There’s a quiz you can take online. Sixteen questions, Likert scale, it takes a few minutes. At the end, it tells you how you tend to love. (https://dream-owl.com/attachment/index.php)
I scored a 3.67 out of 5 on attachment anxiety. A 1.17 on avoidance. In clinical terms, that means I’m anxiously attached – someone whose nervous system treats intimacy like a fire alarm. Not because closeness is dangerous, but because losing closeness might be. The alarm doesn’t go off when someone leaves. It goes off when someone might leave. For me, it shows up most obviously in the act of texting. When a text goes unanswered for too long. When you see those three dots going on and on, and then they disappear, and then nothing. When a friend’s tone shifts by half a degree. When a room that felt warm five minutes ago suddenly feels like a room you’re about to be asked to leave.
I’m also a cisgender man. And according to almost every study on the subject, I’m not supposed to be anxiously attached.
The research is pretty consistent: women tend to score higher on attachment anxiety. Men tend to score higher on avoidance (note: not much research has been done on attachment styles in gender non-conforming persons). Marco Del Giudice’s meta-analysis found this pattern holds across cultures, with effect sizes that are small but persistent. The shorthand version – women cling, men withdraw – has just enough truth in it to be dangerous.
But when you break anxiety down into its narrower facets, something strange emerges. Preoccupation and neediness are higher in women, yes. But rejected desire for closeness – the facet that captures wanting connection and feeling shut out of it – is higher in men. Men who want love and connection and can’t seem to find it. Men whose need isn’t absent, just invisible.
The sample problem makes it worse. Only 20 to 30 percent of participants in web-based attachment studies are men. We’re building our model of how men attach from data that barely includes them. And the men who do show up as anxiously attached? They don’t match anyone’s script. He’s not the avoidant stoic the research expects. Not the emotionally available partner the culture claims to want but routinely punishes.
I’ve spent most of my life in that gap. Too much and not enough, at the same time, in the same breath.
I was eight or nine years old, standing in a garage in small-town Iowa, and I made a vow: I would never become my father.
It sounds clean when I say it now. Noble, even. A child choosing a different path. But vows made by eight-year-olds aren’t strategic. They’re survival. My father’s version of masculinity involved slapping me around like a rag doll, trying to force the rambunctiousness out of me. It involved six boys and two overwhelmed parents and a house where the volume was always wrong – too loud or too silent, nothing in between.
So I rejected the template. I would be gentle. Emotionally attuned. Vulnerable. Curious. I would build a new masculinity from scratch, assembled from whatever I could find that wasn’t him.
What I didn’t understand at eight was that rejecting a template isn’t the same as having one. All I knew was what I wouldn’t be. I had no idea what I was building instead. And the thing about constructing yourself in opposition to someone – you’re still tethered to them. Every choice is a reaction. Every softness is a rebuttal.
Here’s what anxious attachment looked like before I had a name for it.
In elementary school, I developed intense crushes on girls I barely knew. I appointed them to a role in my interior life that had nothing to do with who they actually were. They became the person who would finally see me, finally welcome me, and finally prove that I was lovable. One girl yelled, “Yo, Dusty, my main man!” from the swings once, and that moment burned into my memory like a brand. A five-second interaction that my nervous system filed under evidence of safety. Evidence that I might be cherished.
This is what attachment researchers call displacement. When the primary attachment figures aren’t safe – when the people who are supposed to hold you are the people you need holding from – the system doesn’t shut down. It redirects. It finds a target. And it pours everything into that target with an intensity that has nothing to do with the target and everything to do with the wound.
I did this for decades. Different faces. Same architecture. The target was always someone I couldn’t quite reach, because people I could reach would require me to actually be seen, and being seen meant being evaluated.
The message I received from my parents was “you are not enough,” and “You’re stupid.” It was almost as if I were in a courtroom and found guilty of neediness and a general lack of intelligence.
I’ve spent my adult life building a defense against this. The hundreds of books I’ve read are an exhibit that I’m not stupid after all. So is the anthropology degree. The archaeological dig in a cave in Ukraine. The novel I started writing. The therapy career I’m building. The weight I’ve lost. All of it was entered into evidence. Proof that the charge is false. Proof that I am smart, capable, worthy, enough.
But you can’t win an argument with a tape player. The prosecution isn’t a person. It’s a recording. It doesn’t hear my evidence. It doesn’t rest. It just plays.
The jury came back years ago. Everyone who has looked at me with clear eyes as an adult already reached their verdict. My best friend Tommi. My therapist. The kids in addiction that I work with. They’ve seen me. They’ve decided. But I haven’t read the verdict because doing so would mean the trial is over. And if the trial is over, who is Dusty when he’s not defending Dusty?
That question is more frightening than the tape.
In November of 2016, I stopped singing.
That might sound like a small thing. It wasn’t. I’d done musical theater. I’d been in the symphony chorus. I’d performed. My voice was the most connective, most human instrument I had, and I put it away because it was too connected to my emotional self. The heartbreak was real.
