#194: When You Don’t Feel Like a Priority in Your Relationship
Do you find yourself constantly striving to earn a place in your partner's life? Always initiating contact, making plans, and feeling like everything in your relationship originates with you? If you're nodding along, you're experiencing something incredibly common amongst anxiously attached people—the painful sense of not feeling like a priority in your relationship.
This dynamic creates an exhausting cycle where you feel like you're competing for attention, working overtime to prove your worth, and never quite feeling valued or important to your partner. Today, we're diving deep into why this happens, where it comes from, and most importantly, what you can do about it.
The Roots Run Deep
To understand why you might find yourself in this pattern, it helps to look back at the origins of anxious attachment. Many anxiously attached people grew up in relational environments marked by inconsistency. The overall experience was: "It feels really good when we're connected, but I can't always rely on that connection to be there when I need it."
This inconsistency often came from parents who were distracted by demanding jobs, their own mental health struggles, marital stress, or other life pressures. As children are quick to do, you likely internalised this unavailability as being about you—creating the story that "if I were better in some way, then my parent would show up for me the way I need them to."
This leads to a survival strategy of trying to be good, performing, people-pleasing, and striving—feeling like you have to earn and prove your worth. Sound familiar?
How This Shows Up in Adult Relationships
This childhood pattern doesn't just disappear when we grow up. It follows us into our romantic relationships, creating a dynamic where:
The relationship becomes your top priority, often to the exclusion of everything else
You make yourself endlessly available, leaving your calendar open "just in case"
You rearrange your entire life to accommodate your partner's needs
You over-function whilst secretly keeping score of what you're giving versus receiving
You build resentment when your extreme dedication isn't reciprocated
The painful irony? You end up blaming your partner for having boundaries when you have none.
The Anxious-Avoidant Dance
This dynamic becomes especially pronounced in anxious-avoidant pairings. While you're dropping everything to prioritize the relationship, your avoidant partner is likely protecting other areas of their life. They may actually pull away more when they sense pressure to match your level of relationship focus, feeling their autonomy threatened.
The more you up the ante in terms of prioritizing the relationship, the more they might resist—creating exactly the dynamic you're trying to avoid.
What You Can Do About It
1. Have the Conversation
If you're truly doing all the heavy lifting in your relationship, it's worth addressing directly. The key is approaching it without blame:
"Hey, I've been feeling like a lot of the time it's me who's reaching out or making plans, and it's starting to feel a bit imbalanced. I'm not sure if that's something you've been aware of as well, but either way, I'd really appreciate it if we could maybe rebalance the scales a little."
Take responsibility for your part while clearly expressing your needs.
2. Stop Over-Functioning and Start Prioritising Yourself
Here's a hard truth: the things that bother us most in our relationships are often the very things we're doing to ourselves. If you're complaining that your partner doesn't prioritize you, ask yourself—how good are you at prioritizing yourself?
If you're someone who consistently abandons your own needs to focus on others, you're putting enormous pressure on your relationship to provide everything for you. When your partner inevitably falls short of this impossible standard, the disappointment feels devastating.
The recalibration that needs to happen is this: Get better at actively taking care of yourself and prioritizing your own wellbeing.
This means:
Setting boundaries that protect your time and energy
Saying no when something doesn't work for you
Maintaining your own interests and friendships
Taking care of your needs instead of hoping someone else will
The Path Forward
Once you've had clear communication and started taking responsibility for how you're showing up, you'll get a much clearer picture of your relationship's true dynamic. If things still don't shift after you've stopped over-functioning, that gives you valuable information about whether this relationship is right for you.
But until you've done this inner work, it's hard to judge fairly—because a big part of the dynamic might be of your own creation.
Remember — this struggle is far more common than you might think. The pattern of not feeling like a priority touches so many people, and understanding its roots can help you approach it with self-compassion rather than self-criticism. The goal isn't to never need prioritisation from your partner—it's to build a relationship where both people are actively showing up, rather than one person desperately performing whilst the other remains passive.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:04]:
You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I'm your host, relationship coach, Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking about what to do when you don't feel like a priority in your relationship. So maybe you are always feeling like you're striving to get a place in your partner's life, like you're always competing for their attention, like you're the one who's always initiating contact or initiating plans, basically that everything is originating with you and your really having to earn your place. And that creates this overall impression of not feeling important or valued to your partner. And I think that this is incredibly common among anxiously attached people.
