Why Am I So Drawn To This Person?

Some Connections Feel Powerful Before We Understand Why

Attachment, Dating, and Getting Curious About Your Nervous System

Before we begin, I want to be clear that this post isn’t about pathologizing anyone or telling you who should connect with, become attached to, or choose. It’s about sparking curiosity and helping people make choices that honor their safety.

Have you ever wondered why you’re attracted to certain people or situations?

Why one person can feel interesting or intriguing, while another seems to activate something incredibly powerful inside of you?

Or perhaps why peace and stability can sometimes feel less activating, while emotional unavailability, early idealization before truly knowing someone, avoidance, the lover you can’t ever be with, the complicated situation that we can romanticize internally and project onto from a distance, the tragedy, uncertainty, or even disrespect can pull some nervous systems in?

Why do certain relational dynamics repeat themselves—even when part of you knows they aren’t working or making you feel content?

Or why, sometimes, you can’t quite tell whether the intensity you’re experiencing is connection, chemistry, attachment activation, anxiety, familiarity, intuition, a sense of unsafety—or some complicated mixture of all of them?

This is one of the areas of therapy I’m most passionate about.

Attachment work isn’t simply about figuring out whether you’re “anxious,” “avoidant,” “secure,” or “disorganized.” Human beings are far more complicated than a few boxes on an Instagram infographic.

When I work with attachment and relational patterns in therapy, I don’t begin by trying to place someone into a category or pathologize them. I begin with curiosity, and a thorough, individualized assessment.

We look carefully at your biopsychosocial history, early attachment experiences, trauma and relational history throughout your lifespan, current relationships, patterns of attraction and connection, nervous system responses, and what you actually want from relationships at this point in your life.

The question is bigger than “what is my attachment style?”. It’s also: What has my nervous system learned about closeness? What tends to activate me? What feels familiar? What feels safe? And are the relationships I’m drawn toward actually compatible with the life and relationships I want to build?

Attachment-informed therapy can help us understand how we learned to experience and define closeness, what happens inside of us when connection feels threatened, what kinds of people and dynamics activate us or draw us in, and how our histories can influence the relationships we choose today.

And increasingly, I’m interested in something that happens even earlier:

What happens before we’re deeply attached?

⸻

What Happens Before Attachment?

I like to think about this as the pre-attachment period.

I’m not using “pre-attachment” here in a pathological sense, or as a formal diagnostic category, or established stage of adult attachment theory. I’m using it as a clinical frame for understanding the early period in which attraction, curiosity and emotional investment are beginning to develop.

Because sometimes we begin building an attachment to someone before we’ve gathered very much relational information about them.

We may know that we’re attracted to them.

We may know that conversation feels electric.

We may know what they do professionally, what music they like, what they post online, what their values appear to be, how they describe themselves, what communities they belong to, or what kind of life they seem to live.

And our brains begin doing what human brains are remarkably good at doing:

filling in the missing pieces.

Potential can begin feeling like compatibility.

Similarity can begin feeling like intimacy.

Red flags are brushed over in favor of continuing to view the person favorably.

Activation can feel like intensity or chemistry.

A person’s initial or surface presentation can become confused with their relational capacity.

And an imagined relationship can begin developing before a real relationship has had enough time to reveal itself.

That doesn’t mean the attraction isn’t real.

It means the information is incomplete.

⸻

Sometimes We Attach to Possibility Before Reality

Early attraction naturally contains projection and idealization.

We don’t know another person yet.

So our minds inevitably make predictions.

We imagine what spending time together might feel like.

We notice similarities.

We identify qualities we admire.

We wonder whether they might understand parts of us other people haven’t.

We may begin imagining what a relationship with them could become.

None of this is inherently unhealthy.

Fantasy is part of desire.

Imagination is part of falling in love.

The problem isn’t having fantasies.

The question is whether we remain capable of reality testing them, and updating those fantasies as real information arrives.

Because over time, relationships provide data.

How does this person respond when you disagree?

What happens when you’re disappointed?

Can they tolerate your boundaries?

Do you notice controlling tendencies?

Are they curious about your experience, or do they insert their own narrative and assumptions before understanding your mind?

Are their words congruent with their behavior?

Can they communicate directly?

What happens after conflict?

Can they apologize?

Can they repair?

Can they make room for your needs without experiencing them automatically as criticism, control or rejection?

And in some cases: Do I actually know this person? Or are they on their best behavior after someone who they egregiously harmed held them accountable for their behavior? If the real story about what they actually did and what they’re still actively participating in now was revealed to me, would I be okay with someone who behaves this way?