Three things broke at once: an election that shattered my sense of agency, a divorce that shattered my sense of home, and the death of an academic dream that shattered my sense of future. Each one, on its own, was survivable. Together, they proved something my anxious wiring had always suspected: you cannot shape your world. You are not that powerful. The things you love will leave, and your hands are too small to hold them.
So I put an earbud in my left ear. Just the left. I left it there and filled it with The Office and Parks & Recreation on constant repeat. I built a fortress of predictable things around the hole where connection used to be. For nine years, I lived like the character in my unfinished novel – the last person alive on his planet, archiving knowledge for a world he was no longer sure existed.
I didn’t stop wanting people. That’s the thing about anxious attachment – the wanting doesn’t stop. It just goes underground. I wanted to be invited to things I still wouldn’t attend. I wanted to be missed by people I’d made it impossible to miss me. I wanted someone to pull the earbud out and say come back, but I’d gotten so good at disappearing that no one could find the door.
Someone found the door.
Her name is Tommi, and she is my very good friend, and she did something that no amount of therapy or medication or self-help books had managed: she got that goddamned earbud out of my ear.
I can’t point to the moment. That’s not how it worked. It was cumulative. Persistent. She just kept showing up. Not with answers. Not with interventions. Just with presence. Steady, unbothered, I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere presence. The thing my nervous system had been scanning for since the swings.
Then came a new role at work – helping teens in addiction navigating substance abuse. I went from fixing pipes to helping humans. Purpose returned. Not the frantic, exhibit-building purpose of the courtroom. Something quieter. Something that existed because other people needed it, not because I needed to prove I deserved to exist.
I want to be precise about the timeline, because the story people want to hear isn’t quite the story that happened. The depression lifted in October 2025. I’d been in my new role for six months by then. I’d been off olanzapine for a month. I’d just started Adderall. The clinical interventions mattered – I’m not dismissing them. But connection was the ignition. Everything else was fuel.
I belonged my way out of depression.
So what does earning security actually look like? It doesn’t look like a music montage. This isn’t The Karate Kid, though “You’re the Best” does play in my head from time to time.
It looks like texting a grieving friend “I trust you” when every synapse is screaming chase, fix it, prove you’re needed. It looks like a woman going silent for two months and choosing to wait – not freeze, not punish, just wait – and then dropping off a borrowed book with no strings. It looks like three friendships where the question is “Do I matter to you?” and then sitting in the not-knowing instead of forcing an answer.
It looks like reading a book called Needy and finding the author’s phrase for the things you’ve never admitted you want: ugly needs. The needs you don’t put on the list because you’re ashamed they exist. Needing reassurance. Needing to know someone isn’t leaving. Needing to hear it out loud, because your nervous system doesn’t believe what isn’t spoken.
And it looks like recognizing that expressing those needs as a man is going to hit differently. That the very thing my attachment system requires – transparency about my need for closeness – is the thing my gender socialization has spent forty-nine years telling me to bury. I’m not fighting one war. I’m fighting two. The attachment wound says you’ll be abandoned if you’re not enough. The masculinity wound says you’ll be abandoned if you’re too much. Earned security is the daily practice of being both – enough and too much, needy and generous, scared and still here – and letting people see it anyway.
I took the quiz again recently. My avoidance is still low – 1.17, meaning I’m deeply comfortable with closeness and interdependence. A lot of people who survived what I survived end up avoidant. I didn’t. I think that matters. I think the eight-year-old in the garage, whatever else he got wrong, got that part right. He chose toward, not away.
My anxiety has dropped. I can’t pinpoint exactly when or why, which my therapist says is actually the most encouraging sign. When the alarm system itself quiets down – not just behavioral override, not just white-knuckling through the panic, but the actual baseline lowering – that’s structural change. That’s not performing security. That’s earning it.
I’m not secure. I’m earning secure. Present tense. It’s a practice, not a destination. Some days the tape still plays. Some days, I draft a text and delete it four times because I’m sure it reveals too much. Some days I hear “Yo Dusty, my main man” from a woman on a swing set forty-odd years ago, and I feel it in my chest like it happened this morning.
But I also started singing again.
I auditioned for a couple of musicals this year. I stood on a stage and sang “Out There” from Hunchback of Notre Dame – literally a song about yearning to be seen – and I shook like a leaf. My voice cracked. My hands wouldn’t stay still. I did it anyway.
There’s a video of Keala Settle rehearsing “This Is Me” for The Greatest Showman. She’s gripping the music stand. She doesn’t want to step forward. She’s a bigger woman, and she’s fighting herself the entire time – fighting the visibility, fighting the vulnerability, fighting the part of her that knows the song is true. And then the song pulls it out of her. She lets go of the stand. She steps forward. She doesn’t stop being scared. She just stops letting it be the last word.
That’s earned secure. Not “I’m not afraid anymore.” Just: I’m afraid, and I’m still here, and you don’t get to make me disappear.
Gingerpithicus Frisii 
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