[00:01:10]:
It's certainly something that I'm fielding questions on every week, multiple times a week from students in my courses. It's so endemic and yet it's probably not one that we talk about in so many words. Enough. And so today I want to address this head on in this episode, talking about why it's such a common dynamic for anxious attachers to land in how it interfaces with some of our other wounds and patterns around unworthiness and fear of abandonment and fear of rejection and all of the protective strategies that can accompany those wounds, what it looks like in an anxious avoidant kind of pairing, and why those differing attachment styles might exacerbate this dynamic. And ultimately what you can and maybe should be focusing on. If you find yourself in a relationship where you are constantly battling to feel like a priority, you know, where is your energy best spent? Because I think oftentimes the instinct is to just keep pushing and try harder and keep striving and keep over functioning. But oftentimes that keeps us in the pattern rather than releases us from the pattern. And so I'm going to be sharing some thoughts on what to do if this is a position that you find yourself in so that you can hopefully shift into something that feels a little bit more balanced and sustainable and reciprocal.
[00:02:28]:
Before we get into today's episode, a couple of quick announcements. The first being if you are in or around London, I'm super excited to share that I am running an event there in September, on the 13th of September. You might have heard me mention this over the past couple of months, that it was, you know, a potential plan in the works. It is now confirmed and tickets are on sale. I'm going to be giving a talk on the path to secure love, so much of which is about healing our inner relationship. So if you're a podcast listener and everything I speak about here resonates with you, and you'd like to hear me speak in more depth, in person, in an intimate setting, there'll be plenty of time for Q and A and meet and greet and all of that afterwards. So I'd really love to see any of you there. If you're in or around London and would like to come along on 13th September.
[00:03:17]:
The link to purchase tickets is in the show. Notes Second quick announcement is just a reminder about my free training on how to heal anxious attachment. This training has now been attended by close to 5,000 people. In the last couple of months, it has received some amazing feedback. So if you're someone who struggles with anxious attachment and you'd like a bit of a deep dive into why you struggle the way that you do and what the path to healing looks like, my free training is a really great starting point. Okay, so let's talk about what to do when you don't feel like a priority in your partner's life or in your relationship. So, as I said, this is way more common than you might think. It is truly something that I'm answering questions on all the time.
[00:03:58]:
And so I can assure you that you are far from alone in feeling this way. Now, as I said in the introduction, I think it's really important to recognise and validate, like, where this comes from in us and why it makes so much sense that we land here in our relationships. And to do that, I want to just jump back to the origins of anxious attachment, which some of you will be familiar with, others of you might not be. But many anxiously attached people grew up in relational environments, so in a family system that was marked by inconsistency in one form or another. And so the overall impression is it feels really good when we're connected, but I can't always rely on that connection to be there when I need it. And so that's what creates in me this hypervigilance around separation. That's what creates in me all of these people pleasing behaviours, all of these ways to keep love close, because I don't trust in the safety of letting go, even temporarily. And part of that experience of inconsistency is this perception of unavailability and not feeling important enough.
[00:04:56]:
You know, children are so quick to internalise whatever's going on out there as being about them. And so for a lot of children, if parents were very distracted, if they had very demanding jobs, or if they had other stuff going on, their own, mental health issues, or the marriage was very under stress and strain, and so there were just a lot of demands on their attention. A child can sense all of that and see all of that and somehow internalise the message that if I were better in some way, then my parent would show up for me the way I need them to, they wouldn't be so misattuned to my needs, I wouldn't have to compete and strive and perform to get their attention. And so that's a really, really common picture for anxiously attached people. And obviously, you know, that's fairly generic and that can have lots of different permutations, but that overall environment of inconsistency and some perception of unavailability and the resulting strategy around trying to be good, you know, performing people, pleasing, striving, feeling like we have to earn and prove that is really, really common and that stays with us into our adult relations. And if you're sort of connecting the dots, you might notice that that similar kind of dynamic is present in a lot of your relationships or has been present in a lot of your relationships. So feeling like it's so great when we're connected and close, but I always feel like you're at risk of slipping away and then I won't know how to get you back. And I feel like I'm losing control in that way.
[00:06:25]:
So I never trust in the good times because it feels like the bad times are just lurking around the corner. And so I'm always in this mode of hyper vigilance and anticipation, waiting for bad to happen in my relationships, waiting for connection to be withdrawn, waiting for love to be taken away. And then I'm going to be left all on my own to deal with this. And I don't know how to do that. And it's going to be my fault because I tell myself the story, whether I realise it or not, that it's because I'm not good enough, that this keeps happening. And so that's a really heartbreaking story. And I think, as always, when we can connect it to what its origins often look like, we can have so much compassion for the fact that this has followed us through life, into our adult romantic relationships. But with that as the backdrop, we can start to look at this dynamic of not feeling like we're a priority and start to go like, wow, okay, maybe this isn't just about my current relationship or my current partner and whatever is going on there.
