A Lid for Every Pot:

What the Purdue Attachment Study Says About Your Marriage — and What to Do About It

You know the dance.

One of you moves closer, texts more, asks more, needs more. The other pulls back, goes quiet, gets busy, disappears into work or their phone or the garage.

The closer one chases. The other retreats further. Round and round it goes, until you’re two people sharing a mortgage and a Netflix password and almost nothing else.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not broken. You’re not incompatible. You’re caught in what researchers call the pursuer-distancer cycle, and new science out of Purdue University has something genuinely hopeful to say about it.

There is a lid for every pot. The research says so. But finding yours requires understanding the pot you’re actually dealing with.

What Purdue Researchers Found About Why Marriages Succeed or Fail

Dr. Susan South at Purdue University’s Relationships and Mental Health Lab studied 100 newlywed Indiana couples, most in their late 20s and early 30s, who had been married for less than a year. The researchers wanted to catch couples before years of accumulated conflict could muddy the picture.

What they found was both sobering and hopeful.

Using a 36-item attachment survey, a 32-item relationship satisfaction measure, and thousands of behavioral data points, Dr. South’s team mapped a clear pattern: the way you attached to your parents as a child is the same template your nervous system uses to attach to your spouse today.

That’s not destiny. But it is important information.

Attachment Style	What It Looks Like in Marriage
Secure	Consistent trust, easy repair after conflict, genuine intimacy
Anxious	Hyper-vigilance, reassurance-seeking, fear of abandonment
Avoidant	Emotional distance, self-reliance as armor, fear of engulfment
Disorganized	Unpredictable responses, deep confusion, unresolved trauma

The good news, and this is the part Dr. South calls the “lid for every pot,” is that an insecure attachment style does not sentence you to an unhappy marriage. What matters most is whether your partner can become what researchers call a restorative relationship: someone whose consistent, predictable presence actually re-wires your nervous system over time.

Trust, it turns out, is the active ingredient. Not chemistry. Not compatibility scores. Trust.

The Pursuer-Distancer Dance: Why It Feels So Hard to Stop

Here’s where the Purdue findings get practical.

Most couples who feel stuck aren’t stuck because they stopped loving each other. They’re stuck because they’re running an automatic program, a relational pattern baked in long before they met, and neither person knows how to change the music.

The pursuer-distancer cycle is one of the most common and most destructive patterns in intimate relationships. Research from the Gottman Institute suggests that couples locked in this cycle in their first few years of marriage have an 80% chance of divorce within five years. That’s not a small statistic.

If You’re the Pursuer

You move toward your partner when things feel off. You text again when they don’t respond. You say “we need to talk” even when you know the timing is terrible. You push because the silence feels unbearable, like a fire alarm going off in your chest that nobody else seems to hear.

From the outside, this can look like neediness or nagging. From the inside, it feels like a survival response. Because for your nervous system, emotional distance registers as danger.

IN MY OFFICE, I HEAR THIS A LOT:

"I have 100 browser tabs open in my brain at all times. I’m constantly scanning, is he okay? Are we okay? Did I say something wrong? Is this the beginning of the end?" That’s not anxiety about your relationship. That’s your attachment system working overtime.

The pursuer believes, deep down, that if they could just communicate better, love harder, or explain themselves more clearly, the distance would close. What they don’t yet see is that the intensity of their pursuit is often what keeps the distance in place.

If You’re the Distancer

You pull back when things get heavy. Not because you don’t care but because closeness, when it comes with pressure, starts to feel like a smoke-filled room. You need air. You need space to think. And when your partner comes at you with urgency and need, your system’s first response is to go somewhere quieter.

The behaviors look like stonewalling, intellectualizing, and burying yourself in work. But beneath those behaviors, there is usually not coldness. It’s overwhelming. It’s a person who learned early on that relying on others was dangerous, so they built a self that didn’t need anyone.

Here’s the cruel irony of this dynamic: the pursuer’s anxiety makes them pursue harder, which makes the distancer retreat further, which spikes the pursuer’s anxiety, which, you see where this is going. Each person’s defense triggers the other’s deepest fear. Over and over, automatically, until someone names it.

Why You’re So Exhausted (And It’s Not Just the Kids or the Job)

I see a specific kind of tiredness in my office. It’s not the tiredness that a good night’s sleep fixes. It’s what I call bone-deep exhaustion, and it lives in people who have been running a threat scan on their relationship for months or years without realizing it.

When you’re anxiously attached, your brain’s amygdala, the part responsible for detecting danger, is essentially stuck in “on” mode. You’re not being dramatic or oversensitive. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was trained to do: keep you safe by watching for signs that love is about to be withdrawn.

