#207: Why You Feel Secure When You’re Single (But Anxious When You Start Dating)
If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I feel amazing when I’m single—confident, grounded, totally in control. But the moment I start dating someone I actually like, I spiral into a ball of anxiety”… you’re not alone.
This is one of the most common questions I hear: why do we feel secure when we’re single, but suddenly anxious when we enter the dating arena?
The short answer? It makes perfect sense. And once you understand why this happens, you can begin to soften the self-judgment and support yourself through it.
The Calm of Singleness
When you’re single, your attachment system is relatively quiet. There are no relational stressors—no one pulling away, not texting back quickly enough, or stirring up fears of rejection. You’re not “in the arena,” so to speak.
You may be thriving in other areas—work, friendships, personal growth—and that can feel like security. But in reality, your attachment wounds aren’t being activated. They’re simply dormant.
The Trigger of New Connection
Attachment styles are essentially patterned responses to relational stress. For someone with anxious attachment, those fears center around abandonment, rejection, or disconnection. For someone more avoidant, the fears are often about being smothered, controlled, or losing autonomy.
When you start dating—when there’s something (or someone) you could lose—those old fears get activated. Suddenly, your nervous system goes into high alert: “This is important. This feels vulnerable. What if I get hurt?”
That’s why you can feel secure while single but fall back into anxious spirals as soon as there’s emotional investment.
Does This Mean You Can Only Heal in Relationship?
Not at all. You can do a tremendous amount of healing when you’re single—building self-worth, creating a full and meaningful life outside of partnership, and learning to soothe your nervous system.
But some fears can only be activated in relationship. For example:
An avoidant person can’t fully work through intimacy fears if they’re never in situations that require real vulnerability.
An anxious person won’t come face-to-face with their deepest abandonment fears unless they’re attached and emotionally invested.
Relationships, by design, bring our stuff to the surface. That’s not failure—it’s the work.
A Reality Check on “Doing the Work”
Even if you’ve done lots of inner work while single, it’s normal for your stuff to resurface once you start dating again. That doesn’t mean you’ve failed or regressed.
Think of it as being invited to practice in real time. Your growth isn’t about never being triggered—it’s about learning how to meet those triggers differently.
Instead of defaulting to old strategies (like clinging, over-texting, or obsessively seeking reassurance), you can notice your anxiety and ask:
“What do I need right now to feel more grounded? How can I support myself without abandoning myself or overwhelming the other person?”
That’s where healing really happens.
The Growth Edge
Dating with an anxious attachment style is inherently vulnerable. You’re excited about someone, which means there’s something to lose. That vulnerability is what kicks up your anxiety.
But vulnerability is also the entry point to deeper connection. The key is learning how to hold yourself with compassion in those moments—so you don’t spiral into self-blame or panic, but instead practice new ways of relating to yourself and others.
Final Thoughts
If you feel secure when single but anxious when dating, you’re not broken—and you’re certainly not alone. It’s not a sign that all your progress has gone out the window. It’s simply your nervous system doing its job, alerting you to perceived risks in connection.
The invitation is to meet those moments with curiosity rather than judgment. To remind yourself: “This makes sense. I can support myself through this. I don’t need to make the anxiety mean something bad.”
Because that’s where your growth edge lies—not in avoiding relationships altogether, but in showing up differently when your fears are activated.
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Episode Transcript
Stephanie Rigg [00:00:00]:
Hey, guys, Steph here. Before today's episode begins, I just wanted to pop in with a quick and time sensitive announcement. For 72 hours only, I am running a flash sale where you can save 40% of my signature course, Healing Anxious Attachment.
Stephanie Rigg [00:00:14]:
If you're hearing this, it means that. The sale is still live, but only. For a very limited time. I hardly ever run public flash sales. Like this, so if you've been thinking about joining, now is the time.
Stephanie Rigg [00:00:24]:
Head to the link in the show notes or go directly to my website to grab your spot before the sale ends. Alright, let's get into the episode. 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.
Stephanie Rigg [00:00:55]:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, I am answering the question of why you feel secure when you're single but anxious when you start dating. So this is one that I get a lot. People will reach out to me, whether students in my programmes or people on Instagram or elsewhere with this experience of like, I feel great when I'm single. I feel like I'm totally in control and I've got my shit together and I'm good at my job and it feels like life, life is kind of going well, everything is smooth sailing. And then as soon as I start seeing someone, start talking to someone on an app that I'm interested in, maybe I go on a couple of dates and I lose the plot.
