There's a feeling some people get when a relationship is actually going well. Things feel close and good and reciprocal, and then — instead of relaxing into it — the anxiety quietly increases. Like the good thing is evidence that something is about to go wrong. Like you are now holding something you can lose.

This is attachment doing what it does when it learned that closeness was also risk. Maybe the closeness got interrupted before. Maybe it came with conditions you couldn't always meet. Maybe the people you loved early on were inconsistently available — wonderful sometimes, elsewhere other times — and your nervous system learned to watch for the withdrawal rather than settle into the connection.

So now when someone is consistently there, part of you doesn't entirely trust it. Not because they're untrustworthy — but because your internal model for "this is going well" includes a bracing for what comes after. The closeness is real. The anxiety about losing it is also real. They coexist in a way that feels confusing from the outside but makes complete internal sense.

What you're not is broken. What you're not is incapable of real intimacy. What you are is someone whose nervous system learned a particular version of how love works, and that version includes vigilance as a form of care.

You can update the model. It's slow. It happens through repeated experience of the thing not going wrong. Each time the closeness stays, the pattern gets a little smaller.