Attachment Styles in Relationships: Insights From a Psychologist
Ask most people what their attachment style is, and they’ll name one. Anxious. Avoidant. Maybe secure. But in reality, you probably don’t have one attachment style. Attachment styles in relationships usually depend on who you are relating to and what that particular relationship asks of you.
Attachment theory says the bonds you form as an adult carries a replicated imprint of the ones you formed in your earliest years of life. And, those early attachment experiences follow you into your dating life influencing who you choose, why you choose them, and how the relationship progresses or doesn’t.
As a board certified couple and family psychologist, attachment theory has informed my work with every single person I’ve treated because it’s foundational to understanding yourself.
In this article, I’ll cover what attachment theory is, the four common types, and the nuances of attachment theory in relationships (because it is much less black and white than you may realize). I’ll also share how to consider assessing your own attachment style to help you work toward building more secure connections.
What is attachment theory?
As babies, we needed to be fed, changed, clothed, sheltered, and medically attended to. That was the bare minimum. Beyond that, we needed skin-to-skin contact. We needed someone to respond when we cried. We needed attunement and care consistent enough for us to trust that it would keep coming.
If those needs weren’t met, or worse, we experienced or witnessed abuse or neglect or had parents who were traumatized — that also impacted us. The degree to which we had all of these experiences shapes how we feel about ourselves and what we come to expect from people.
Attachment researchers describe this becoming an enduring internal script: a story about how things will or won’t go when you need someone in the future. In adult relationships, this shows up as expectations. Do you trust that the person you’re dating will do what they said, when they said? Pay the bill, plan the date, remember your birthday. And do you do those things? We can’t outsmart these inborn scripts, but we can evolve, heal, and grow if we learn how to understand them.
Four Common Attachment Styles in Relationships
In the 1970s, researchers John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth described the following four attachment types:
Secure Attachment
Secure attachment means you can tolerate both togetherness and separateness, and move between them without much drama. You’re clear about your commitment to each other, so a hard conversation doesn’t put the whole relationship on the table. You ask for what you need directly instead of hinting, testing, or waiting to be correctly read. For example, you say something like “I felt weird when you didn’t call.” You can also receive: you can need your partner, let them show up for you, and not feel like you always have to be the capable one.
Securely attached people still argue, but they know how to repair and it doesn’t take long. When you’re secure, the other person doesn’t feel like they need to decode tones, rehearse how to have conversations, or scan messages for “what they might really mean.”
If you’re used to intensity, a secure attachment style can read as boring before you recognize it as safe. This takes practice, but is possible.
Anxious Attachment
Anxious attachment means becoming preoccupied with the relationship or the other person in the relationship. Togetherness feels manageable, and likely chronically desired. The struggle usually comes when you’re not with the other person.
Being anxiously attached can look like asking for an inordinate amount of reassurance, asking questions you already know the answer to, or people pleasing. The script running here is: something is wrong, they’re doing something to hurt me, they’re going to leave.
Significant others may experience you as intense, smothering, and/or not giving them room. You might have an anxious attachment style in a relationship if the care you got as a kid wasn’t always reliable.
Avoidant Attachment
Avoidant attachment in relationships means having a hard time experiencing and/or sustaining closeness. This style can tolerate small doses of closeness or none at all. If you’re avoidant, it usually feels difficult to depend on someone else. You may also avoid sharing much, and it often doesn’t occur to you that there’s something to share. You may keep an eye out for the ways you could get hurt, which can look like focusing on what you don’t like about them. Or you might project your own fears onto them instead of naming what's actually yours to carry.
The script might sound like, “This relationship isn’t working. I can’t do this. They’re the one who needs help.” The problem gets assigned to the other person.
When you’re avoidant, partners tend to feel on edge and insecure. They're unable to name what’s wrong or understand why closeness isn’t consistently available, although they may come across as strong, steady, and calm.
Disorganized (Fearful-Avoidant) Attachment
Disorganized gets the wrap for being the most difficult, or the one that comes from the most trauma. If this is your style, you likely feel a strong mix of experiences about other people that aren’t consistent and don’t always make sense to you. You might feel very attracted to someone and very repulsed by them in a short amount of time. It can be a combination of anxious and avoidance: fearful of loving, fearful of leaving, and a loss of self-understanding all at the same time.
From the outside, it can look like things don’t add up — something ending abruptly for reasons that don’t make sense, or falling apart when it otherwise seems like things are going well. A partner might feel whiplash and confusion, might find it intense, and may be curious to understand it.
Important Nuances to Understand About Attachment Styles in Relationships
Attachment styles aren't fixed labels, they’re patterns: A style is a description of what you tend to do in close relationships, not a category you belong to. It describes patterns of internal feeling states and external behaviors.
You can have different attachment styles across relationships: Attachment styles can be dynamic and influenced by you, the other person, and the relationship between the two of you. No two relationships are the same.
