#253: Perfectionism in Anxious-Avoidant Relationships
Perfectionism is one of those traits that often gets brushed off.
We might call ourselves “a bit perfectionistic,” or say we just have high standards. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to do things well or striving for excellence, perfectionism tends to run much deeper than that.
Because at its core, perfectionism isn’t really about high standards.
It’s about safety.
It’s about what we believe will happen if we’re anything less than perfect.
Where Perfectionism Really Comes From
Perfectionism is often rooted in a lack of safety, a lack of trust, and a deep sense of inadequacy.
It can develop in environments—internal or external—where we didn’t feel like it was safe to make mistakes, to be messy, or to simply be human. Where love, approval, or acceptance felt conditional on performance.
So we adapt.
We learn that if we can just be good enough—or better yet, flawless—we’ll be safe. We’ll be loved. We’ll avoid rejection.
But the problem is that perfectionism doesn’t have an endpoint.
There’s no “arrival.” The bar keeps moving.
Even when we meet our own standards, we’re already scanning for the next flaw, the next problem, the next way we’ve fallen short.
It becomes a rigid way of relating to ourselves—and to others—where anything less than perfect feels threatening.
How Perfectionism Shows Up in Relationships
Perfectionism doesn’t just live in our heads or in our work. It plays out powerfully in our relationships—often in ways we don’t even realise.
And interestingly, it tends to look quite different depending on our attachment patterns.
Perfectionism & Anxious Attachment
If you lean more towards anxious attachment, perfectionism is often directed inward.
It sounds like:
I have to be perfect to be lovable.
If they don’t choose me, it must be because I’m not enough.
I just need to do more, be more, give more.
This can lead to holding yourself to impossibly high standards in relationships—constantly trying to earn love, approval, and security.
You might:
Overextend yourself trying to be the “perfect partner”
Blame yourself for any disconnection or conflict
Feel like it’s always your responsibility to fix things
And here’s where the painful irony comes in:
While you’re holding yourself to such a high standard, you may not be holding your partner to one at all.
You might tolerate inconsistency, low effort, or even poor treatment—while continuing to believe that you are the problem.
The “Fix-It” Trap
Another way perfectionism shows up here is in how you relate to the relationship itself.
There can be a very low tolerance for imperfection:
A dip in connection feels threatening
A miscommunication feels urgent
A rough patch feels like something must be “wrong”
So you try to fix everything—quickly, constantly, and sometimes frantically.
You might find yourself:
Bringing up issues frequently
Focusing on what’s not working
Feeling like you need to stay ahead of problems
But this hyper-focus on fixing can actually create the very instability you’re trying to avoid. It can make the relationship feel heavy, pressured, or never “good enough.”
Perfectionism & Avoidant Attachment
For people who lean more avoidant, perfectionism often goes in the opposite direction.
Instead of being applied to the self, it’s applied to the partner.
This can show up as:
Hyper-focusing on a partner’s flaws
Losing attraction over small or trivial things
Feeling like something is “off” or not quite right
Sometimes this is subtle—like getting the “ick” over something minor. Other times it’s more structural, like questioning compatibility based on differences.
But underneath it, the mechanism is similar:
Perfectionism becomes a way to create distance.
If the partner isn’t perfect, then the relationship isn’t right. And if the relationship isn’t right, it justifies pulling away.
This often happens unconsciously, especially when closeness starts to feel unsafe.
When These Patterns Collide
When anxious and avoidant patterns meet, perfectionism can create a particularly painful dynamic.
The anxious partner strives to be perfect in order to be chosen
The avoidant partner looks for imperfections as a reason to pull away
And both people end up reinforcing each other’s deepest fears:
“No matter what I do, I’m not enough.”
“Something isn’t right here—I need distance.”
It’s not about either person being “wrong.”
It’s about patterns playing out.
Breaking Free from Perfectionism
Perfectionism isn’t something you can switch off overnight. But you can begin to shift your relationship to it.
For the Anxious Pattern: Build Self-Worth
If your perfectionism is rooted in needing to prove your worth, the work is not about becoming “better.”
It’s about coming home to a deeper sense of inherent worth.
When you genuinely trust:
I am enough
I am lovable as I am
You stop trying to earn love—and start choosing relationships where love is already present.
