The more I’ve watched attachment theory take over dating culture, the more I’ve realized how narrow the framework really is. We throw around the different labels of attachment style like secure, avoidant, anxious, and disorganized as if they’re universal human categories – neat little personality labels that can explain anyone’s behavior, in any context, at any moment.
But attachment theory, at least the lite version that dominates social media, wasn’t designed with everyone in mind. It was developed by British and American researchers observing white, Western, middle-class, two-parent families in the mid-20th century. That context shaped what became the definition of healthy bonding and emotional regulation: direct communication, low-context emotional expression, comfort with naming needs, and an expectation of warmth and attentiveness from caregivers and later, people with whom you have intimate relationships.
Anyone who grew up outside those norms (culturally, economically, neurologically, or structurally) gets squeezed into a model that doesn’t actually describe them.
What gets labeled avoidant or disorganized in these situations often isn’t attachment at all. It’s culture. It’s neurodivergence. It’s masking. It’s survival. It’s communication norms formed in households where emotional expressiveness didn’t look anything like white middle-class therapy culture. It’s what psychologists and researchers in cross-cultural emotion studies have been saying for years: Western emotional norms are not universal, but psychology and pop culture often treat them as if they are.
This isn’t just a dating issue. Struggling to connect is an issue in many of my close relationships – friendships, family, romantic partners, coworkers, everyone. Across my life, people have interpreted my internal processing as withdrawal, my shutdowns as avoidance, my silence as disinterest, my need for time as emotional distance. And until recently, I didn’t have the language to explain what was actually happening. I woke up this morning and said to Threads:
View on Threads
I do not have an avoidant or disorganized attachment style.
I do not have a fear of intimacy.
I am disorganized, but that’s like a messy girl thing not an attachment thing.
I am autistic, and my multi-cultural layers and experiences cannot be neatly packaged into how we’re currently talking about attachment style. I said ableist in my Thread, but I actually think the lite attachment style theory being peddled around relationships is culturally-limited and ableist.
What Attachment Theory Was Designed For vs What Social Media Turned It Into
Attachment theory wasn’t created as a dating typology or a personality label. When Bowlby and Ainsworth first developed it, they were looking at something very specific: how infants bond with their caregivers, how they seek comfort under stress, and how those patterns shape their sense of safety in the world. And that part is valuable – our earliest relationships absolutely influence how we show up later in love, conflict, and connection.
But attachment theory was never meant to be the universal relationship rubric social media has turned it into. Online, it’s become a shorthand that flattens people into four types and ignores everything else that shapes adult relationships: culture, neurodivergence, trauma, class, communication norms, and the realities of how different families actually function.
Instead of being a description of how someone responds under stress, attachment style became a moral sorting hat.
Secure equals healthy.
Avoidant equals cold.
Anxious equals needy.
Disorganized equals chaos.
The theory itself isn’t the problem – it’s the oversimplified, context-free version of it that circulates online. When you take a framework built from a very specific group of families and apply it to everyone without nuance, you’re going to misread a lot of people. And the people who get misread the most are the ones whose emotional lives don’t look anything like the families the original research was based on.
Attachment Styles Through a Cultural Lens: What Western Psychology Misses
I am half-Black and half-Japanese – two cultural contexts that white attachment theory or culture seems not to have the tools to interpret correctly.
Many Asian families prioritize emotional restraint, indirect communication, and expressions of love through behavior, not verbal intimacy. Emotional discussion is often low context, indirect, or deemphasized — not because love is missing, but because love is enacted, not narrated.
That was my experience: I never felt forbidden from having emotions; I just felt like there was never a right or safe time to have them. Everything emotional felt too loud, too inconvenient, too easily misread. The message wasn’t “don’t feel,” but “manage it quietly.”
On the Black household side: Tone is everything. Respect is non-negotiable. Emotional privacy is the norm. Boundary-setting with elders? LOL.
Mental health in Black communities and households is often framed in binaries: either you’re fine or something is seriously wrong. Strength is modeled. Vulnerability is contained and only shared if safe.
Growing up, if you can huh you can hear wasn’t just a cutesy phrase – it’s a rule. Tone mattered more than content, and my tone was constantly misinterpreted. Flat sounded sarcastic. Neutral sounded disrespectful. Asking for clarification sounded like talking back. And in that environment, emotional nuance was something I learned to keep locked inside. I am 32 and just now practicing saying I’m not ok, this is what I need, and
The way my culture presents in my personality isn’t avoidant attachment. It’s culturally coherent attachment. Attachment theory (especially as its being presented online right now) simply wasn’t built to interpret the emotional ecosystems I grew up in.
Read More If You Want (Relevant Articles)
- Beyond Parental Control and Authoritarian Parenting Style: Understanding Chinese Parenting through the Cultural Notion of Training
- David Matsumoto – Cultural Influences on Facial Expressions of Emotion, Culture and Emotional Expression
- D.W. Sue – A Theory of Multicultural Counseling and Therapy
- Patricia Hill Collins – The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought
- Jean Wyatt, PhD – Patricia Hill Collin’s Black Sexual Politics and the Geneology of the Strong Black Woman
- Lisa Delpit – Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom
How Neurodivergence Gets Misread as Avoidant Attachment
Autistic masking research shows how many autistic adults, especially women, develop extremely advanced social camouflage. In my case, I grew up articulate, bright, verbal, charming when I want to be, and socially intuitive enough to “perform” connection in any situation. Outsiders interpret that as emotional fluency and real-time self-awareness.