Styles can shift over time: Attachment styles have stable features, but they also change due to things like age, circumstance, experience, and the other person.
No style is "bad:" Attachment styles are not character flaws. They are patterns of behavior that are almost always traceable to earlier experiences. When earlier experiences are uncovered and understood, your attachment patterns make sense.
Some attachment styles have their own strengths: People who are anxiously attached often notice shifts before anyone else. Avoidantly attached can often hold steady in crisis.
Attachment styles are inherited generationally:While not on purpose, our caregivers often replicate the type of caregiving they received. We also learn attachment styles from other people.
Your attachment style reflects beliefs you have about yourself: How you attach reflects what you came to believe about how lovable and worthy you are of relationships. Simply picking “a better partner” alone doesn’t solve that.
The other person may be genuinely triggering you: Being fearful of abandonment when someone is quite literally showing abandonment behaviors is a normal response to the lived experience. Pushing away from closeness when someone is smothering you is a normal response to that lived experience.
Anxious and avoidant end up together often: Each one confirms what the other already expects: the pursuing makes distance feel necessary and the distance makes pursuing feel necessary.
You can’t change someone else’s attachment style: You can change what you do, but the work of shifting patterns belongs to each individual. You can’t change another person; they have to want the change themselves.
How to Identify Your Attachment Style
There are formal ways to assess attachment and they involve working with a trained clinician. Short of that, the following questions can be a helpful and potentially fun way to better understand yourself.
When there’s distance:
When your partner is unreachable for a period of time, what are your go-to thoughts, what happens in your body, and what do you do about it?
When plans get canceled, is your first reaction disappointment or relief?
When things are close:
When it’s going well, do you relax into it or start waiting for something?
Can you let someone take care of you, or do you have to be the caretaker?
After conflict:
How long until you can come back to the conversation? An hour? A day? Or does it go unaddressed indefinitely?
Do you say the hard thing directly, or do you hint or hope someone will “just know”?
Across relationships:
When something goes wrong between you, do you assume it’s someone’s fault? If so, yours or theirs?
Do you believe you’re worth someone staying in a relationship with?
Resources to Understand Your Attachment Style
Books on Attachment Styles
These books can help you learn more about attachment styles, what you might lean towards, and how you can become more secure.
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love by Amir Levine, MD and Rachel Heller, MA
Secure: The Revolutionary Guide to Creating a Secure Life by Amir Levine, MD
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Dr. Sue Johnson
An Online Quiz for Attachment Styles
Psychology Today’s Relationship Attachment Test is a brief assessment that asks a series of questions about your experience in relationships. The results will give you more information about your attachment style, what changes you can make to become more secure, and options for next steps.
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How to Build More Secure Attachment
Building a more secure attachment is absolutely possible, and I want you to know that upfront. Whether you’re having trouble in a current relationship or want healthier relationships going forward, try the following to build a more secure attachment style.
Practice self-awareness: Think about your caregivers and how consistently they showed you love, and whether you trust and believe in love.
Notice your existing relationships: Consider how you feel in your relationships with romantic partners, friends, and family. Notice if changes need to be made.
Consider the other person: Attachment happens between two people. When thinking about the best people to have secure attachment dynamics with, consider those who are interested in talking openly about feelings and needs, introspective, self-aware, and equally willing to build a secure relationship.
Work with a therapist: You can do a lot of attachment work on your own. However, a therapist can help you dig even deeper and work towards more security in relationships. If you’re in a relationship, you might also consider couples therapy.
Attachment Styles in Relationships: FAQs
Can attachment styles change?
Yes, attachment styles change. Your default may still be there, but you start to catch it and then feel good about yourself for catching it. The healthier your relationships, the more welcomed those redirects are because other people want you to be and feel better. In healthy relationships, no one is waiting for you to fail.
What attachment styles are best together?
No attachment styles are best together. What’s best together are two or more people who want to be introspective, want to learn and grow, care about each other’s experience, and know each other’s defaults well enough to not keep feeding them.
Therapy is often important here. What actually predicts whether a couple does well is desire, follow-through, and life circumstances that leave enough time, privilege, and resources to make the effort.
How do you know your attachment style?
Formal assessments exist to help you understand your attachment style. Trained clinicians can administer, score, and interpret them for you. But remember, attachment styles are not fixed labels. You might fall in more than one category depending on the relationship.
Attachment Styles in Relationships: Next Steps
If you take one thing from this article, let it be that you probably don’t have a single attachment style and that whatever patterns you do have do not have to be permanent. Your patterns are traceable to earlier experiences, even if you don’t yet understand how—and understanding is available to you. Your default may still show up, but you can learn to catch and rewire.
If you and someone close to you, whether a partner or family member, want to work on your attachment styles together, reach out here. I have a relationship-specific practice, and I’d love to connect and see whether I might be a good fit to support you.