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You have been married several years, and this week you found yourself checking what time they got in. You haven't done that since early in your relationship. You know the house, the routine, the person. You could describe their whole day without asking. And still, on Tuesday, you stood in the kitchen working out how long it had been. The question that follows is usually the same one, and it arrives with some dread

attached: 0:41

Is something wrong with us? I'd like to offer a different question because, in my experience, it's the more useful one. Not what changed in the marriage, what changed in your life? You're not doing anything wrong. There's a mechanism underneath why this pattern resurfaces at this life stage. And once you can see it, this can stop looking like a verdict. If any of that sounds familiar, you're not broken. You're not too much. Your nervous system may be doing exactly what it learned to do long before this relationship began. I'm Dr Narelle Duncan, a Clinical Psychologist drawing on 30 years of helping people understand themselves. This is Steady and Connected. Each episode, I'll bring you the science, the tools, and the clarity to understand what may be happening when anxiety shows up in love, and what you might do with that understanding. Let's get steady and connected. Most of what's said about anxious attachment is aimed at people in the

early part of a relationship: 2:04

dating, the first year, the not yet sure. Very little of it is written for someone in a long-term relationship. So today we go there. Why an old pattern can arrive loudly several years into a relationship, what usually changed to let it, why duration itself makes it harder to admit to, and what to do when a feeling that seems to have no cause in a marriage at all. Let's start with the thing that often gets skipped, which is the many quiet years. A pattern that isn't showing is not the same as a pattern that isn't there, and in a busy adult life, there is a great deal that holds an anxious pattern quiet without anyone deciding it should. For a start, children, work that took everything you had, a house, a schedule, aging parents, a decade where the two of you were simply too occupied to sit in a room and notice how you felt about each other. Being busy is an effective way to manage an anxious pattern. That is not a criticism. For many people, it works for years, and it works precisely because it uses up the attention the pattern would otherwise spend on monitoring. There just wasn't a spare hour for the audit. The difficulty is only that it's a strategy that ends without notice. The children leave, the job changes or ends or stops mattering the way it did. Your health or theirs alters what the days contain. And the attention that was fully committed for many years is suddenly available again, and it goes to the nearest important thing, which is the person on the other side of the kitchen. So the pattern didn't come back. It came out from behind what was covering it, and that distinction helps change what you can do about it. A pattern that came back suggests a cause somewhere in the recent past, a betrayal, a drift, a decision one of you made. A pattern that was covered suggests something much less alarming. It suggests that the cover moved. Those two readings send you looking in completely different directions, and only one of them tends to find anything The forms are a little different this far in, and that is part of why they can go unrecognized. I'll offer a few. Notice what lands and notice what doesn't. That's information too. Watchfulness without a question. You're reading their mood carefully, and there's nothing you actually want to ask. The monitoring is running with no destination. The retrospective audit, not the last two days, an audit of the last two years, whether this is what you both meant to end up with and whether they'd choose it again. The scale of the review is new. The machinery underneath it is old. Distance where there used to be logistics. For years, the conversation was arrangements. Who's collecting whom? What's on Saturday? That was the connection in practice. When the arrangements stop, the quiet that follows can feel like drifting apart when a good deal of it is simply the absence of the old scaffolding. Sharper reactions to small things. A tone at dinner lands harder than it would have a few years ago. Nothing about the tone changed. What changed is how much room there is around it. Comparison that goes backwards, not necessarily to other couples. Comparisons to the two of you earlier, a version you may remember more warmly than you lived it. Reluctance to name it. Perhaps the most telling form at this stage, knowing something is off and deciding not to raise it because after this long it seems like it would be a large thing to say. If several of those landed, that is worth taking notice of, and it is also very common at this stage of life. It doesn't tell you anything is necessarily wrong between you. Now the mechanism, and it's the part people can find most surprising about themselves. There's a reasonable assumption that time in a relationship should settle an anxious pattern. Many years of evidence that show they stay, surely that answers the question. It often doesn't quite, and the reason is worth understanding. Knowing someone is a matter of information, and it sits in a different place to whether your body treats them as safe. You can hold a complete, accurate account of a person, their habits, their history, what they'll say before they say it, and still have a system that goes on checking. Familiarity is knowledge. Felt safely is a body state. They are not the same, and one does not automatically produce the other. The other half of it is that the expectation being defended is not about this relationship at all. It was laid down long before in other relationships, and what it holds is a general rule about what happens when you rely on someone. Many years of counter-evidence in one relationship can leave that general rule surprisingly intact, particularly when the counter-evidence arrived as ordinary, uneventful days, which, as we said last episode, tend not to get filed. If you'd like to see which of these patterns is most active for you now, because it may not be the one that was active many years ago, the free quiz at steadyandconnected.com.au is a good place to start. It's for