How Texting Reveals Your Attachment Style

When I was a teenager, I would be texting back-and-forth with someone I liked on my custom-blue Nokia 5110, feeling that dopamine hit every time my phone made that classic high-pitched double ring. I would eagerly text back on my stiff numerical keyboard, filled with unease after pressing send, before the response came and I grew calm again. My excitement would rise as I read her wonderful words, before I eagerly responded and awaited her response again.

Then: nothing. A minute becomes two. Two minutes become ten. Maybe she’s been called to dinner, I would reassure myself. I would then go inside and watch TV with my family with an ache in my chest. After another ten minutes, I would sneak back inside and check my mobile. Nothing. My chest would seize up, and I would spiral into a panic. I would then pore over our exchange, checking to see if I said anything stupid or offensive. Why is she not responding?

“Everything ok?” I would text her.

After another couple of hours of agonising and sweating, her response would come:

“Sorry, yes. I was busy.”

At first, the double beep would be like a shot of morphine. But her short response would leave me incredibly unsettled. Why was I feeling and being this way?

It was because I had an anxious attachment style.

The Agony Of Texting When Insecurely Attached

Texting can make for a fascinating science lab of human attachment. Without eye contact, body language or the ability to even see where the person is, you are bound to a vertical thread with a box to type in your communication. That’s it. That’s all the power you have.

When you are in the same room as someone, you always have the possibility to engage them. It’s hard to ignore a person right next to you who can yell at you and shake you. However, with texting, you can simply put the phone on Do Not Disturb and pack it away, and the person is left typing into the abyss.

The challenge with texting comes when you get emotionally invested in an exchange. In person, you receive regular feedback in the form of eye contact, facial expressions and immediate responses. With texting, you have no choice but sit patiently in the waiting room of the abyss. Then, as with all things social online, you get that dopamine hit when the response comes. For anyone who is emotionally invested in a text exchange, pouring your heart into a rigid, cold communication medium while being intermittently poked with dopamine hits is an unsettling experience.

For the anxiously attached, it can be pure hell.

Anxious Attachment

Anxiously-attached people are the ones who send you ten panicked messages in a row. They are the ones who ‘test’ you when you do not respond promptly.

As I described through my teenage self, anxiously-attached people, once emotionally invested in a text exchange, require consistent, timely responses, as well as clear communication about when the thread is over. Even then, the waiting time in the abyss is terribly painful for them. They get a moment of dopamine-fuelled joy, followed by many minutes of unease and panic.

Anxiously-attached people grew up receiving intermittent reinforcement from their parents. The nature of texting is the same dynamic which caused them to suffer in the first place. Entering into a text exchange with someone they value and like is therefore a treacherous undertaking, especially with the next insecure attachment style.

Avoidant Attachment

Avoidants are the ones who leave your message on ‘seen’.

When feeling relatively calm and content, people with avoidant attachment will respond to a text. They will then read the response, and if it is relatively functional and surface level, will write back quickly. However, when the conversation moves into personal depths which drag the avoidant beyond their threshold of intimacy, they will wait to respond.

Even when they have the time and energy, avoidants may take their time responding until it feels safe. They need equal investment in length and depth of message. When you overshare or get too personal, the avoidant will become anxious and put away the message thread until they can calm their nervous system enough to respond.

An avoidant and anxious person texting is highly likely to derail at some point, either with the avoidant becoming overwhelmed and disengaging for good, or the anxious person losing their nerve and blowing up due to the avoidant’s withholding.

Fearful Avoidant Attachment

The fearful avoidant is the one who texts you impulsively and compulsively for hours on end one day, then leaves you on ‘seen’ for the next three days.

Fearful avoidants have a combination of anxious and avoidant attachment styles, with a traumatised core as the cherry on top. Fearful avoidants can become incredibly intimate and open for long periods, often over-committing and over-sharing, before becoming suddenly overwhelmed and abruptly turning avoidant. Making this even more confusing are their countless triggers due to their trauma.

Fearful avoidants can perceive disrespect, betrayal and rejection even when it is not there. The fearful avoidant’s hairline triggers can go off anytime, especially over a text exchange. In an in-person exchange, you can sense in real-time when the fearful avoidant is triggered, or when they pull away, and can correct course more easily. Without the rich feedback of body language, understanding what is going on with the fearful avoidant over text is basically impossible.

Secure Attachment

Those with a secure attachment style have few of the above issues. They do not get overly invested in a text exchange. They write back with a clear intention, happy to communicate, but are then happy to get on with the day when they get no response. If a matter is urgent, they text with a direct demand of what they need.

Securely-attached people are practically unbothered by sudden breaks from the avoidant, and remain consistent in their communication and boundaries with an anxiously-attached person. They generally text with an aim in mind, and will switch over to voice or in-person when needed, as they prefer the warmth and intimacy you can only get when hearing, seeing and touching the person you value.

What’s your attachment style? Do you resonate with any of the above?