These things tell us considerably more about long-term compatibility than the intensity of the initial attraction.

⸻

Dating in 2026 Has Changed the Attachment Landscape

Modern dating adds another layer.

We can encounter someone digitally long before we meaningfully know them relationally.

We see photographs, videos, stories, captions, playlists, careers, hobbies, political beliefs, friends and carefully selected, curated fragments of someone’s inner world.

And our minds are remarkably good at filling in missing information with projections—which may or may not be totally accurate.

A limited amount of information can become an entire imagined person.

And this presents challenges to our attachment systems and forming healthy relationships.

Digital relationships create an attachment environment unlike the one our attachment systems evolved in.

Research on computer-mediated communication has long described a hyperpersonal effect, in which limited cues and selective self-presentation can sometimes contribute to idealized impressions of another person (Walther, 2007).

Research on online dating has similarly found that people navigate a complicated balance between authentic self-presentation and presenting an appealing version of themselves to prospective partners (Ellison, Heino, & Gibbs, 2006).

Social media adds still another layer because access to another person’s life can continue even when direct relational contact is limited.

That creates a strange modern condition:

We can accumulate enormous amounts of information about someone without accumulating equivalent relational experience with them.

Knowing someone’s Spotify playlist isn’t the same as knowing how they handle rupture.

Watching someone talk beautifully about vulnerability on a post isn’t the same as experiencing them being vulnerable with you.

Knowing their politics isn’t the same as knowing whether they can tolerate disagreement.

Watching someone practice emotional intelligence publicly isn’t the same as knowing how they actually behave when they’re ashamed, frightened, jealous, angry or hurt.

Online information isn’t necessarily false.

It’s simply different from relational information.

⸻

Information vs. Interpretation

This distinction can become incredibly useful in dating.

Information might sound like:

They initiated plans three times this month.

They told me they aren’t looking for a relationship.

They consistently respond warmly when I reach out.

They disappear for several days after emotional intimacy.

They apologized after hurting me and changed their behavior.

They haven’t communicated directly with me about how they feel.

Interpretation might sound like:

I think they’re afraid because they like me so much.

I bet they’re pulling away because the connection is too intense.

They secretly want something more.

They aren’t interested at all.

They’re my person.

They’re intentionally sending me a message.

Some interpretations eventually turn out to be correct.

Others don’t.

The point isn’t to stop interpreting human behavior—we couldn’t if we tried.

It’s learning to recognize the difference between what we know and what we’re imagining.

That little space can protect an enormous amount of emotional energy.

⸻

Why Can Certain People Feel So Powerful?

Because attachment systems aren’t logical spreadsheets.

They’re regulatory systems.

When connection feels uncertain, ambiguous, threatened or inconsistent, attachment feelings and behavior can intensify.

For someone with greater attachment anxiety, uncertainty may increase proximity-seeking, rumination, reassurance seeking or heightened monitoring of relational cues.

Someone who relies more heavily on avoidant strategies may respond to increasing intimacy by distancing, suppressing attachment needs, indirect or coded communication, intellectualizing feelings or emphasizing independence.

And people don’t exist permanently inside one category.

Different relationships can evoke different strategies.

Someone may feel relatively secure in one relationship and intensely activated in another.

This is one reason I prefer attachment frameworks as maps rather than identities (however it's also true that some attachment orientations are deeply entrenched and do exist across contexts).

The interesting question isn’t simply:

“What attachment style am I?”

It’s also:

“What happens inside of me in this particular relationship?”

⸻

Activation Can Feel Like Chemistry

This is where things get complicated.

Sometimes nervous-system activation feels incredibly alive.

You think about the person constantly.

You feel energized when they contact you.

You experience a drop when they disappear.

Small interactions feel enormously meaningful.

Uncertainty creates anticipation.

Relief after distance can feel euphoric.

That experience can easily be interpreted as:

This person must be incredibly special to me.

And they might be.

But intensity alone doesn’t tell us what is producing the intensity.

It could involve attraction.

Sexual chemistry.

Emotional resonance.

Novelty.

Familiarity.

Attachment activation.

Uncertainty.

Projection.

Fear.

Hope.

A genuine sense of connection.

Or several of these things happening simultaneously.

The goal isn’t to convince yourself that chemistry is “just trauma.”

That’s reductive too.

The goal is curiosity.

What exactly is happening inside me when I’m around this person?

What story am I telling myself about their behavior?

Because activation can also make discernment go out the window. We can make excuses for every aspect of someone's behavior, while ignoring the impact and factual components of it.

