Understanding attachment theory and how it affects your time at Skirt Club

If you’ve never identified your attachment style, it can be one of the most helpful things you can do for yourself before coming to Skirt Club. Your attachment style is how you go about connecting with another human when you’re in a committed or long-term relationship with them. While attachment styles are not immutable, they’re generally related to how you experienced love in your family growing up.

There are four main ways in which you can be attached – securely attached, avoidantly attached, anxiously attached and disorganised-attached, and these can affect everything you’ll do in a romantic relationship from how you feel about your partner flirting with other people to your text reply speed.

If you’re not sure which attachment style you lean towards - there are a few tests you’ll easily find from Google.

While there’s no direct correlation between your flirting style and your attachment style, if you have a partner back home, your attachment to them will definitely have a subtle impact on your experience at Skirt Club. What’s more, the more you know and recognise your attachment style, the more you can play to its strengths and sit with its weaknesses so that your amorous encounters don’t hurt you or other people.

Secure Attachment

First up, secure attachment. This is held up as the ‘model’ kind of attachment with therapists thinking around 60 percent of us are securely attached.

People that are securely attached find romantic relationships the easiest. They have a healthy sense of ‘togetherness’ vs ‘separateness’, don’t over-worry about being away from their partners and generally feel as equally secure and happy in themselves whether they are in or out of a romantic relationship.

That said, at a sex party, those who are securely attached to a partner back home can feel anxious. Even if you’ve come to Skirt Club with someone’s blessing, it’s common to feel a bit guilty, especially if you’ve not experienced any sexual touch from another person since before you got together with your partner.

It’s also completely common to feel shy and unconfident about flirting – after all, you’ve become used to interacting with someone who loves you and you know finds you attractive, probably without question. Your flirting skills can feel extremely rusty – or underdeveloped, particularly if you’re exploring your bi side for the first time.

The thing to reassure yourself of in this scenario is that you do have permission to be here, so you’re not doing anything wrong. Secondly, it’s to approach the situation with ‘the beginner’s mindset’, as the Buddhists say. Nobody is judging you – more than half the room feels this nervous!

Don’t worry about making clumsy conversation or not being able to precisely gauge if there’s a mutual attraction or not – that’s part of the fun, so try and relax into it. You might be an ‘expert’ at being in a couple but finding your feet with this element of your sexuality is going to feel awkward at first.

Anxious attachment

Next up, the anxiously attached. Anxious attachers tend to be preoccupied with relationships. They over-worry about their partners leaving them and benefit from a lot of verbal and physical reassurance that they are desired and loved.

At a sex party, the anxious attachers can at first find it difficult to enjoy the moment and may overanalyse why their partners agreed to them coming to Skirt in the first place. Feeling increasing guilt, they can worry unduly about what their presence at a sex party without their partner means for their relationship which can threaten to derail the fun. This often make them feel anxious about interacting with others and keen to hook into deeper conversations rather than immediate physical contact.

Conversely though, being ‘let off the leash’ can be a really good way for those that can feel anxious or insecure to build sexual confidence. Being reminded you are attractive to others can provide a welcome ego boost and give them an energy they can take home and feed back into their core relationship.

Anxious attachers also greatly benefit from a bigger pre-discussion about reasons for coming to Skirt and a debrief about the night when they get home.

Avoidantly Attached

On to the avoidantly attached. These are the people that have a lower level of intimacy in their core relationships. This doesn’t mean that they don’t feel or want love or commitment, but avoidantly attached people tend not to like talking too deeply about their relationship and often don’t need as much physical touch to feel safe and comfortable in a relationship.

For that reason, sex parties tend to be appealing to them because they don’t lend themselves to deep interactions even though they often lend themselves to life-changing ones.

People with avoidant attachment tend to find casual sex the easiest and are often the first to switch off when they arrive. The most important thing to note if you’re avoidantly attached and also coupled up outside of Skirt is that you may need to do an extra check-in with your partner about your core relationship both before and after you attend Skirt.

When you’re avoidantly attached, it’s easier for distance to creep into your relationships but you can push back on this by really talking to your partner about what the experience has been like afterwards and reassuring them you are committed to the relationship (which in fact is a really good tip for anyone of any attachment style attending!)

Disorganised attachment

The fourth category of attachment, ‘disorganised’ attachment means you tend to be a blend of the above.That means, when in a relationship, you often have strong, conflicting feelings about your need for closeness and your need for independence.

If you have a partner, coming to a sex party can really churn all of those things up in side of you and may make you feel disoriented, or it might give you a real sense of clarity and freedom to explore the conflicting aspects of your identity. You may even find that you can be more loving, intimate and focused at home as a result of getting the wilder, free-roaming aspect of your personality satisfied at Skirt.

In fact, all the attachment styles have something really important to teach us about what feelings can come up at Skirt –that they may not be the ones you’re expecting. And that’s ok. The whole point of Skirt is to have experiences – both physical and emotional – that you couldn’t have otherwise.