self-reflection, not a clinical assessment, and your results come to your inbox with a short series that goes deeper on what they mean for you. Here is the layer that can make things harder than the early years, and I want to name it directly. When you're anxious in a new relationship, there's a rough social permission for it. Everyone tends to accept that early love is uncertain. Many years later in a long-term relationship, that permission is often gone. The feeling can arrive with an extra sentence attached, "I should be past this by now." And that sentence can do real damage because it converts an ordinary resurfacing into evidence of a personal failure It stays unsaid. Not to friends who would be surprised, not to a partner, because raising it after this long seems to imply something's wrong with the relationship. It gets carried privately, which is the condition under which it grows. So let me provide another view. Duration was never meant to be a treatment. Time in a relationship does not by itself update an expectation laid down in childhood. The years have to contain a particular kind of experience for that, and busy years often don't contain much of it. Many good years and a live anxious pattern are not a contradiction. They are an extremely ordinary pair. There's a second cost to the silence, and it's worth spelling out. A partner who notices you're watchful and is told nothing about why can make up their own account of it, and the account they reach for is usually about themselves. So the privacy that was meant to protect the relationship quietly puts a second uncertainty into it. Two people, each holding a story about the other, neither one said out loud. You have not gone backwards. You have arrived at the first stretch of your life with enough quiet in it for this to be visible. Let's go back to Tuesday and the kitchen and working out how long it had been. Walk it through gently. The noticing, they're later than usual, and you register it. The old move, checking the time, which is the same old watchfulness you did earlier on in the relationship. The question, "Is something wrong with us?" Asked of the marriage because the marriage is what's in front of you. And the answer that fits the evidence better. Your youngest moved out in March. You stopped doing the drive that you used up an hour of every day, and for the first time in decades, there is room in a Tuesday evening. Nothing about them changed. Nothing about the marriage necessarily changed. What changed is that the attention came home, and it went looking for the thing it used to watch for. So what does it want, this returned watchfulness? It's worth answering carefully because the obvious response is often to take it to the relationship, and that is often the wrong address. What it's asking for is what it always asks for: a signal that connection is still there. What's new is that the ordinary signals have gone quiet. For many years, the evidence of connection was constant and structural: a shared project, a shared schedule, the sheer volume of contact required to run a household with other people in it. That was reassurance delivered continuously, and without anyone noticing, it was doing that job. When it stops, the connection is still there, and the evidence stream isn't. So a system built to watch closeness reads a drop in signal and does exactly what it's for. Which means the work here is rarely about repairing something between you. More often, it's about what fills a life that has room in it now, and about giving your own system a source of steadiness that doesn't depend on the household being busy. That's a kinder problem than it first sounds. It often isn't a repair job on the relationship. It's the question of what a life with space in it is for, and it may well be the question your partner is sitting with, too, on their side of the kitchen. So here is the one thing for this episode, just one. The next time the old watchfulness turns up and the question forms, "Is something wrong with us?" Set it aside for a moment and ask a different one. What changed in my life this year? Not in the marriage, in the life around it. Who left? What ended? What stopped taking your time? What your body is doing differently. What you no longer have to organize. Just list them. No need to conclude anything. Most people find three or four things they hadn't connected to the feeling at all. That's the point of it. This is a gentle experiment with no right result, and it isn't a way of talking yourself out of a real concern. If there is something to raise with your partner, this doesn't replace that. It only makes sure you're raising the right thing. And if you'd like something to write the list down, I've made you a one-page guide called What Changed This Year? What's different, what you used to do with that feeling, and what you have instead now. It's at go.steadyandconnected.com.au/changed. Free and yours to keep. Which leaves the thing a lot of people get to and stop at. You've worked out what's happening, you'd like the person you live with to know about it, and every version of the sentence you've tried out in your head either sounds like an accusation or an apology. How to say it and when is where we're going next episode. One more thing before I go, understanding the pattern is where this starts. What tends to shift it is doing something with the understanding, not once, repeatedly, in the ordinary moments where it actually runs. That's what I built the workbooks for, three of them and a start here guide, so what you learn here gets put into practice. They're at steadyandconnected.com.au. That's everything for this episode. If today resonated, follow Steady and Connected wherever you listen so the next episode lands automatically. And if someone came to mind while you were listening, share it with them. If you'd like to know which attachment pattern is most active for you, take the free five-minute quiz at steadyandconnected.com.au. Your results come straight to your inbox, along with a short email series that goes deeper on what they mean for you. If today's conversation has brought up anything you need support with, please reach out. Lifeline is available 24/7 on 13 11 14. And if you're ready to explore this work more personally, I offer individual telehealth sessions at getlifedirection.com. I'm Dr Narelle Duncan, Clinical Psychologist. Take good care of yourself, and I'll see you in the next episode.