Stephanie Rigg [00:01:41]:
I am totally beside myself with anxiety. I spiral into this anxious mess and I hardly recognise myself. What is going on? I thought that I was making strides and I was suddenly secure and then actually I feel really disheartened because it turns out all of my anxious patterns were just lying dormant beneath the surface, waiting to be activ activated by some new connection. So what? What gives? What's going on? Why is that happening? So maybe that's something that you relate to. I know that it is really common and I'm going to be sharing some thoughts today on why that actually makes perfect sense. That is not at all confusing or perplexing to me. That is exactly what I would expect to happen. So I'm going to be talking about why that makes so much sense and perhaps more importantly, how you might relate to that experience and what you can do to try and feel a little bit more ground rather than making that experience a problem and kind of panicking and going, this is bad.
Stephanie Rigg [00:02:38]:
I shouldn't be feeling anxious. I was feeling fine before. What does it mean that I'm not feeling fine now? Because obviously all of that meaning making on top of the anxiety that you might be experiencing can take it from bad to worse and can leave you feeling not only insecure and full of doubt, but then like, spiralling about the spiralling. So that's what we're going to be talking about in today's episode. Before we get into that, just a reminder. If you are someone who struggles with anxious attachment, as I know most of my listeners are, and you haven't yet checked out my free training on how to heal Anxious Attachment and finally feel Secure in Life and Love, or my Anxious Attachment starter kit, both of those are really wonderful free resources that you can find in the show notes and on my website. I really, really encourage you to check those out as a starting point, and particularly if you're someone who has this tendency to judge your anxiety as being wrong or bad and the instinct to just try and get rid of it to make your anxiety stop or go away. Those free resources that I've mentioned will be really helpful in explaining to you why that might actually be keeping you stuck, that mindset, and what you can do instead to meaningfully shift the relationship you have with your anxiety, which in turn tends to actually soften some of the anxiety.
Stephanie Rigg [00:03:50]:
Ironically, the more we try and control it and make it go away, the louder it gets much of the time. Okay, so let's talk about this. Why would you feel totally secure while single, but suddenly an anxious mess when you start dating someone? So if we take a step back and look at what attachment theory and attachment styles is des, and you might have heard me say before that my preferred way of distilling down the crux of attachment styles is what have we learned to fear in relationships and how have we learned to respond to the fear? Or what are the things that we experience as stressful when it comes to a relationship, and how have we learned to manage the stress? And those habituated patterns of stress and fear and protective strategies are essentially attachment styles, right? So someone with more anxious attachment patterns has learned to fear disconnection, abandonment, rejection, rupture, and the ways that they've learned to manage that are by clinging, gripping, controlling, information gathering, people pleasing, fawning, all of those protective strategies, whereas someone who's more avoidant has learned to fear being smothered, being criticised, being a Failure and being overly depended on in a way that feels like it's out of their depths, being trapped, having their autonomy infringed upon, and the ways that they've learned to protect against that are shying away from emotional depth or intimacy, trying to keep things more casual by resisting commitment. All of those things can be part of the protective strategy of someone with more avoidant patterns. So why is it that you'd feel secure when you're single, but suddenly be propelled into all of your protective strategies in whatever direction? And I should have said at the outset the question was about anxious attachment, but the same will be true for people with other insecure patterns. Right? You might feel really secure when you're single and suddenly very not secure when you start D and the very simple answer is that when you are single, you are not being brought into contact with relational stresses. Right? And if we think of attachment styles and your anxious attachment patterns or your avoidant attachment patterns or fearful avoidant attachment patterns for that matter, as being the things that you do in response to relational stress, there's just no trigger when you're single. So there's nothing for those patterns to be responding to.
Stephanie Rigg [00:06:09]:
So you might be feeling totally in control when you're single, but you're not in the arena when you're single. Right. It's only when you develop an attachment to someone that all of those patterns and all of those fears start to register as being relevant to the situation. They get brought to the surface because that's what they're in response to. They're in response to relationships. That's where they were formed. That's where they play out. Now, you might be wondering and listening to that.
Stephanie Rigg [00:06:37]:
Does that mean that I can only heal when I'm in a relationship? If all of these patterns are just going to lie dormant until I get into a relationship? No. No matter what I'm feeling when I'm single, does that mean that certain things can only be healed there? And I've done a whole episode on this. Is it better to heal while single or in a relationship directly addressing that question? So you can go and listen to that if you want to go deeper. But the short answer is I think there are certainly things that will only come up in relationship and so can only be healed in relationship. So certain fears around intimacy. Right. If you're someone with more avoidant patterns, you're not going to heal your intimacy fears by being single because you're just not being brought into contact with those intimacy fears. If you're maybe having Casual sex with people, or you've got kind of surface level friendships or whatever.