For the Relationship Itself: Tolerate Imperfection
Healthy relationships aren’t perfect.
They ebb and flow. They include disconnection, repair, growth, and change.
Learning to tolerate that natural rhythm—without jumping into panic or urgency—is key.
Not every dip is a sign something is wrong.
Sometimes it’s just part of being human together.
For the Avoidant Pattern: Get Curious About Patterns
If you notice a recurring pattern of:
Losing attraction
Fixating on flaws
Doubting your feelings
…especially across multiple relationships, it’s worth getting curious.
Not every relationship is meant to last—but if the same pattern keeps repeating, there’s usually something deeper at play.
Final Thoughts
Perfectionism promises safety.
But in reality, it keeps us stuck in fear—of not being enough, of things falling apart, of love being conditional.
The shift isn’t about lowering your standards.
It’s about softening the rigidity.
It’s about trusting that relationships—and people—can be imperfect and still be safe, meaningful, and deeply fulfilling.
Because the truth is:
You don’t need to be perfect to be loved.
And neither does anyone else.
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[00:01:30]:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking all about perfectionism and how perfectionism can impact our relationship dynamics. Both our relationship with ourselves, but also how we relate to our partners and how we approach the relationship more broadly. Now, I think perfectionism is something that is easy to brush off as a character trait or being slightly neurotic, having high standards. But as we're going to talk about today, I think there's a lot more to perfectionism than meets the eye. And oftentimes perfectionism is an adaptation to an internal and sometimes external environment where we don't feel safe to be anything other than perfect. We don't have enough compassion, we don't have enough grace, we don't have enough trust in the fact that anything less than perfect will be enough.
[00:02:21]:
And so it can come from these deeper wounds that we have around unworthiness, around needing to earn, improve and strive, feeling generally unsafe and so being very hyper fixated on cracks in the armour or holes in the boat. Choose your metaphor. But I think oftentimes that can be where our perfectionism is coming from. Not just from a commitment to high standards, but a fear of what it would mean for there to be imperfections and not trusting that relationships can safely exist in that imperfect place. So in today's episode, I'm going to be unpacking what it might look like for you to be perfectionistic in the way you relate to yourself. And that will be something that I think a lot of anxiously attached people will relate to, that we can hold ourselves to impossibly high standards. Standards that, you know, I have to be perfect in order to be lovable. How it might show up in the relationship in terms of how you approach the relationship.
[00:03:13]:
And we're also going to talk about what it can look like for people who lean more avoidant in their attachment patterns, because I think they certainly have their own brand of perfectionism. But as we'll talk about, it often goes the other way. It's perfectionism as applied to a partner. And it can be almost used as a distancing strategy, a part of the broader pattern of deactivation to hyper fixate on a partner's flaws as a way to potentially create that distance or justify pulling back from the relationship. Now, I should say if anyone is watching rather than just listening. So if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify, you might have noticed that I have a slightly different backdrop than usual. That is because we have recently moved. And that is also the reason that I had a quick, unplanned hiatus from the podcast.
[00:03:59]:
Those who are very regular listeners might have noticed that I missed a couple of episodes. I do apologise for that. It was not my intention, but the busyness of life got the better of me. And while I was in the thick of it, moving house and also finishing my book, all of which collided in one big storm of deadline busyness. We also missed the fourth birthday of the podcast. So on Attachment is officially four years old, which is pretty amazing. So I just wanted to mention that and thank you all for your ongoing support. It is so touching to me.
[00:04:32]:
This podcast started four years ago in my living room. I'm still now at home recording it myself. I do all of the editing myself. It is very much a one woman show and I love being able to connect with you in this way. People literally everywhere in the world listening to this show. It is very deeply touching to me and I'm so appreciative whether you're new or you've been here from the start or somewhere in the middle. I really am so grateful for your ongoing support. So thank you very much.
[00:04:59]:
Okay, so let's talk about perfectionism. We'll talk about it more broadly first and then get into the nitty gritty of how it can show up in our relationships in ways that we're maybe not aware of and might want to look at shifting. So perfectionism, as I said in the introduction, I think is really oftentimes rooted in inadequacy, a lack of trust and a lack of safety. And so it's not just this striving to be great. I think that there's absolutely nothing wrong with having high standards and holding those standards. That's something that I teach and really encourage and I would like to think that I embody that myself. But I think perfectionism has this very specific quality of nothing is ever going to be good enough. And so the bar is always being raised.
