Your fluctuating feelings can doom your relationship
If you’re distrustful and clingy towards your partner, it might make them anxious about the relationship, says Ashley Cooper, a graduate student of Florida State University, US, who researched on how attachment security impacted partners’ experiences.
“For people anxious in their attachments, they have anxiety as to whether the person will be there for them and if they are worthy of others,” said Cooper. “Some couples experience instability from one day to the next in their relationship, so we explored what could increase or decrease this volatility,” Cooper explained.
They found that individuals who experience high levels of anxiety about their partner’s commitment were likely to experience more volatility in their feelings about the relationship from one day to the next. Furthermore, when women experienced anxiety, their male partners experienced similar volatility in their feelings about the relationship.
They interviewed 157 couples and asked them a series of questions about how the couples communicated their attachment to each other, how comfortable they were in emotionally connecting with their partners, their relationship satisfaction and the type of conflict that existed in the relationship. Of the sample, 74% of participants were dating and nearly 50% of participants were in relationships of two years or less.
When individuals reported high attachment anxiety, there was increased volatility in relationship quality.