposite. It is avoidance in better branding, and usually not out of arrogance but out of fear, the same fear that moves the anxious one and the avoidant one, protecting itself the only way it has ever learned how.
Because real security, the genuine article rather than the performed version, is not a fortress you build to keep imperfect people out. It is the capacity to stay in connection with imperfect people, yourself first among them. Someone who can only love the already-healed hasn’t transcended insecurity so much as found a gentler-sounding way around the risk of loving someone real. Which is, when you sit with it, one of the most human moves there is. Worth noticing, never worth condemning.
And in any case, nobody holds the trophy all the time. Security is not a personality you acquire and keep in a cabinet. It flares and fades with how much you have slept, how much is being asked of you, which particular person is in the room, which particular old wound they have wandered too close to. The one most certain they are the secure one is very often just the one who has not yet been activated. Give it time. Give it the right argument at the wrong hour.
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The only line that matters
So if every feeling is permissible, anxious, avoidant, green, yellow, red, is the answer simply that anything goes? No. There is a line. It is just not where we have been told it is.
The line is not the feeling. The line is the choice.
You are allowed to feel anything. You are responsible for what you do with it.
You are allowed to feel the anxious spike of fear when a message sits unanswered. You are not licensed to go through your partner’s phone. You are allowed to feel the avoidant pull to vanish when things get close. You are responsible for whether you actually leave the room without a word, or whether you manage to say, even clumsily, I am overwhelmed and I need a minute. The internal state is weather. The behaviour is the choice you make while standing in it. The first you cannot help. The second is entirely yours.
This is the whole ethic of this series compressed into a sentence: responsibility, not shame. You are not being asked to feel the correct thing, because there is no correct thing to feel. You are being asked not to do harm with what you feel, and then, slowly, across a life, to learn to choose a little better. We work with what we have in the moment. You do not get to choose your activation; you get to choose, with whatever regulation you can scrape together, what you do in the next thirty seconds. And when you know better, you do better, which is not a demand to have already been perfect. It is permission to have simply not known yet.
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Remission, not a cure
There is one more thing the gold-standard story hides from you, and it is the most freeing of all.
Even the genuinely secure are not cured. Security is not a summit you climb once and then live on. It is closer to remission: a state you tend, that asks for maintenance rather than handing you a victory, that can flare again under the right pressure and then settle again with care. The healthiest people I have ever known are not the ones who never wobble. They are the ones who have stopped being ashamed of the wobble, and have learned, with some tenderness toward themselves, what to do when it comes.
Which means the goal was never to become a flawless type and then retire there. There is no there to retire to. There is only the ongoing, ordinary practice of being a person, with all your weather, making the kindest choices you can manage from wherever you happen to be standing on the day.
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I think often about my friend, certified anxious, waiting in the wings for a security that was never going to post her a certificate. I wish I had said it more plainly at the time, so I will say it here, to her and to you.
You do not have to earn your way into being allowed to love. You are allowed to be the anxious one and still date. Allowed to be the avoidant one and still stay. Allowed to be someone who is visibly, ongoingly, unmistakably a work in progress, in the company of another work in progress, both of you learning in real time. The work is real. It is simply not an entrance exam you have to pass before connection is permitted. It is the thing connection is made of.
There is no green zone you have to reach before you are allowed to be here. You are already allowed to be here.
In the next issue, I want to stay with this and look at the engine that actually drives change, which turns out not to be the one most of us are running on. We try to improve ourselves by disliking ourselves harder, and then wonder why we never move. There is a gentler mechanism, and it works far better. We will talk about why you change faster from self-compassion than from self-contempt.
Sharon x
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The Relational Human is a newsletter about the skills of intimacy. The ones no generation was ever formally taught, and the ones that quietly decide whether our lives, and the lives of those who come after us, feel like genuine connection or its prolonged simulation. Written by Sharon Alexandra: psychotherapist, behaviour specialist, educator, and writer. With rigour, with warmth, and with the conviction that none of this is fixed.
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I really appreciate this corrective — especially the way “secure attachment” can become another idealized identity people use to measure or shame themselves.
The layer I keep thinking about is the difference between not needing to be perfectly secure before relationship, and repeatedly putting yourself back into dynamics where the same unresolved imprint keeps getting activated.
I agree that anxious or avoidant responses should not become moral failures. And I also think the healing world often treats attachment patterns as if they are permanent traits we can only learn to manage more kindly.
That has not been my experience.
In my own work, these patterns are not fixed identities. They are nervous system predictions that can fundamentally resolve.
So the question becomes less, “Am I secure enough to date?” and more, “Is this relationship giving me more access to choice, truth, repair, and accurate perception — or am I repeatedly re-entering a pattern that keeps retraumatizing the same imprint?”
The goal is not perfection before intimacy. But it is also not endless repetition dressed as self-acceptance.
There is a real difference between dating as an imperfect human and continuing to place yourself inside dynamics where your nervous system has to keep surviving the same old threat.