Stephanie Rigg [00:07:26]:
You go to work, you catch up with someone for a drink. None of that is bringing you face to face with your deepest fears about intimacy and vulnerability. So you're able to keep that locked away. And for as long as that's locked away, it's still there. It's only when we turn towards those parts of ourselves that we have maybe locked away in the basement that we can develop a new relationship with them and ultimately free them from the burdens that they might have been carrying for a really long time. The same is true for someone with more anxious attachment patterns. You're not going to be face to face with your abandonment fears if you're not in a relationship. You might be feeling insecure about not being in a relationship, but it's not going to be to the same degree as when you're really invested and the stakes feel so high because suddenly there's someone that you're very attached to and you're scared of losing them.
Stephanie Rigg [00:08:15]:
That's a completely different set of circumstances to being single and wanting a relationship. So there are certain things that we'll only really be brought into contact with when we're in a relationship and when we are invested and when the stakes do feel high and when we do feel like we've got a lot to lose because that's where we're risking so much and so much is on the line. So naturally our fears and our protective parts are going to be on high alert in those circumstances. With that being said, I still think that there's a lot of work that you can do when you're single or between relationships in order to better prepare yourself to do that work once you get into a relationship at whatever future point. So it's not to say that time spent between relationships is wasted and you can't be doing any meaningful work on yourself. I think the opposite is true, particularly if you're someone with more anxious patterns. There's huge value in learning to build a beautiful, fulfilling, rich life between relationships, because your starting point might be always needing a relationship in order to feel like you're enough or like your life has value. Always orienting your identity around being someone's partner.
Stephanie Rigg [00:09:28]:
So learning to stand on your own two feet and learning to feel really good about yourself I think is absolutely valuable and worthwhile work to do when you're single. But that's not to say that you're going to have a really smooth transition back into relationships. And I think that's an important kind of reality check and expectation realignment that a lot of people need. That even if you've done a lot of work, when you get into a relationship, your stuff is going to come up. And that's probably true even for secure people. Right. That relationships are uniquely triggering and they're kind of designed to show us all of our stuff and designed to push us to our edges and show us where our work is. And obviously there are healthier and less healthy containers for doing that work.
Stephanie Rigg [00:10:15]:
It's not to say that it's a great idea to get into a super triggering relationship just so that you're in the arena and you have the opportunity to be confronted with your triggers. But expecting to never be triggered in a relationship just because you've been doing the work while single is not realistic either. So all of that to say don't panic. If you start dating someone and suddenly you're feeling really anxious, that makes perfect sense. Because that is just your nervous system doing its job, doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to say, hey, this thing reminds me of that other thing. And that other thing was painful or scary or we got hurt. Then are you sure we shouldn't try and do all of the things to prot ourselves that we did before? And that's just the programme that it's going to run. And you don't have to make meaning out of that.
Stephanie Rigg [00:11:00]:
You just have to notice it and turn towards yourself and go, okay, what do I need? I'm noticing that I'm feeling anxious about this person that I've connected with. That makes sense. I'm excited about them. And being excited about them means it's vulnerable, means I've got something to lose, I've got some skin in the game. So naturally my fears around that are going to be brought to the surface. How can I best support myself to move through this period that feels a little edgy, that feels a little vulnerable in a more grounded way? And that is how we actually shift our patterns is by showing up to triggering or challenging experiences in a different way to what we might have in the past. That is really where our growth lies. And that's what shows our system.
Stephanie Rigg [00:11:43]:
There's another way. We don't have to default to those old habituated patterns of self protection which might be tech someone incessantly or stalking them or doing all of the things to try and create reassurance for ourselves at a time when we're feeling unsure. So that's really the growth edge here. That's the opportunity is to not make ourselves wrong for feeling anxiety, but get curious about it and get curious about what we might need in order to stay somewhat grounded through that experience and really support ourselves to show up as the person that we want to be. And I should say I do have other episodes on anxiety in early dating and how you can manage that things to do and not do to support yourself through that experience. Okay, I really hope that that's been helpful in answering this question and demystifying it a bit because as I said, it's actually not a mystery at all. It makes perfect sense if that's your experience. If anything, I'd be more surprised if you weren't experiencing anxiety in early dating because it's an anxiety inducing experience for people with anxious attachment patterns that is absolutely par for the course.
Stephanie Rigg [00:12:47]:
So rather than making that a problem, we just want to manage it as best we can and learn better ways to support through that experience. Okay guys, thank you so much for joining me. I really hope this has been helpful and I look forward to seeing you again next time.
Stephanie Rigg [00:13:03]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things things, attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.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
attachment, emotional intelligence, nervous system, parenting, relationships, child development, self-awareness, self-regulation, mental load, self-care, family dynamics, conflict resolution, marriage, somatic therapy, emotional literacy, behavioural choices, co-regulation, repair in relationships, individual differences, sensory processing, resilience, burnout, childhood emotional needs, adult relationships, neuroception, compassion, guilt in parenting, shame, family communication, children's emotional safety