⸻

The Push-Pull Dynamic

Some relationships become especially activating because closeness and distance repeatedly alternate.

One person moves toward connection.

The other becomes overwhelmed and moves away.

The first person experiences the distance and moves closer.

The second experiences the increased pursuit and retreats further.

Around and around they go.

Emotionally Focused Therapy conceptualizes many relationship problems not as one defective partner and one healthy partner, but as a negative interactional cycle that both people become caught inside.

That’s an important distinction.

Because attachment language can become weaponized very quickly:

They’re avoidant.

I’m anxious.

They’re emotionally unavailable.

I’m the emotionally healthy one.

Real relationships are usually more complicated.

Understanding the cycle allows us to ask something more useful:

What happens between these two nervous systems when connection begins to feel unsafe?

Knowing this, we also can make space for the fact that sometimes one partner is actually abusive, highly defended, and unable to take accountability for extreme harm. Good clinical work doesn't excuse those facts and requires challenging and confronting abuse when it's occurring. Additionally, it is possible that one partner can have deeply entrenched, insecure attachment patterns across contexts, not just within the particular relational dyad.

⸻

And What About “Attached”?

I recently re-read the book “Attached”, and I have some thoughts. The book is one that is historically cited by many people seeking understanding about relationships that destabilized them, and it helped bring adult attachment theory into mainstream conversations about dating and relationships.

That accessibility has helped many people find language for experiences they previously couldn’t explain.

Published in 2011, the book was a hit, but in 2026 we view attachment theory as considerably more nuanced than the popular anxious/avoidant dating discourse sometimes suggests. The book also can be a bit reductionistic, black and white, and leads the reader to believe that only anxious or secure partners have hope in healing themselves, and avoidants should be avoided at all costs, as they cannot ever meet one's needs or actually provide healthy partnership. In some cases, many people with highly defended, entrenched, avoidant patterns are extremely challenging to work with, and the research shows that they often seek therapy less than anxious or secure partners. Primary coping tools can present as triangulating other relationships rather than directly engaging vulnerability or conflict, cheating, compartmentalizing, or several other deactivation strategies instead of showing up to the actual relationship. Since therapy is a relationship, and closeness in relationships is their primary trigger, avoiding it would naturally follow. In fact, research shows that if and when someone with an avoidant core does seek help, they often verbalize somatic complaints, body pains, or "burnout" as the chief presenting problem, when in actuality the issue is a collapsed attachment system that could no longer sustain itself with workaholism, productivity, living primarily internally without adequate reality testing, or escapism.

Avoidant protective strategies can create significant distress within relationships, particularly when one person repeatedly withdraws in response to another person’s attempts to restore connection. But avoidance exists on a continuum, and attachment orientation alone cannot tell us whether someone is emotionally mature, ethical, abusive, capable of repair, or able to build a healthy relationship. Those questions require looking at the person’s actual behavior and relational capacity.

Research has also demonstrated those with a primary avoidant attachment orientation can feel comfortable in the beginning stages of a romantic relationship, when there's clear structured roles like being a boss or parent, or when in the chaser position, but when their attachment alarm is activated, a likely nervous system protective pattern is to retreat.

Thus, I'm curious if perhaps the Attached book was written by authors who were influenced by several traumatizing relational experiences with avoidants, and maybe they've just had enough. Even as a therapist myself, this is understandable. Avoidant behavior can certainly border on abuse, traumatize a nervous system, and can lack relational ethics and responsibility required to sustain a healthy relationship. Deactivation doesn’t always look like quietly needing space; in some people it can manifest through much more disruptive relational strategies.

Nonetheless, although relational attachment systems and patterns can be deeply entrenched for some, attachment doesn't have to be destiny.

Avoidantly attached people aren’t always incapable of love.

Anxiously attached people aren’t inherently protesting.

Secure attachment doesn’t mean never becoming activated.

And not every relationship between someone with anxious tendencies and someone with avoidant tendencies is doomed.

That being said, it can be incredibly useful to use an attachment based framework while navigating dating and your relationships. It not only can give us a map about how to approach our connections, it can tell us a lot about compatibility, capacity, and the long term trajectory of relational satisfaction.

This is something I’m passionate with helping my clients with who seek me for attachment based individual work— getting curious about understanding your nervous system, your attachment system, your needs, through thorough, individualized assessments.

⸻

Emotional Availability Matters

Someone can be fascinating, attractive, accomplished, emotionally deep in some ways, and genuinely care about you—and still not be available for the relationship you want, be able to meet your needs, or have enough emotional maturity to admit when they're wrong or harmed you when they had the chance to.