The problem is that this constant vigilance is metabolically expensive. When your brain is running a background program called “Is this relationship safe?” 24 hours a day, there isn’t much left over for joy, creativity, or even basic presence with your partner.

This is how couples arrive at what I call the Silent Divorce. Nobody filed papers. Nobody had a big blowup. They just… drifted into being efficient co-managers of a household who haven’t actually talked in months. The lights are on, but nobody’s home.

What You Feel	What’s Actually Happening
Bone-deep exhaustion	Chronic cortisol from living in relational threat mode
100 browser tabs open	Anxious hyper-vigilance is consuming your cognitive bandwidth
Going through the motions	The “Silent Divorce”  emotional disconnection masked as routine
Numb or checked out	The nervous system shuts down as a protective response

Where EMDR Comes In: Healing the Wound Under the Dance

The Purdue study identifies trust as the thing that heals insecure attachment. But here’s what the study can’t tell you: how do you learn to trust when your nervous system has decades of evidence that closeness is dangerous?

That’s where EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) becomes a genuinely powerful tool. Not because it teaches you skills or gives you communication scripts (though those matter too). But because it goes to where the attachment wound actually lives: in your body’s memory.

The pursuer’s frantic chase often has a root. Maybe it was a parent who was unpredictable, loving one day, absent the next. The distancer’s retreat usually has one too. Maybe it was a parent whose love came with conditions, or whose presence felt suffocating rather than safe.

Those early experiences are stored not just as memories but also as body states. A racing heart. A clenched jaw. A feeling of being trapped or abandoned that arrives before rational thought has a chance to weigh in.

EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, rhythmic side-to-side eye movements, taps, or sounds, to help the brain reprocess stored experiences so they no longer disrupt current relationships. The memory doesn’t disappear. But it loses its grip.

What EMDR Actually Changes

•  For the anxious partner: the “threat scan” quiets down  the pursuer can sit with space without interpreting it as abandonment

•  For the avoidant partner: the “smoke-filled room” feeling eases closeness, stops feeling like a loss of self

•  For the relationship: both partners can access what researchers call “future templates,” practicing new responses to old triggers before they’re needed in real time

EMDR doesn’t fix your marriage. It removes the obstacle that was preventing you from fixing it yourself.

Three Things You Can Do Starting Today

Research and therapy are both essential. But while you’re working on the deeper stuff, here are three practical moves that come directly from the Gottman-South synthesis.

1. Learn to recognize your alarm bell

The pursuer’s urgent “we need to talk NOW,” and the distancer’s cold retreat are both responses to an internal alarm. The first step is to learn to recognize the alarm before acting on it. For the pursuer: that tight chest and racing thoughts are a signal of internal fear, not evidence that the relationship is actually on fire. For the distancer: that suffocated feeling is a signal of overwhelm, not evidence that your partner is asking for too much.

2. Trade demands for soft invitations

"We need to talk" closes doors. "I’ve been feeling a little disconnected. Would you have some time tonight or tomorrow to check in?" This opens them. The difference is agency. When a distancer feels like they have a choice, they’re far more likely to walk toward you than away.

3. Get curious about the old story

The intensity of your pursuit or the depth of your retreat is rarely really about your partner. It’s an echo of something older, an old terror or an old yearning that learned to show up in every close relationship. Getting curious about where that echo comes from is the first step toward choosing a different response.

THE DEPENDENCY PARADOX

Here’s something counterintuitive: allowing yourself to genuinely depend on your partner, to let them see your need and meet it, actually makes you more independent over time. When people feel securely held, they explore more freely. The goal isn’t less attachment. It’s a safer attachment.

The Lid Is Out There. Sometimes You Just Need Help Finding It.

Dr. South’s research doesn’t guarantee that every relationship is worth saving or that every partner can become restorative. What it does say is that insecure attachment is not a life sentence, and the nervous system can learn new things. That “earned security,” developing the kind of trust that early childhood didn’t provide, is a real and achievable outcome.

But you don’t get there by working harder at the same dance. You get there by understanding the music and deciding you want to learn a different one.

Whether you’re the one doing the chasing or the one who keeps pulling away, there is a way through this. And you don’t have to find it alone.

Ready to break the cycle?

Whether you’re the one doing the chasing or the one pulling away, EMDR therapy at Think Well Live Well Counseling can help you get off the hamster wheel and back to each other.

→  Book a session with Becky VanDenburgh at

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Also explore: EMDR Therapy  ·  Anxiety & Stress  ·  Trauma Therapy