[00:05:41]:
There's never this sense of arriving because even if we do meet the standard, we're so trained to look for the next problem or look for the next slip up or shortcoming because we have this like 110% perfect mentality and such a low tolerance, maybe zero tolerance for anything less than that. So ultimately it's a very rigid way of living to be so gripped by the need, need for everything to be exactly right all the time so that we can feel okay. And if something is imperfect, whether that's us, whether that's someone else, whether that's a situation, this can show up at work for sure. This sense that like that is really registering as unsafe in my body for something to be imperfect. And oftentimes shame is very quick to bubble up when we perceive that we've dropped the ball or that something's not okay. We can be really hard on ourselves. And I think most people who do tend to really struggle with perfectionism or consider themselves to be very perfectionistic can also be highly self critical and have a lot of really harsh, punitive inner dialogue around. You know, you're not good enough.
[00:06:52]:
And feeling like we have to hold ourselves to this very high standard and we have to remind ourselves when we mess up, we have to keep ourselves accountable because otherwise everything's going to fall apart. So if that feels familiar to you, just know that that's probably been born out of a deeper wound around not feeling good enough or feeling like our worth comes from performance or feeling like we do have to strive, earn, prove our worth and value through our productivity, through our output, through our appearance. Perfectionism is certainly something that can show up in the way that we relate to our appearance and not wanting to be seen as anything other than perfectly curated all the time. There's so many different permutations and manifestations of perfectionism. Now, when we look a little more closely at how this shows up from an attachment point of view and looking at how people with different attachment styles are likely to experience this, I think for people with anxious attachment, much of what I've just been describing will be familiar for a lot of you. Because we have this starting point of feeling unworthy of love, whether that's conscious or not, but feeling like we always want relationships more than the other person. And because we acclimatised to this relational environment where we feel like we're always reaching or that we're always more invested, or that the other person's always withholding or pulling away, that naturally creates a bit of a power imbalance. And when there's that power imbalance, it's natural that you would try and work over time to close the gap, to prove yourself, to get the love, to get the affection, all of those things.
[00:08:31]:
And so perfectionism in the way we relate to ourselves can show up as I just need to be the perfect partner so that they fully choose me. And to the extent that they're not fully choosing me, it's probably because of something that I've done or not done. Maybe I'm not beautiful enough, funny enough, sexy enough, thin enough, smart enough, successful enough, like all of the things. And so we can really raise the bar on ourselves that we just need to keep doing more, being more so that we are chosen. And to the extent that, as I said, when not chosen, it's probably our fault. And it confirms our own perception of our own inadequacy. So that can be a really tender, painful operating system to be working with when we are just so hard on ourselves and holding ourselves to impossibly high standards. And of course, the irony being that most people who struggle with that can be very compassionate or forgiving, give other people 55 second chances when their behaviour doesn't stack up.
[00:09:32]:
Or maybe we're doing all of that proving, chasing, earning, striving for someone who actually isn't treating us very well, or who themselves isn't putting in a lot of effort. And yet we fail to see the asymmetry there. And so even as we're holding ourselves to an impossibly high standard, we're not maybe holding someone else to a very high standard at all. And we're accepting something that is of a very low standard. So that can be part of the irony of that self imposed perfectionism. Now, I think the other big one for anxiously attached people is that we can be pretty perfectionistic about our relationships in the sense of having a very low tolerance for kind of fluctuations, ups and downs, periods of disconnection. We can be very focused on what's not working and want to frantically fix everything because we can have that sense of unless it's perfect, it's all going to fall apart. And I don't really trust the sturdiness of the relationship to be able to hold something that is maybe a bit wobbly or maybe we're a bit out of sync.