Emotional availability isn’t the same thing as constant accessibility.

Healthy people need space.

They have boundaries.

They become overwhelmed.

They occasionally withdraw.

They have complicated lives.

The more meaningful question is what happens after the distance or when the relationship is tested by every day realities.

What happens when there's conflict? What happens when someone triangulates, creates chaos and instability, loses touch with reality, and blames you for reacting to it instead of taking accountability?

Do they return after a rupture?

Do they communicate?

Can they acknowledge impact?

Can they tolerate difficult conversations?

Can they make room for your internal world alongside their own?

Can they repair?

Because relational safety isn’t created by never experiencing rupture (Every relationship will have some conflict at some point).

It’s created partly by learning that rupture doesn’t necessarily mean abandonment. That conflict can be an opportunity for growth.

But when someone cannot repair after extreme harm, and potentially was given more grace and chances than any other human would have given them, that's a different story.

⸻

Compatibility Is More Than Shared Interests

Two people can share music, politics, humor, sexual chemistry, professional interests or some of the same life experiences—

and still be profoundly incompatible in relationship.

Compatibility also includes things like:

desired relationship structure,

availability,

communication,

values,

flexibility to also meet you on your terms, not just in an environment or through a medium that they have control/power over you in,

emotional responsiveness,

capacity for interdependence,

healthy boundaries,

conflict style,

sexual compatibility,

life goals,

reciprocity,

and willingness to repair.

Research on intimacy has repeatedly emphasized the importance of perceived partner responsiveness—the experience of feeling understood, validated and cared for by another person—in developing closeness.

Relationships also benefit from novelty, shared growth and experiences that allow partners to expand their sense of self together.

So yes, shared interests matter.

But being interesting to one another isn’t identical to being able to build the type of relationship you want together.

⸻

When Is Activation Actually Information?

There’s another side of this conversation that I think gets sometimes lost in attachment discourse.

Sometimes activation isn’t merely an old wound being triggered, or evidence of some pathology or mental health issue.

Sometimes something happening in the present actually doesn’t feel safe.

Your nervous system isn’t always wrong.

A clinician should get curious about this before diagnosing you, or inserting their own narrative about what they think you’re experiencing.

And if someone’s behavior is chronically inconsistent, deceptive, coercive, dismissive, boundary-violating or emotionally destabilizing, the goal of therapy shouldn’t automatically be teaching you to tolerate more of it.

Sometimes anxiety is information.

Sometimes anger is information.

Sometimes the impulse to create distance is protective.

The clinical task is learning to differentiate:

Is my nervous system responding primarily to the past, my own anxieties, the present, or some combination of both?

That distinction requires curiosity rather than automatic self-distrust.

⸻

Fantasy and Reality Can Coexist

Another important skill in attachment work is reality testing without shaming imagination.

You can have an intuition about someone.

You can feel deeply connected to them.

You can believe there’s potential.

And simultaneously acknowledge:

I don’t know yet.

Those four words can be enormously regulating.

I don’t know yet.

I don’t have to decide that this person is my soulmate.

I don’t have to decide that they’re dangerous.

I don’t have to decode every interaction.

I don’t have to know what they’re secretly feeling.

I can allow reality to reveal itself.

And I can remain in relationship with myself while it does.

⸻

Pre-Attachment Is an Opportunity for Discernment

This is why I’m increasingly interested in helping clients become curious about attachment before a relationship reaches crisis.

The pre-attachment period gives us an opportunity to ask:

What am I actually learning about this person?

What am I filling in myself?

What qualities am I attracted to?

What does this person represent to me?

Is there mutual movement toward connection that feels expansive, or is it controlled only on their terms?

How available are they actually?

What happens when I don’t receive reassurance?

Am I becoming increasingly grounded as I know them—or increasingly preoccupied?

Does the relationship exist primarily in direct experience, or increasingly in my imagination?

Am I attracted to who this person consistently demonstrates themselves to be?

Or am I becoming attached to who I believe they could become?

Have I given myself time to truly know them?

Is my attachment overriding red flags?

Again, none of these questions are designed to shame desire.

They’re designed to create choice before attachment becomes so powerful that choice and discernment can feel impossible.

⸻

The Goal Isn’t to Never Get Your Heart Broken

I don’t think the goal of attachment work should be creating a perfectly optimized dating life in which nobody ever hurts us.

That’s not intimacy.

That’s risk management.

Love involves uncertainty.

Relationships require vulnerability.

