8 hacks to change your relationship attachment style to seem hotter

How to transition from anxious to avoidant without years of therapy

“What’s your attachment style?” asked every upper middle class person under the age of 55 in a blue state city on a second date. If you’ve never heard of attachment theory, you’re probably reading this post by mistake, and you should increase the font size on your desktop PC and google “mall walking” or “assisted living facility.” Books have been written about the books about the books about attachment theory, and there are more online clickbait quizzes to help you figure out your attachment style than there are pronoun variations, genders and sexualities in Northern California. These books and quizzes are a massive waste of your time. If you want to know your attachment style and change it without spending a dollar or more than 4 minutes, read on. 

Let’s start by explaining attachment theory. 

If you text someone you’re into, and you lose your shit when they don’t write back within 60 minutes, you have what’s called an anxious attachment style. If you get a text from someone you’re into, and you force yourself to wait 60 or more minutes to read their response because you want to seem like you’re not that into them, you are anxious-avoidant. If you get a text from someone you’re into, and you leave them unread in favor of cleaning your bathroom, you are avoidant (and probably also OCD). Supposedly there is a fourth attachment style called “secure,” but this style is a myth and definitely irrelevant, because no one who bothers to read about attachment style is actually secure or ever will be. 

It’s highly uncool to be anxious, it’s totally exhausting to be anxious-avoidant, and it’s fucking fire to be avoidant. Being avoidant makes you much sexier during sport-dating, and it gives you a ruthless, unfair advantage in your healthy, long-term, nourishing relationships. 

What’s cool about attachment theory is that you can pretend to change your style to seem more attractive. 

Given that all of you - literally every single one of you - have an anxious attachment style in your polycules, I’m going to give you 8 (because I couldn’t think of 10) simple hacks that will enable you to give the aspirational impression of being avoidant without spending a decade in therapy, half of which would have been devoted to you asking your therapist if someone you went on two dates with will respond to the text you sent two weeks ago (they won’t). Therapy is for people who don’t take the initiative to find far more efficient shortcuts of seeming well-adjusted. 

These are 8 hacks that you can use to quickly and easily transition from anxious to (seeming) avoidant in your romantic relationships: 

1. Date down

Thinking back to the relationships in which I was at peak anxiety levels, I realized something blindingly obvious. I was punching above my weight. I was out of my league. I was constantly afraid of being abandoned, because I never had any business dating these people to begin with, and we both knew it. So, they were naturally avoidant, and I was anxious. The solution to this problem is to lower your standards. If you date someone who isn’t bonkers hot, you naturally tend to give fewer fucks. They cancel plans? Dope. No need to shower, pizza is two clicks away, and look at all the variations of Yellowstone on Paramount Plus. Dating people you aren’t particularly excited about helps you find that perfect level of chill.  

2. Masturbate more

Anyone over the age of 30 probably doesn’t masturbate as much as they should in order to not have an anxious attachment style. And by anyone, I mean straight men. Women of all ages still masturbate frequently to compensate for straight men being unsatisfying sex partners, so if you’re a woman, this hack isn’t for you. Masturbation is an entirely overlooked tool for men who want to become avoidant, because when you want sex less, you become less needy, which is a shorter way of saying “anxious attachment style.” Men: the next time you send a text to a woman you’re into, stop whatever you’re doing and masturbate. Women: if you send a text to a guy you’re into and after weeks of anxious communication behavior he suddenly doesn’t respond, you will need to pursue the nuclear option: send nudes. 

3. Wear a kimono 

Everyone knows that the most chill people on the face of the planet are the Japanese. Based on their declining birth dates, the entire population of Japan is avoidant. A great way to simulate their legendary level of avoidance is to dress like you are a Jedi living in Kyoto, which is how most grown men in Williamsburg dress: draped in kimonos. You will find that the moment you put on a kimono, especially one that you have custom-made for you through that guy who knows the guy with the contact at that one store in the Shimokita neighborhood in Tokyo, you will become serenely avoidant. This is partly because you will spend more time looking at yourself in any reflective surface, which is what all guys who live in Williamsburg and wear kimonos do, and also because no one will want to date you in that stupid kimono, so you won’t have anyone to be anxious about. 