[00:07:23]:
Maybe there are some deeper layers to this which have something to do with my stuff as well. And that's not to say that there isn't real stuff going on in the relationship that might need your attention, but just to recognise that we. We are often drawn to relational dynamics that activate our wounds and that reflect back to us the stories that we carry about ourselves and about others. So in this case, the things around unworthiness, the things around not being important, the things around, like, no one ever loves me as much as I love them, no one ever tries as hard as I do, no one ever gives as much as I give. And that's so unfair. And I don't know why I can't just find someone who meets me in that. Oftentimes we actually gravitate towards relationships where that's true, rather than it being an objectively true story about everyone in the world. Right.
[00:08:13]:
And so getting really curious and taking ownership for that, and the fact that maybe this pattern is serving us in some way, even if we don't like it or we say we don't like it, getting curious around, like, what's actually going on here can be part of the process of bringing more awareness to this and ultimately shifting it. So I did say that I was going to talk about, you know, what this specifically looks like in a more anxious, avoidant dynamic. And I think it's important to acknowledge here that for anxiously attached people, the relationship will almost always be the priority, oftentimes to the exclusion of all else. And people with more anxious patterns will quite happily drop other balls to make sure that all of their attention can be on the relationship, if that's what's required. So they might make themselves available in the sense of not making other plans, even if you don't have plans with your partner, particularly in the early stages, I think this can be true, that you just leave the calendar open, so to speak, in case they want to hang out, because you're so committed to being completely available to them all the time. And that's just ranks so far ahead of anything else that you could do with your time. So you don't want to forego the opportunity to potentially see your partner. But it can also look like, you know, if your partner asks you to do something and it's actually really inconvenient for you, but you don't acknowledge that, you just rearrange everything behind the scenes to make things go smoothly for them, to accommodate them, to help them out, which, you know, there's nothing wrong with.
[00:09:37]:
Like, that can be a really beautiful trait. And there are points at which we might push back and advocate for ourselves and say, like, oh, I wish I could help out, but actually that would totally, you know, throw my day out. So I probably can't this time. What we often do is we just do all of the things because we're so committed to being, you know, endlessly adaptable and flexible and helpful and making ourselves so needed. And then when someone maybe doesn't mirror that back to us, they don't reciprocate to the same degree, we start to harbour resentment around it. We notice ourselves keeping score and going, well, I always do this, this and this, this, but you don't even do that. And that's where it really starts to brew and bubble away. And we really can see that toxic resentment building in our relationship and we so readily point the finger at someone else and say, like, it's your fault because you're not doing X, Y and Z.
[00:10:27]:
And we don't really acknowledge that maybe we overextended ourselves in the first instance, maybe we made someone a priority to such an extreme degree. And then we're blaming them for the fact that they're not reciprocating our extreme behaviour. In other words, we kind of blame them for having boundaries when we have no boundaries. And I think this will often happen in an anxious, avoidant dynamic because someone who's more avoidant is unlikely to do that. We know that avoidant folks are not likely to prioritise the relationship above all else and drop everything in their life. If anything, they might be quite protective of other areas of their life and the expectation that they are to drop everything, to just focus on the relationship might be something that they have quite an aversion to and might really push back against. And so whether you're directly or indirectly employ that they should do that, that might actually see them pull away more because they feel this need to protect their autonomy, to protect their selfhood outside of the relationship. And so you just continuing to up the ante in terms of how much you prioritise the relationship and hoping that they follow suit, might actually have the opposite effect.
[00:11:36]:
That might create in them a bit more resistance and pulling away because they feel a bit smothered or overwhelmed by the extent of that expectation. So what to do here? How best to navigate what does the path forward look like if you feel kind of chronically deprioritized by your partner now, as always, it's nuanced and it's hard for me to give a one size fits all solution. So I'm just going to throw a couple of things out there and you can be discerning and adapt that to your situation as makes sense. But the two key pieces that I want to focus on are having a conversation about it, obviously. So to the extent that you really are doing all of the heavy lifting in your relationship and maybe without your instigation, like nothing would ever happen in your relationship, you'd never see your partner, you'd never talk to them because you're the one initiating all contact. And it feels like the effort and input is really, really asymmetrical, like it's just all coming from you and you're really, really over functioning. There might be something to call out there and not in a blaming way, but just in an acknowledgment of like, hey, I've been feeling like a lot of the time it's me who's reaching out or it's me who's making plans and it's starting to feel a bit imbalance. I'm not sure if that's something you've been aware of as well, but either way I'd really appreciate it if we could maybe rebalance the scales a little there and if you could put in a bit more effort into reaching out or planning dates or whatever.