Sometimes we choose thoughtfully and still get hurt.

Sometimes a relationship is beautiful for a period of our lives and then ends.

Sometimes we misjudge people.

Sometimes people change.

Sometimes we change.

No attachment framework can eliminate grief from being human.

But perhaps we can become more skillful at recognizing ourselves earlier.

We can notice when fantasy is racing ahead of information.

We can understand why particular people activate us.

We can get better at differentiating between what activation actually is trying to tell us vs. the story in our minds about it.

We can learn what emotional availability actually looks like.

We can become more interested in demonstrated relational capacity than potential or words alone.

And we can become curious about whether the relationships we’re pursuing actually have room for the kind of connection we desire.

⸻

Attachment Work Is About Creating More Choice

Everyone is on their own journey.

I’m not interested in telling people who they should love, date, leave, forgive or choose.

I’m interested in helping people understand themselves deeply enough that their choices become more intentional.

Because attachment is powerful.

And if it were as easy as logically talking ourselves out of loving someone, human beings would have figured that out a very long time ago.

The work isn’t eliminating attachment.

It’s learning to recognize what’s happening inside of us while we’re attaching.

To distinguish intensity from intimacy.

Chemistry from compatibility.

Possibility from demonstrated capacity.

Fantasy from information.

Activation from relational safety—and sometimes to recognize when activation itself is giving us important information.

And maybe the question changes from:

Why can’t I stop wanting this person?

to:

What is this attachment teaching me about what I need, what I fear, what I’m drawn toward—and what kind of relationship I actually want to build?

That is where attachment work becomes much bigger than a label.

It becomes an opportunity to know ourselves more deeply—and to choose our relationships with greater awareness, compassion and agency.

Sending everyone who may be reading this a gentle invitation to stay curious, stay grounded, and be safe, and care for your nervous system while you’re exploring and searching to find the relationships that feel right for you.

⸻

What’s Next: Attachment Healing in Practice:

Understanding our attachment patterns is only one part of the work. Insight can be incredibly valuable, but insight alone doesn’t necessarily change the emotional and relational patterns our nervous systems have learned over time.

Attachment healing can also happen experientially-through developing new ways of relating to our emotions, our needs, ourselves, and other people.

In future posts, I’ll be exploring therapeutic approaches that can support attachment healing, including Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT), experiential and relational approaches, and relational Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP).

I’m also developing an experiential attachment-focused therapy group tentatively planned for January 2027, for people who may be interested in exploring this work alongside others in a supportive, relational space.

Stay tuned, there’s more to come!

Research referenced

Walther, J. B. (2007). Selective self-presentation in computer-mediated communication: Hyperpersonal dimensions of technology, language, and cognition. Computers in Human Behavior, 23(5), 2538–2557.

Ellison, N. B., Heino, R., & Gibbs, J. L. (2006). Managing impressions online: Self-presentation processes in the online dating environment. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), 415–441.

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford Press.

Johnson, S. M. (2019). Attachment Theory in Practice: Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with Individuals, Couples, and Families. Guilford Press.

Laurenceau, J.-P., Barrett, L. F., & Rovine, M. J. (2005). The interpersonal process model of intimacy in marriage: A daily-diary and multilevel modeling approach. Journal of Family Psychology, 19(2), 314–323.

Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273–284.

Coyle, P., Van Doorn, G., Teese, R., & Dye, J. (2025). Adverse childhood experiences and infidelity: The mediating roles of anxious and avoidant attachment styles. Family Process, 64(1), e13088. DOI⁠

Ghiasi, N., Rasoal, D., Haseli, A., & Feli, R. (2024). The interplay of attachment styles and marital infidelity: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Heliyon, 10(1), e23261. DOI⁠

Körner, R., Overall, N. C., Chang, V. T., Hammond, M. D., Sasaki, E., Schütz, A., & Zverling, E. (2026). The relational nature of attachment and power: Attachment avoidance and withdrawal limit partners’ power. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 52(7), 2098–2115. DOI⁠

Selalmaz, E., & Erdem, G. (2025). Emerging adults’ infidelity intentions in romantic relationships: The role of parental infidelity, adult attachment insecurity, and intimacy. The Family Journal. Advance online publication. DOI⁠

DeWall, C. N., Lambert, N. M., Slotter, E. B., Pond, R. S., Jr., Deckman, T., Finkel, E. J., Luchies, L. B., & Fincham, F. D. (2011). So far away from one’s partner, yet so close to romantic alternatives: Avoidant attachment, interest in alternatives, and infidelity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(6), 1302–1316. DOI⁠

re w