Why Do I Get Attached So Easily?

Do you feel attached to someone after the first or second date? Do you always seem to end up more attached to people than they are to you? Feeling emotionally attached to someone isn’t a bad thing, but when it happens too soon, it can make you feel like you’re “crazy” – and it leads to significant disappointment when relationships don’t work out.

Our attachment systems are designed to create quick emotional investment in others, but why do we sometimes attach too quickly, and how can we slow it down?

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Attached to Someone?

Adult attachments work on the same basis as our childhood attachments – we still need a safe haven and a secure base, even though we don’t need our attachment figures to survive anymore. Forming attachments to others is a natural process, sometimes it just activates too soon.

Therefore, emotional attachments are this same process still at work. Emotional attachments have been defined as something that occurs when¹:

• We perceive the traits of the other person mirror our own, supporting our self-concept,
• We experience emotional reactions, and
• Attachment behaviors are evoked.

Attachment behaviors are the actions we take to seek closeness. These approaches are typically either signalling or approaching; signalling behaviors might involve smiling or crying to show how you’re feeling, while approaching behaviors might be physically moving closer or clinging.

Example: Getting Emotionally Attached Easily

Raquel has been dating someone she met on a dating app for 2 weeks. She felt a spark right away and really enjoys their company, and there are lots of things she likes about them. She knows she has a pattern of getting attached quickly, so she tries to slow down and remind herself that they haven’t spent much time together yet.

Despite her best efforts, Raquel finds herself repeatedly checking her phone for messages from them and planning a future with them in it. She generally doesn’t feel like anything is missing from her life, but when she starts dating someone new she can become distracted from everything else. She spends less time doing things that make her feel like herself and seeing her friends.

The Psychology Behind Getting Attached Too Fast

The model above suggests that being emotionally attached to someone means that we’re seeing something affirming in them. It follows that if we have a deep need for self-affirmation, we might be more likely to form an emotional attachment quickly.

This need for self-affirmation could come from low self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, or your attachment style.

High attachment anxiety is associated with low self-evaluations and a need for validation from others; as such, attachment styles high in anxiety (anxious-preoccupied and fearful-avoidant) have been found to have the lowest self-esteem².

If forming fast attachments is associated with low self-esteem, and high attachment anxiety is also associated with low self-esteem, then we might suggest that high attachment anxiety might also be related to attaching quickly via the mechanism of self-esteem.

However, it turns out, you don’t have to have an anxious attachment style to experience attachment anxiety.

Does Your Attachment Style Explain Why You Get Attached So Fast?

Sometimes, psychologists talk about attachment in two ways: state and trait. A trait attachment is your baseline, something that might change over time but little and slowly, like a personality trait. A state attachment is affected by your current situation, and can change more quickly, like a mood.

Even if you have trait attachment security, you might experience a state of attachment avoidance if friends start to cross boundaries, for example.

A 2008 study found that attachment anxiety was higher in participants with desired or “fledgling” (early dating) relationships compared with those in defined relationships, regardless of the participants’ actual attachment styles³. In other words, being in the early stages of dating is associated with an increase in attachment anxiety, even if your attachment anxiety is usually low.

Psychologists believe that this is because attachment anxiety has an important function in bonding – it motivates us to approach and seek care from another person, and activates the attachment system to form the attachment. Again, this is normal and necessary to function, but it can create problems if it kicks in too soon.

Perhaps if you already tend towards attachment anxiety, you might experience a quicker and more intense attachment, but the data shows that this state of heightened attachment anxiety in the beginning of a relationship can happen to anyone.

How Dating Apps Amplify the Cycle

Dating apps create an inconsistent, high-feedback, rejection-rich environment, creating the perfect conditions for attachment anxiety to thrive.

The Attachment Project’s study on over 44,400 responses about dating app use found that people use dating apps for a variety of reasons, and often to find validation rather than a connection. Of the participants who used dating apps for validation purposes, 65.9% had high attachment anxiety (47.7% anxious-preoccupied and 18.2% fearful-avoidant, compared with 29.9% secure and 4.3% dismissive-avoidant).

