Attraction

Thanks, it does. I'm not surprised that anxious would be attracted to fearful. I've started dating a few anxious guys lately and while it could just be normal defensive behavior after a recent long term break up, I find myself uncharacteristically avoidant with them. I crave intimacy, but another name for anxious/preoccupied is ambivalent. I think while anxious want intimacy we are conflicted about getting too close and getting hurt. With avoidants of either flavor the pulling back seems to take my focus on pursuing, and I forget to feel conflicted or ambivalent and this is much more comfortable. I met an avoidant, unknown at the time, at a party and had more intimacy on the dance floor with him than I had with an anxious I have been dating and who is already wiling to hold my hand in public and cares when I tell him about some of the personal problems my friends are having. The next day I was hooked on the avoidant, hoping we might start dating so I could be free of the anxious guys I had been seeing. Luckily within a week I could tell he was avoidant and that I needed to back off.
I'm surprised fearfuls might be attracted to dissmissives but that could just be cause I lump them in together and assume the anxious is their natural pair.

Yes, I remember that quote, but I can't remember if the book includes a paragraph about the pairing of a dismissive avoidant with an anxious avoidant, which describes my relationship with my partner. Theoretically, I guess, although Jeb might have some insight here, we shouldn't work. Realistically though, and as I mentioned in my previous post, we are together because:
1. We want to be - we believe that what we have is worth it. We are kind and love one another.
2. We compromise almost daily. We are very tolerant of each other's traits, but have mutually agreed boundaries in place.
3. We are very self-aware. This has taken years of reflection, reading, and unfortunately many failed relationships.
4. We are in our 50's, and to some extent age and maturity is on our side.
5. We both have a number of secure traits. Despite being text-book avoidants in many ways, we can, and do, act ( with an emphasis on the word 'act') as actors, like secures sometimes, unless our core attachment types are triggered, which can be often, although not as much as before.
6. If we are triggered, we recognise it and cut the other some slack. However, this is not always easy. Despite all of the above, the feelings of giving up, bolting, hiding, or whatever, never really go away. Both of us fear control, stifling, and a lack of freedom in a relationship, but it is an irrational fear sometimes.
7. Bizarrely perhaps, although the literature bears this out, our anxious / dismissive traits keep us attracted to one another.

Although we want to be together, it is hard work, and we both have wondered in the past if it would be easier to walk away. But we do have very good times together, and we like each other too. Nevertheless, It is not for the faint hearted, and I really wish that it didn't have to be this way.

As a fearful dismissive I usually end up in a relationship with an anxious - preoccupied, and I usually end that relationship, because they go psychotic on me.  When I dated another fearful avoidant, I ended a relationship after a significant withdrawal from him.  When I have dated secures, there has been no chemistry, whatsoever. And when I dated a dismissive avoidant, I could not let go of the relationship although it was clearly bad for me. I am still in that relationship, contemplating the end yet also having discovered this information still looking at ways to save the relationship and being thoroughly confused.