[00:13:03]:
The thing is, obviously again, this will depend on where you're at in the relationship, if it's relatively new versus if it's well established. But the same principle, basically naming it, having a direct, honest, non blaming, non accusatory conversation around it where you take responsibility and go look, partly my doing because I just always fill the gap. That's just what I do by default. But I also realise that it's making me feel a little bit resentful and things do feel a bit imbalanced. So just to flag that, I'm not going to be doing that as much anymore and I'd really appreciate it if you could kind of meet me halfway. So that might be one thing to do is just to name it and acknowledge it and have the conversation and be clear in what your needs and desires are there. The other piece, which sort of goes hand in hand is that you probably need to stop over functioning and you probably need to prioritise yourself. I was saying this to a student in my course the other day around the topic of self abandonment, but it's amazing that the things that we complain about or that really bother us or trigger us in our relationships like, you know, they're not prioritising me, or, you know, they're not taking care of me, or they're not validating my needs or whatever it might be.
[00:14:15]:
Or invariably, I can guarantee that the person saying that is doing the same thing to themselves, that they're not validating their own needs, that they're not prioritising themselves, that they're not taking care of themselves, that they're not supporting themselves. And yet we point out there over at them and say, you're the reason I'm feeling this way because you're not doing the thing that I want you to do. And again, it's not to discount the realness of the relational piece and the importance of that to our overall sense of wellbeing. But we do want to come back to what is within my direct control. Where can I really shift things and transform my relationship from the inside out? Where can I take responsibility for the way that I'm showing up, the way that I'm feeling? And I really think that the way we treat ourselves and relate to ourselves is an incredibly powerful way to do that. So if you are feeling consistently like you are not a priority in your relationship, my question for you is, how good are you at prioritising yourself and your wellbeing? Because my guess is, as we've talked about in today's episode, that if you're someone who is often in this pattern, you probably spend a lot of time focusing on other people and their needs and their convenience and how you can make their lives easier. And in the process, you probably deprioritize yourself as well. And your hope is that somehow you doing that is going to mean that they're going to do the same thing back to you and it'll all even out.
[00:15:38]:
But that isn't what usually happens. They probably happily receive all of your giving and then you get resentful. So I think the recalibration that does have to happen is that you get better at actively taking care of yourself and prioritising yourself and saying no to things if they don't actually work for you. You know, having those boundaries in place that really protect your wellbeing, rather than overextending yourself and over functioning and over giving and then getting pissed off about the fact that everyone else isn't doing the same thing and playing by the invisible script. So getting really clear and really carving that time and space to honour your own needs and to take care of those needs as best you can. But, like, the more we abandon ourselves and drop everything to just be available to the relationship. It does really put a lot of pressure on the relationship to provide everything for us. And then we feel all the more let down, disappointed and frustrated when our partner maybe isn't showing up.
[00:16:34]:
And I think it's only once we've done those things. So I've had clear communication around it, really taken responsibility for how we're showing up, how we're treating ourselves. You know, if things still don't shift and it still feels like you're just not getting anything back from someone, well, that's going to give you a pretty clear picture on like, is this relationship right for me? But until we've done those things, it's maybe hard to judge because there might be, you know, a big part of that is of our creation. Like if we really are contributing to that over functioning, under functioning dynamic, we just won't really know until we make some of those changes and then see what the ripple effect is. So that would be my suggestion if you're in this, is to pull back a bit, maybe have a conversation about it if that feels appropriate, and then see what shifts as a result. Okay, I'm going to leave it there, guys. I really hope that this has been helpful. I did want to say if this is something that's interesting to you, I really recommend the book the Origins of youf by Vienna Farren.
[00:17:32]:
She was on the podcast a couple of years ago. She's a really wonderful marriage and family therapist. She has a really big Instagram account which is is mindful mft. I'm not affiliated with her in any way. I just love her work. And her book the Origins of you goes through five different origin wounds and one of them is the prioritisation wound. And that is pretty much everything we've been talking about today. This wound around never feeling like a priority.
[00:17:57]:
And so I think that while that is not a book about attachment specifically, I suspect it will resonate with many of you and I really, really recommend it. So maybe go check that out if you're, you know, interested in this topic and want to dive a bit deeper into it. Okay, gonna leave it there guys. Thank you so much for joining me and I will see you again soon. Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram at stephanyrigg or stephanyrigg.com and if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again soon.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, prioritization wound, insecure attachment, emotional unavailability, relational patterns, over-functioning, under-functioning, people pleasing, self abandonment, boundaries, hypervigilance, inconsistency, self prioritization, resentment, communication skills, self worth, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, childhood wounds, inner child healing, origin wounds, attachment dynamics, anxious-avoidant pairing, emotional safety, unmet needs, self advocacy, personal responsibility, inner healing, attachment repair, secure love, relationship coaching, autonomy, emotional labor, invisible scripts, relationship imbalance, self regulation, validation, self compassion, attachment triggers, intimacy blocks, self trust