The World Isn’t Full of Avoidants. Your Nervous System Just Thinks It Is.
10 reasons you keep choosing emotionally unavailable partners & how to stop. (10min Read)
TL;DR Summary:
Most people are secure, your picker is just outdated
Dating apps overexpose insecure attachment
Secure people exit fast; insecure people linger
Your nervous system chooses before your brain
Familiar stress gets mislabeled as chemistry
Secure attachment feels boring before it feels safe
You give hope to insecurity and leave presence too early
“Low-maintenance” often signals emotional absence
Trauma content primes you to expect dysfunction
Attraction isn’t broken, it’s trainable
MOST People Are Secure
I bet you didn’t know that in large adult population studies, roughly 55% to 70% of adults are securely attached, and about 40% are insecure (anxious, avoidant, or disorganized).
Which begs the question…
If most people are secure, why do you keep ending up with the same emotionally unavailable, insecurely attached gremlins?
Newsflash: It ain’t bad luck.
I’ve got a degree in cognitive neuroscience and study this for a living.
Today, we’re going to break down the top 10 reasons this happens, and of course, we’ll talk about exactly how to break this cycle!
Let’s dive in.
1. Dating Apps Don’t Reflect Reality
Dating apps are not neutral environments.
They reward:
Optionality
Emotional distance
Low accountability
Infinite scrolling
From a behavioral economics standpoint, apps select for people who stay in circulation longer, not necessarily people who are more secure.
Secure people often match, assess, commit, and leave the market for stretches of time.
Insecurely attached people (especially anxious and avoidant) are more likely to:
Cycle through more partners and re-enter the apps more often
Stay active while feeling uncertain about commitment
Use the apps themselves as a regulating dopamine loop
So when apps are your main pool, you’re not sampling attachment styles in the same proportions as the general population.
You’re swimming in selection bias.
This isn’t just about you being “drawn to avoidants.”
It’s about the environment over-presenting people who are less likely to form stable, secure bonds quickly, often anxious, avoidant, or both over time.
2. Secure People Don’t Stay Available Long Enough to Be Chosen
Secure people don’t circulate.
They don’t linger in situationships. They don’t hover in ambiguity. They don’t build chemistry over chaos.
From an attachment perspective, secure systems seek resolution, not prolonged activation.
They move toward clarity or away from it.
Which means they disappear quickly from dating pools.
Not because they’re rare, but because they don’t tolerate stagnation.
So it looks like they don’t exist.
They do.
They just don’t wait around for nervous systems that need time to decide.
I know, I know, harsh, but true.
3. Your Nervous System Filters Before Your Brain Ever Gets a Vote
You believe you’re choosing with logic.
Neuroscience says otherwise, my dear friend!
Your autonomic nervous system evaluates safety in milliseconds, long before conscious thought.
This scan prioritizes:
Familiarity
Predictability
Pattern recognition
Not necessarily a healthy, secure attachment.
If your early relational environment included inconsistency, distance, or emotional unpredictability, your system learned to associate arousal with connection.
So when you meet someone emotionally available, regulated, and steady…
There’s no spike.
And no spike feels like nothing.
So, you move away from it subconsciously.
4. Familiar Stress Feels Like Chemistry
This is the one most people confuse with preference.
Intermittent reinforcement is the strongest conditioner of attachment.
It’s the same mechanism behind gambling addiction.
Read that last line again…
Uncertainty + occasional reward = obsession.
Avoidant dynamics deliver exactly this:
Hot/cold behavior
Inconsistent availability
Emotional scarcity
Your system releases dopamine during the chase and cortisol during the uncertainty.
Together, they create intensity.
And then you mislabel intensity as chemistry.
So, you’re not attracted to people, you’re attracted to activation.
Whoopies…
Secure connection, however, doesn’t hijack the stress system.
So it doesn’t feel intoxicating at first.
They don’t disappear to increase desire. They don’t weaponize distance. They don’t confuse withholding with depth.
It’s a slow, steady burn. (Steady being the important bit, if you were wondering.)
So if attraction only shows up when someone pulls away, you’re not responding to the person.
You’re responding to nervous system activation.
In IFS language:
A Part of you equates longing with love
Another art associates calm with danger or abandonment
These parts aren’t wrong.
They’re just outdated protective mechanisms that were helpful at one point, but are clouding your judgment now.
Which leads us to our next reason…
5. Secure Attachment Feels Boring Before It Feels Safe
Secure relationships start neutral.
They don’t activate your threat response.
There’s no urgency. No hyperfocus. No internal obsession.
From a polyvagal perspective, secure connection lives in the ventral vagal portion of your autonomic nervous system and feels calm, present, and socially engaged.
But if your system is used to sympathetic arousal, this can feel flat.
Your body asks: “Why don’t I feel anything?”