[00:10:35]:
And so I think that that can be a way that perfectionism gets us locked into those cycles of always bringing up problems and disappointments and concerns and unmet needs. Because it's coming from this place of almost urgency and distrust that unless I fix it now, then it's only going to get worse and it can really spiral out of control and we can lose sight of the fact that we are maybe contributing to a relational environment that is overwhelmingly negative or that feels heavy and serious and can really wear the other person down because we're putting so much of our anxiety and those really arguably unrealistically high standards, dumping it into the relational field and going, we have to fix this. Coming at our partner with a fire hose of complaints that can counterintuitively create the problem that we're so frantically trying to avoid, which is the relationship falling apart and losing its footing. And so that sense of I need to always be ahead of the problem and I need to fix everything preemptively. And even if our partner has done like nine out of the 10 things that we ask them to, we tend to really focus on the one that they haven't. The one ball that gets dropped. And we use that as proof that they don't actually care or they're not really going to make the change or whatever it is. And that's because our system is really trained to look for problems, because that's what anxiety does.
[00:12:02]:
It does like a lot of scanning and hypervigilance and issue spotting from this place of like, if I can just think of everything, everything that could possibly go wrong, then I can solve it before that happens. So those are two ways that perfectionism is maybe showing up for you. If you're someone with more anxious attachment patterns that self imposed I have to be perfect. And also the really focusing on fixing the relationship all the time to the point where we can be overwhelming both our partner and the relationship with our focus on the problems and our inability to tolerate even slight imperfections, ruptures mess up Mistakes, all of those things can feel disproportionately threatening to our system. We can really magnify them and then create meaning out of them that fuels all of the other anxieties or insecurities that we might be experiencing. Okay, so I now want to shift to talking about avoidant attachment and perfectionism, which I think is really overlooked a lot of the time and doesn't really get anywhere near as much airtime as all of the anxious stuff, simply because it tends to be the anxious people listening. But let's talk about it. Because whether you are avoidant yourself or you're in relationship with someone who's more avoidant, I think it can be useful to understand this behaviour through the lens of perfectionism.
[00:13:21]:
So for people with avoidant attachment, I think this can show up mostly as perfectionism applied to a partner. Because while avoidant people can be very hard on themselves and have very high standards in terms of their own achievement, success, feeling successful in the relationship is really important. For avoidant people, the difference is that when they feel like they've failed in that the instinct is typically to defend against it. Whereas for the anxious partner, when they feel like they failed, they double down and apologise or try and be better, whatever. Whereas the avoidant person, the shame that they feel when they have that experience of I've messed up, I'm a disappointment, I'm a failure, is to push it away. And oftentimes that means pushing their partner away, shutting down, defending, faking the other person wrong. That's how they kind of process and metabolise the shame that they are brought into contact with. Whereas anxious people, it's just a different response to the same experience, they tend to go into overdrive to try and make the shame go away by disproving it.
[00:14:26]:
So different approaches to the same core experience there. But I think the other key piece that is more unique to avoidant attachment is perfectionism is applied to a partner and used as a distancing strategy or a deactivating strategy, which is basically just a way to create physical and or emotional distance when they are triggered in their attachment patterns and they start shutting down because all of their protective mechanisms are coming up and saying, this doesn't feel safe. So this tends to be a pretty subconscious process, but it can take the form of like the ick, so to speak. So if you're not familiar with that term, it's a pop culture social media term of just inexplicably being a bit get grossed out or losing attraction to a partner, or like, hyper fixating on one little thing they do, like the way they drink a glass of water, or the way that they snore when they're asleep, or like a jumper that they wear, or like how they sing karaoke, like just finding them inexplicably irritating or losing attraction to them for something that's pretty trivial. And I think that for avoidant folks, they can magnify perceived flaws. And whether it's something like the examples that I just gave, something that is obviously like, trivial and meaningless in the scheme of things, or whether it's something like feeling judgmental of part of your partner's personality or character, feeling like, the ways in which you are different flaws in them. So that can be an indirect way of defending your own way of being is by looking down on the ways that your partner's different from you. But I think that that can be part of the basis upon which avoidant folks can create some distance and start questioning the relationship.