But inside, my emotional processing is delayed. Research on alexithymia and autistic interoception describes exactly what happens to me: emotions register late, unevenly, or in a confusing, overwhelming rush of anxiety. I also struggle with central verbal processing – sometimes it is really hard for me to comprehend spoken information. It takes time (sometimes hours or days) for my internal world to make sense enough for me to articulate how I feel once I even grasp what I’ve been told.
So when I hit overwhelm, it’s not a gentle shift – it’s a full red-alert shutdown.
It feels like treading water in a rising pool, staring up at a ceiling that gets closer every second, while someone I can’t see yells at me to either swim for the exit that I also can’t see, or to ask for the life preserver, but I know if I open my mouth to ask, I’ll drown.
And because I can articulate so well when I’m regulated and chilling, people think I can do that all the time. They think I’m withholding when I’m actually buffering or that I’m retreating when I’m actually trying my absolute best to keep my head above the water of panic. They assume I’m shutting down on purpose but actually, my nervous system has literally reached capacity and I might literally throw up.
Autistic shutdowns look exactly like avoidant behavior from the outside, but the cause is entirely different. Attachment theory sees behavior but does not account for neurology, and only interprets through the lens it was built on.
Read More If You Want (Relevant Articles)
- Cook, Hull, Crane, and Mandy – Camouflaging in Autism: A Systematic Review
- Meng-Chuan Lai – Understanding autism in the light of sex/gender
- Sarah Garfinkel – Interoception and Anxiety in Autistic Adults
- Alexithymia & Autism Info
- Devon Price – An excerpt from Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
- Khudiakova, Alexandrovsky, A, Meng‐Chuan Lai – What We Know and Do Not Know About Camouflaging, Impression Management, and Mental Health and Wellbeing in Autistic People
Being Misread Through the Attachment Styles Lens
When people read my patterns through the attachment lens, they misread me. This isn’t just romantic; it’s happened in every close relationship I’ve had, but dating and the social media content I see around dating is where the misinterpretation becomes clearest.
I think about the night a guy gently asked if I knew I displayed avoidant attachment, while I was in the middle of the most vulnerable emotional attempt I’d ever made in my entire adult life. I wasn’t avoiding anything; I was panicking because I didn’t know how to articulate what I needed without being misunderstood, dismissed, or told I was wrong for feeling it – experiences directly shaped by both my cultural upbringing and my neurodivergence.
I wasn’t withdrawing. I wasn’t afraid of closeness. I was terrified of being misread again by someone I wanted to connect with, I felt like I was going to throw up because having that fear but also advocating or my needs is NEW and new is scary sometimes!
There have been dates where I genuinely liked someone but forgot to express interest externally. I forgot to animate my face. I forgot to keep my voice bright and smile at them. I slipped into FBI-interview mode because my excitement makes me curious and analytical, not giggly and flirty. I’ve had people interpret my quiet processing as boredom, my flat affect as emotional distance, my careful words as coldness.
Even with my mom (someone who knows me better than anyone else) I’ve had moments where I answered the phone too early, before I had processed my emotions after something happened, and she asked one too many questions. I explode into overwhelm, not because of her, but because I’m not done completing my internal emotional processing sequence.
These moments get labeled as distancing, dysregulation, or avoidance. In reality, they’re a neurodivergent processing lag colliding with cultural expectations I was never taught to navigate in a new environment where no one is advocating for me but me.
Secure for me is not the Western therapy-culture definition of secure — constant emotional openness, in-the-moment vulnerability, or high-verbal processing. That’s not how I was raised, and it’s not how my brain works.
Secure for me is regulation. Consistency. Low chaos. Clearly articulated expectations. Emotional honesty that doesn’t demand immediacy or intensity. Space.
When I have those things, I become the most affectionate, engaged, present, emotionally available version of myself. I show up fully. I nurture. I celebrate. I fully engage. I don’t need daily contact or reassurance.
Why Attachment Styles Aren’t Wrong, Just Incomplete
Attachment theory has value. But its current pop-psych form erases nuance:
- It treats white emotional norms as universal.
- It ignores cross-cultural communication science.
- It doesn’t know what to do with neurodivergent physiology.
- It pathologizes behaviors that are normal in non-white families.
- It misreads autistic shutdowns as avoidance.
- It assigns labels to survival strategies formed outside privileged conditions.
Psychologists themselves have been critiquing attachment theory’s cultural bias for decades – check the Read More section below if you want to get into it. But dating culture rarely accesses that nuance. It defaults to the familiar labels: avoidant, anxious, disorganized, secure.
And people like me (autistic, mixed, raised in non-white emotional systems) get squeezed into a diagnostic vocabulary that was never built for us.
Read More If You Want (Relevant Articles)
- Heidi Keller – The Myth of Attachment Theory
- Heidi Keller – Universality claim of attachment theory: Children’s socioemotional development across cultures
- Heid Keller – The Cultural Nature of Attachment
- van IJzendoorn & Sagi-Schwartz – Cross-Cultural Attachment
- Cultural Variations in Attachment: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5800550/
I Was Never Avoidant. The Framework Was Never Built for Me.
I am not avoidant.
I am not inconsistent.
I am not emotionally unavailable.
I am disorganized but as we discussed, that’s a separate thing.
I am autistic.
I am culturally mixed.
I am navigating multiple emotional languages.
I am trying to survive in frameworks that don’t recognize people like me while also dating, which is hard no matter where you come from or what generation you claim.
Attachment theory works as a lens but it’s not the whole landscape. And until we start acknowledging the gaps in the lens, we’re going to keep mislabeling entire communities, entire cultures, and entire neurotypes as insecure when really, they’re operating in systems that attachment theory wasn’t designed to understand.
