He takes four hours to text back and suddenly your whole nervous system is on high alert. You rewrite your reply six times. You check if he's "active." You tell yourself you're fine, and you are absolutely not fine.

If that sounds familiar, you might be dealing with an anxious attachment style. And I want to start with this: it's not a flaw. It's a pattern you learned, and patterns can change.

I was single for seven years before I met my husband. I know that specific ache: the group chat that turns into a conversation about daycare, the wedding where you're seated at the "singles table," the Sunday night loneliness that nobody warned you about. I'm also a licensed therapist, so I'm going to give you both the friend answer and the clinical one.