[00:16:10]:
And like, well, I don't know if you're the right partner for me, because the right partner for me wouldn't make me feel this way, or I wouldn't have these doubts. I wouldn't have these feelings if you were the right person. And so they can use that perfectionism, which is really like kind of this mythical idea of the perfect partner as the basis for distancing or even exiting the relationship is like, you're not perfect, therefore you're not good enough. And of course, we can then zoom out and go, isn't that just a perfect storm of two people's patterns colliding in a really potentially painful way? Because you've got the anxious partner who is just desperately striving to be chosen and convincing themselves that if I'm just perfect enough, if I'm attractive enough and accommodating enough and generous enough and patient enough and everything enough, then they will choose me. And then you've got someone else whose patterns can drive them to find flaws as a way to push someone away. And so when those things meet, we can see how that would create, like, quite a painful combination because it's really entrenching both people in their pattern. It's allowing the avoidant partner an exit. And it's reinforcing for the anxious partner that no matter what I do, it's never enough.
[00:17:29]:
No matter how hard I try, no matter how much I sacrifice in an effort to be chosen by you, it's still never enough. And really, it's not about the individuals. It's just like the patterns are being played out in that arena and you could be anyone and that same pattern would probably come up. So what do we do with all of that? It's not something that you can just go, oh, okay, now that I know it, I'll stop doing it. But I think the growth edges for each of those expressions of perfectionism. If you're the anxious partner and you are struggling with that self imposed thing of I have to be perfect in order to be lovable, that is almost always this unworthiness piece. And so I think that everything that I teach really comes down to building self worth. That's the ticket out of that experience as the one thing that changes.
[00:18:19]:
All the other things is when we build authentic self worth. This inherent sense of I am really comfortable with who I am, I like who I am, and I really trust in my own value. We shift away from our reliance on other people or external markers of achievement and success as being determinant of our worth. We have more of an inwardly sourced sense of that. And that allows us to show up really differently to our relationships. Because we're not trying to get someone to choose us, trying to get someone to love us or prove ourselves worthy of that love. We tend to be more likely to gravitate towards partners who already see that and value us and reflect that back to us. So it tends to mirror our own internal environment for better or for worse.
[00:19:09]:
In terms of the tendency to apply these unrelentingly high standards to our relationship itself. I think part of that is, of course, if you're in a really dysfunctional relationship, it makes sense that you're always trying to fix it because it feels like there's a lot to fix. But if you're in a good enough relationship, I think sometimes it is about trusting in the imperfections and allowing that to be. Part of the beauty is that you can have have tricky seasons or you can have seasons of disconnection and actually trust that you can bounce back from it. You know that the relationship can ebb and flow and can hold that ebb and flow rather than feeling like every dip is something that's really highly threatening and needs to be like frantically remedied. Because anything less than perfect means it's all falling apart. Because of course that can really wear down the relationship and our partners. And for the avoidant partner, if you notice some of that in yourself, and I know because a lot of people write to avoided people who are doing the work and do notice those patterns and they feel a lot of guilt and shame about them, but then they also second guess is this my avoidant attachment or do I really just not like this person? I think that it's a really good thing to be curious about and certainly if it's a pattern, if you do it every time, if you notice that you get a few months in or even a couple of years in and you slowly experience this loss of attraction, or you start to magnify someone's flaws and second guess your love for them or your feelings for them and you start doubting the relationship.
[00:20:44]:
If you are the common denominator in a long line of that happening, then that's always something to get curious about. And that's true for anything that we keep coming up against. When it's a one off, we can go, okay, maybe it's just not the right fit, but if it's every time, then there's a good chance that there's something deeper going on there and it's certainly worth getting curious about. Okay guys, I'm going to leave it there. A reminder for anyone who hasn't already, I have a lot of free resources on my website. I've got free trainings that you can come along to, got lots of free downloads and things like that. Definitely worth checking out if you find the podcast helpful. And as always, if you are able to leave reviews, subscribe if you're on YouTube, follow the show if you're on Spotify or Apple podcasts.
[00:21:27]:
All of that stuff really adds up on my end and is a huge help for me in continuing to create the show and put out as many episodes as I can. So grateful for all of your ongoing support. Thank you so much and I look forward to seeing you again next time.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
perfectionism, relationships, attachment styles, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, self worth, relationship dynamics, self criticism, unworthiness, high standards, relationship problems, perfectionism in relationships, emotional safety, love and acceptance, relational anxiety, self imposed standards, partner criticism, deactivation strategies, distancing behavior, self improvement, partner selection, intimacy issues, avoidance patterns, relationship dissatisfaction, self compassion, self esteem, behavioral patterns, trust issues, communication in relationships, personal growth