What Your Attachment Style Says About Your Digital Behavior

You know that moment when you’re lying in bed, casually “checking” your partner’s Instagram stories for the third time tonight? Or drafting a text you’ll never send, then deleting it, then rewriting it? Your attachment style might have more to do with those habits than you think.

We tend to talk about attachment in the context of face-to-face relationships: how you fight, how you cuddle, how you handle distance. But two recent studies suggest that your attachment patterns follow you into every group chat, every DM, and every late-night scroll session.

The Surveillance Question

Let’s start with the uncomfortable one. Amanda and Ratnasari (2025) studied how attachment style relates to online surveillance of romantic partners, things like checking their social media activity, monitoring who they follow, or reading through old posts to look for “clues.”

Their findings were striking but not exactly surprising: people with anxious attachment styles engaged in significantly more online surveillance. The mechanism? Emotional investment. Anxiously attached individuals tend to be deeply emotionally invested in their relationships, and that investment fuels a need to monitor and reassure.

When emotional investment is high but security feels fragile, the temptation to “just check” becomes almost irresistible.

Avoidantly attached people, on the other hand, showed much less surveillance behavior, not because they’re morally superior about privacy, but because they tend to invest less emotionally in romantic relationships in the first place. Less investment, less urge to monitor.

One finding that raised eyebrows: men in the study showed higher surveillance tendencies overall. The researchers suggest this may relate to gendered expectations around relationship control, though more research is needed.

How You Fight Over Text

The second study, by Akalın Sevi and Güngör (2025), looked at something equally revealing: demanding-withdrawal patterns in conflict. You know the dynamic, one person pushes for resolution (“We NEED to talk about this”) while the other pulls away (“I just need space”).

Here’s what they found:

Anxious attachment predicted both demanding and withdrawing behavior. This might sound contradictory, but if you’ve ever sent a wall of text and then immediately turned off your phone, it makes perfect sense. Anxiously attached people oscillate: they pursue connection desperately, then collapse when the vulnerability becomes too much.

Avoidant attachment predicted demanding behavior but, surprisingly, not withdrawing. This challenges the common assumption that avoidant people are always the ones stonewalling. In some contexts, avoidantly attached individuals actually push for control in conversations, especially when they perceive a power imbalance.

The Power Perception Piece

One of the most interesting findings from Akalın Sevi and Güngör’s work was the role of power perception. When people felt they had more power in the relationship, they were more likely to engage in constructive communication rather than destructive demand-withdraw cycles.

This isn’t about domination. It’s about agency. When you feel like you have a voice and your needs matter, you’re less likely to either explode with demands or vanish into silence. Power perception acted as a mediator between attachment style and communication patterns, meaning that even if your attachment style predisposes you toward certain conflict behaviors, your sense of agency in the relationship can shift the outcome.

What This Means for You

None of this research is meant to make you feel bad about checking your partner’s Spotify activity. (We’ve all done it.) The point is awareness. When you notice yourself falling into a surveillance loop or a demand-withdraw spiral, it helps to recognize the attachment pattern driving it.

A few questions worth sitting with:

• When you feel insecure in a relationship, what’s the first thing you do on your phone?
• In conflict, do you tend to pursue or pull away, and does it depend on who you’re with?
• Do you feel like you have an equal voice in your relationship, or does that sense of agency fluctuate?

Your attachment style isn’t a life sentence. It’s a starting point for understanding why you do what you do, including the digital habits you’d rather not examine too closely.

Curious About Your Attachment Style?

Our free Connection Style Test explores your attachment patterns across multiple dimensions, giving you a nuanced picture of how you connect, in person and online. It takes about 10 minutes, and the personalized report might name a few things you already suspected but hadn’t put words to yet. You can also explore how personality traits interact with your relationship patterns by taking the Big Five personality test.

References

Amanda, A. & Ratnasari, D. (2025). Adult attachment style to online surveillance: The role of investment and commitment in young adults’ romantic relationships. Psikostudia: Jurnal Psikologi, 14(4), 638-645.

Akalın Sevi, E. & Güngör, H. C. (2025). Investigating the mediating effect of distress intolerance and power perception on the effect of adult attachment styles on demanding withdrawal behavior pattern. Journal of Human Sciences, 22(2), 323-343.