4. Be polyamorous 

Polyamory is generally just compensatory behavior in relationships between two people who never wanted to have sex more than a few times but stayed together because they impulsively adopted a dog the summer of 2020, but sometimes polyamory can be more than just glorified promiscuity without short term consequences. If you’re dating someone, and you are anxious and they are avoidant, I suggest that you “open up the relationship.” This will be very hard for you at the beginning; because your partner is avoidant, they will meet this suggestion with intoxicating apathy, which will make you exceptionally anxious. But the moment you come home at 2am smelling like someone else and don’t have the desire or energy to even kiss them goodnight, the power dynamic will instantly shift in your favor. You will become less anxious, they will become less avoidant, and this will create a secure attachment-style-equilibrium until you inevitably break up two months later.

5. Start a company

You’d be amazed by how few fucks you will give about anything in the world that isn’t your startup when you become an entrepreneur. You will find that dating is an afterthought, because you’re constantly getting fucked in your professional life. You will also start sleeping very poorly, which will adversely affect your sex drive. Because you’ve forgone an actual income in favor of “equity,” you won’t have the disposable income to date, which costs adult men in New York City an average of $2,366.66 a month ($4,000 if you live in Manhattan, $3,000 if you live in Williamsburg, $100 if you live in Bushwick). There is a catch with this tactic, however. While you will achieve avoidance in your romantic life, your anxious attachment energy will be redirected towards venture capitalists. You will have first call after first call with dozens of men in their early thirties who attended the University of Pennsylvania, did two years at Citibank as an analyst in healthcare investment banking, worked in business development at a fintech business, started a company that failed after 18 months, and were then hired by whatever venture fund you’re pitching to know about all the possible deals that could be done but not actually deploy any capital. These young men – all of whom are 5’9 and have frizzy, receding hairlines – are suddenly the hottest women you have ever seen, and they are as avoidant as you are anxious. 

6. Become a Republican

Anxious attachment is a personality trait endemic exclusively to liberals. Fretting about being abandoned by your partner is really only for blue state people who are in favor of democracy, equality and recycling. Think about it. Does your khaki pants-wearing, golf-loving, bourbon-drinking, hair-parted-on-the-left-but-votes-on-the-right cousin who was social chair of his fraternity at University of South Carolina and runs supply chain operations for the pesticide company your great uncle started have an anxious attachment style? Do you think he’s ever read into the choice of punctuation in his girlfriend’s texts? Of course not. That dude got married at 26 to his 24-year-old girlfriend, had his first kid at 28 and second at 31, bought one of those flat-bottomed bass fishing boats and hitched to his Ford F-150 to avoid them, and has literally never had a moment of anxiety in this entire romantic life other than that one time he did coke sophomore year and couldn’t get an erection while watching Survivor. This is because he believes in trickle-down economics, pork chops and country clubs. If you aren’t afraid of losing your soul and are willing to leave the Northeast or Pacific Northwest, try voting red in the next election, and watch how quickly your anxious blue attachment style becomes a bright, avoidant red. 

7. Switch from iPhone to Android

Apple products and their interfaces create a tremendous amount of anxiety. This is because anxious attachment styles are at their worst during realtime text communication, and on iMessage you can see when someone is actively writing a response because of the so-called typing awareness indicator. This is perhaps the greatest euphemism of all time. It should really be called the cortisol level enhancer. Have you ever watched those three fucking gray dots undulate not felt like you’re having a cardiac event? Just imagining the myriad different directions your entire life could take based on the outcome of those dots is enough to spark a panic attack. How much better would your entire life be if you just got a blunt, unambiguous, unceremonious green box of words without the reality TV show visual fucking drumroll? I think the Apple design team are sadistic assholes. Never mind Covid-19. It’s actually the typing awareness indicator that have caused the precipitous drop in American lifespans. Want to achieve a healthy level of avoidance in your romantic life? Switch to Android. 

8. Get old

Have you met any 90-year-olds who have anxious attachment styles with anything other than their own mortality? Of course not. Old people have a delightfully avoidant attachment style, because they’ve either been putting up with their spouse’s bullshit for sixty years, or they’re widowed and just want to watch Matlock reruns. What’s interesting about getting old and avoidant is that it isn’t actually an exponential curve that spikes at like, 70. Studies have shown that people who have an anxious attachment style gradually become more avoidant over time and finally achieve optimal avoidance when they are dead. So, if none of these other attachment style transition tactics prove effective, there is hope for you. You just have to be patient.