This might support the idea that people who experience attachment anxiety are more likely to look for validation, and it seems that dating apps make it easier than ever to repeat the pattern. If you have high attachment anxiety, you might be more likely to look for validation in dating apps, and if you’re looking for validation in dating apps, you might be more likely to attach quickly to any connections you make.

Is It Rapid Attachment or Limerence?

Limerence is an intense, possibly one-sided infatuation with another person, fuelled by uncertainty and alternating feelings of hope and despair. Limerence can start very suddenly, creating feelings of intense attachment that might not take very long at all to develop.

Limerence could be considered a form of getting attached too quickly, but not all instances of getting attached too quickly are necessarily limerence. However, it could be easy for a rapid attachment to turn into limerence, which is also associated with lower self-esteem⁴ – it’s important to try to keep our feet on the ground before we get too attached too quickly to potentially avoid this scenario.

How Do I Stop Getting Attached to People So Quickly?

If your attachment system seems to activate too quickly, you might be familiar with the signs of attachment anxiety even if you normally feel secure, or even avoidant: a need to be close to the other person, fear around the uncertainty of the relationship, and a tendency to analyze every little interaction.

Since we now know that this can be triggered by early dating stages, we can recognize when and why we feel like this. This can give us room to step back and see our feelings from another perspective: we’re attaching quickly because we’re wired to, but that doesn’t mean we have to act on it. It’s normal to feel excited and hopeful, but try to stay in the present and keep expectations realistic.

The typical advice for attachment anxiety could apply to anyone experiencing state attachment anxiety: practice emotional regulation skills and nurture secure relationships with friends and family.

Given the connection between self-esteem, attachment anxiety, and attaching quickly, it might also help to focus on self-esteem. Self-confidence and self-liking can be improved by practicing hobbies and activities you enjoy, focusing on positive things about yourself and your achievements, and, again, maintaining a strong social network with family and friends.

Conclusions

Feeling attached to a developing relationship is a natural process, but it can make us feel like we’re “crazy” – especially when other people don’t seem to attach as quickly as we do. Any attachment style can experience attachment anxiety during the beginning of a relationship, but those with anxious attachment styles might be particularly prone to attaching quickly to find validation.

If you feel like you’re in a pattern of attaching too easily, try to focus on building secure attachments with other people in your life and engage in activities and skills you enjoy to support your self-esteem. For a personal, detailed self-esteem score, take our free self-esteem test.

FAQs

Why do I get attached to someone I barely know?

If you’re getting attached to someone you barely know, you might be experiencing state attachment anxiety and finding validation in the other person.

Is getting attached easily a trauma response?

Getting attached easily isn’t necessarily related to trauma. You might be thinking about the fawn response, in which we people-please and ignore our own needs after trauma. That said, everybody’s reactions to trauma are different and it’s possible to start to attach to others too easily after trauma has occurred.

Do people with ADHD get attached more easily?

People with ADHD might be more prone to limerence, which is a form of rapid attachment. This is related to how their brain’s reward system works and possibly lower self-esteem.

Is getting attached easily a red flag?

Feeling a rapid sense of attachment is a flag that you might be dealing with state attachment anxiety or low self-esteem. If your partner feels they’ve attached to you too easily, whether it’s a red flag for future bad behavior depends on how they act on this feeling – do they cross boundaries, display intense emotions inappropriately, or love bomb you? These could be red flags that they’re not managing their emotions well. However, if they’re dealing with their feelings of attachment with maturity, the attachment itself doesn’t have to be a red flag.

References

1. Huang L, Picart J, Gillan D. Toward a generalized model of human emotional attachment. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science. 2020 Aug 10;22(2):178-99.
2. Bylsma WH, Cozzarelli C, Sumer N. Relation between adult attachment styles and global self-esteem. Basic and applied social psychology. 1997 Mar 1;19(1):1-6.
3. Eastwick PW, Finkel EJ. The attachment system in fledgling relationships: an activating role for attachment anxiety. Journal of personality and social psychology. 2008 Sep;95(3):628.
4. Kim O, Jeon HO. Factors influencing limerence in dating relationships among female college students. Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial Cooperation Society. 2020;21(2):304-14.