Digital Social Hour
Adam Lane Smith: Attachment Styles Are Ruining Modern Relationships | DSH #1751
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: Why was attachment theory updated?
Attachment theory has been around for 70, 75 years.
Chapter 2: How do attachment styles affect modern dating?
And it was outdated, so I had to do an update on it. And I started building not just the types, but the subtypes. And there's a subtype that has avoidance as the main, but it has an internal core of anxious attachment. It's from a little bit more damage. And we call it quiet disorganized. Disorganized means the blend of the two, anxious and avoidant.
Quiet disorganized is the one we see with a freeze response. We've got limbic system fight, flight, fawn, freeze.
Chapter 3: What is the freeze response in attachment theory?
And freeze response is your brain locking down, your vagus nerve tightens, you have a vagal dorsal shutdown, and Broca's area, the speech center of the brain, diminishes rapidly to almost zero. It mutes you, you go selective mutism. What your brain is doing is saying, I don't know how to solve this, and anything I do will make it worse.
Okay, guys, we got Adam Lane Smith here.
Chapter 4: How does childhood trauma shape adult relationships?
Just saw an amazing interview of his on Chris Williamson, so decided to invite him on my show. And he's done this one or two times before.
Chapter 5: Why do dating apps contribute to feelings of safety?
Thanks for coming on, man.
Man, Sean, thank you for having me here.
Yeah, we're going to talk dating today.
That's awesome. I love dating.
Yeah, interesting time to date right now, right?
It's a horrible time to date.
Would you consider this one of the worst times in history to date?
That's an interesting question. I think that dating has actually been invented in the last hundred years. I think dating is one of the most inefficient systems for finding a mate or a partner. I think we need to do away with dating.
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Chapter 6: What is quiet disorganized attachment?
And I think that if people are serious about finding a life partner, we need to have the old courtship system come back, but with a smart upgrade. If people want to play around and have fun, they can continue doing dating. But most women especially are looking for a husband, not a boyfriend.
Wow, that is so interesting. I did not know the history of dating. It's only 100 years old, you said?
It has not been a system that we've used for all of human history, no. Mostly what you did was get match made through your family, through your friends. Women especially prefer you to come in with references. And if you don't have references, their guard is incredibly high. They feel unsafe.
The dating industry right now in the dating world is essentially sending a woman from, let's say, 10,000 years ago, right?
Chapter 7: How does successful marriage function like a business partnership?
Just after the Neolithic revolution. Let's say you take a woman back then, strip her of family, friends, everything, send her alone into a forest and say, hopefully the first man you find is kind and not gonna hurt you and is a great husband. Just connect to him, hopefully it works out. Her nervous system, yeah, her nervous system's screaming at her the entire time.
So she's terrified of that man. She'll have a laundry list of very specific things she has to see up front before she'll ever trust him, right? And no man is gonna meet those lists. So she's gonna be afraid. It's going to be an awful experience.
Chapter 8: Can insecure attachment be healed?
Guys out there, same thing. You're wandering through the woods. You're connecting with terrified, angry, scared, traumatized women. They're going to just run you through the ringer. You're going to feel alone. A lot of guys are going to be left out in the lurch. We're looking at massive rates of guys who can't even get a girlfriend, can't even have a conversation with a woman anymore.
They're checking out, so...
I was just going to ask you who do you think has it harder, but it sounds like you think men.
I think it's different flavors of hard. I think our nervous systems are screaming no matter what we are, and it's screaming in different ways. We know that men are more lonely throughout the course of their life. We know that men are less likely to be able to find a partner, but we know that women report a lot higher rates of anxiety and stress and overthinking.
We know that about one quarter of American women is on an anti-psych medication right now for anti-depression, anti-anxiety. We know that our nervous systems are not doing well. It's just pick your flavor of misery.
Are you seeing dating trends in cities compared to rural areas? Like you're in Wisconsin.
I am. I wish that I could say the rural areas are doing better. I wish I could say that cities are the problem, get out of them. But we are seeing that as people condense into cities, you know, back in the 1920s, most Americans shifted into cities and rural areas are smaller. We're seeing the economic hit over the last decade. Well, let's just say several decades.
We've never really recovered even from post-World War II boom. We've never really recovered properly. So we're seeing an economic destruction in the rural areas, which is driving people into the cities. A lot of loss of young people and the ones who are left don't have many options. So I would not say that marital success is better out in the boonies right now.
Interesting, Tay, because I hear some people in Miami, for example, just complaining about the dating culture out there.
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