How to Assess if Your Date is Actively Cultivating a Secure Attachment

It’s natural, in the early stages of dating, to want to know if the person you’re going on dates with is actively working on their issues. Likely you’ll want to know how they will respond and communicate when tension arises or conflict comes up.

It can be hard to tell so early on — and yet it’s important to try, in order to make healthy decisions that will prevent pain later on.

One option is to ask; either directly or in a more roundabout way.

Maybe you’re not comfortable doing that though. Or maybe you are, and your date answers with seeming candor — but people’s self-identification and what their behavior later reveals don’t always align.

Given that this is the case, there are clues you can pick up on that may indicate a different attachment style than what they are claiming.

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I think there are ways to tell when someone is self-aware and understands their mind, behaviors, and patterns.

How do they talk about their past relationships? How long have they tended to last? How much stability and consistency do they seem to have had in their childhood?

This isn’t meant to hold anyone’s past against them, and we can always leave room for benefit of the doubt. Still, to say that our pasts often predict future behavior to some extent isn’t altogether off-base. A pattern will continue to play out unless a person has consciously taken action to interrupt it; and doing this takes significant amounts of work and self-awareness.

Moved around six to seven times through childhood for her dad’s job, changed schools every year.

Dad was in the military, would leave for months at a time, moved to different countries throughout her childhood.

These are often conditions that breed an anxious attachment.

Beyond childhood:

Is 32 and has never had a relationship. Said she’s had plenty of hookups but that in her 20s, she’d push people away shortly after getting physical with them.

This is pretty much avoidant behavior to a tee.

With a past like that of one woman I dated, it should have been a bigger yield sign for me that, at the age of 32, she’d only been in therapy for a couple of months.

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None of these are dealbreakers if a person’s had extensive therapy and is growth-oriented. Nor are they dealbreakers if they’ve truly integrated, learned, grown from, and are no longer run by these past experiences.

It’s just that it’s impossible to definitively know whether a person you’ve just met has done this work. More often than not you just have to take them for their word — or listen between the lines.

If the woman describes her past like this, I want to hear what she’s done to work through it and why she’s in a different place now.

A lifetime of experiences of that kind seem like they’d take significantly longer than a couple of months to integrate and sort out. I wouldn’t trust a doctor who’d only been in school a couple months. And we’re all doctors of our own hearts and minds. To understand them we have to look inside and take more than a cursory glance. It’s often a life-long committed practice.

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Not everyone is on the same page or has looked inward to the same degree — and acknowledging this isn’t meant to put anyone down or imply superiority. It’s meant as a way to protect yourself, if you’re considering becoming involved with someone who’s less far along in that healing process.

For instance, on Queer Ultimatum it was clear that Mal had integrated what she’d learned in therapy into her relationships. This was evident in the way she communicated and provided space for her partner, while acknowledging her conflicting feelings without allowing them to take over or overshadow the other person’s.

Unresolved issues don’t make the other person bad; they just might signify incompatibility, and that you’ll save yourself from hurt if you recognize this early.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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From The Good Men Project on Medium

What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean?

My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence

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