And you leave before safety has time to become pleasure.
It’s like the nightmare version of the marshmallow study…
You end up taking the 1 marshmallow now (the avoidant) because they make you feel something right away instead of training your nervous system to wait for the 2 marshmallows later (secure attachment).
And that’s because…
6. You Give Insecure People More Chances Than Secure Ones
This one is subtle, and costly.
You explain away distance. You wait for clarity. You accept “I’m not ready.” You call it patience.
Hope is a powerful reinforcer to your brain.
Insecure dynamics keep you oriented toward the future:
“Maybe soon.”
“Once they figure it out.”
“If I just hold steady.”
That anticipation keeps dopamine online.
Secure people don’t offer that. They don’t trigger hope.
They require presence.
And presence is harder for a dysregulated nervous system than longing, because presence removes the buffer of fantasy and forces contact with what’s actually happening now.
That makes these kinds of connections hard for people who are more sold on what could be, instead of what is.
7. Some of Your “Standards” Signal Emotional Absence
“I’m low-maintenance.”
“I don’t need much communication.”
“I’m super independent.”
These aren’t neutral traits.
From a signaling perspective:
Secure people hear emotional distance
Avoidants hear compatibility
In modern dating culture, hyper-independence is often rewarded, but neuroscience is very clear on this…
Humans are co-regulating mammals, not autonomous units.
When you advertise minimal needs, you filter out people who want mutuality.
And attract people who prefer distance.
8. Social Media Trains Your Attention Toward Dysfunction
What if social media is quietly training your brain to select these people?
When your feed is 90% avoidant behavior breakdowns, your brain starts thinking that’s the whole dating pool.
It’s not. It’s just the loudest part of it.
So even content meant to help you heal can accidentally keep your nervous system locked on the very patterns you’re trying to leave.
And that’s because your brain does not register social media as ‘education.’
It registers it as environment.
What you repeatedly consume becomes what your nervous system scans for in real life.
And right now? You are likely being FLOODED with insecure attachment content.
And listen, this content isn’t wrong. But it is conditioning.
Familiar does not mean common.
What we repeatedly consume becomes what our brain scans for.
So you walk into dates unconsciously looking for distance, mixed signals, or emotional unavailability, and then are surprised when you find it…
You’re not broken. You’re not doomed. You’re not cursed.
You’re primed.
9. Trauma Language Keeps You Stuck
When you constantly analyze attachment styles and trauma patterns, you start expecting insecurity.
Your perception narrows. Your curiosity collapses.
Awareness without regulation doesn’t free you, it traps you in confirmation bias.
Attachment theory is meant to expand awareness.
But awareness without nervous system regulation creates hypervigilance.
From an IFS perspective:
A protector Part uses labels to create control
Another Part uses analysis to avoid vulnerability
Instead of meeting people, you diagnose them.
Instead of curiosity, you expect a rupture.
This narrows perception and collapses possibility.
10. Secure People Require You to Be Seen
This is the deepest layer.
Secure people notice incongruence.
They ask real questions. They respond to what’s actually happening.
They don’t let you hide behind independence or charm.
For parts of you that learned visibility leads to loss, criticism, or engulfment…
That level of attunement feels threatening.
So you unconsciously choose people who can’t see you fully.
Not because you want distance.
Because being seen once wasn’t safe.
What This All Actually Means
If most people are secure, but you keep choosing insecurity, it means one thing:
You are the common denominator.
Not because you’re broken.
Because your selection system was trained in a different nervous system environment.
And lucky for you, your nervous system can be retrained!
Here’s exactly how to start retraining your attraction system, step by step.
How to Start Retraining Attraction in 3 Steps
This is the part where you stop “understanding” the pattern and actually change it.
Your nervous system isn’t going to rewire from insight alone.
It rewires from repeated experiences + different inputs + slower pacing.
Here’s the plan.
1. Widen Your Pool
Stop sourcing partners from the same ecosystem that keeps producing the same outcome.
Environments create selection bias.
If your pool is app-heavy, nightlife-heavy, or “people who hate closeness” heavy… you’ll keep calling that “what’s out there.”
Surprise, surprise.
How To Do This:
You only date on apps → add one offline channel (friends, events, hobby groups, classes, volunteering).
You only date a specific “type” → pick one variable to deliberately expand (age range, lifestyle, personality presentation).
You only date “high intensity” people → intentionally include “stable boring on paper” people as data, not destiny.
30 Day Action Plan
Pick 2 channels for the next 30 days:
1 online (apps or social media)
1 offline (real-world community)
If you’re on apps: implement a cap (ex: 10 minutes/day). Less dopamine soup, more discernment.
Make a “non-negotiable” list that’s about behavior, not vibe:
follows through
communicates directly
emotionally accountable
Then move to Step 2.
2. Slow Your Pace
