What are Attachment Styles?

Attachment theory explains relationship dynamics and might just be the missing key to your love life. There are three main attachment styles: Secure, Avoidant, and Anxious.

Whether you are single or in a relationship, it is crucial to understand your attachment style and that of your partner or your typical partners. Knowing this will allow you to avoid the relationship traps that have been preventing you from creating the intimate relationship you seek. Below is an overview of each of the three main attachment styles.

Attachment Styles

The 3 Attachment Styles: Secure, Avoidant, and Anxious.

Secure:

Secure individuals are comfortable with intimacy, are warm, loving, and don’t play games in relationships. They feel safe allowing others to get close to them and find it easy to trust and depend on others. Secure people don’t ruminate, obsess over text messages, or “keep score” of how long it took their partner to get back to them. They don’t think, “well, he took 2 hours to respond to me, so now I’ll wait two hours.”

Additionally, secure individuals will invite their partners to meet their friends and family and open up to them in healthy, balanced ways. Often, secures’ parents modeled intimacy well and as a result, they bring little drama or highs and lows to their relationships. Secure partners embody reliability and consistency, and unsurprisingly, they have the highest success rate in relationships out of the three attachment styles.

Secure people find it easy to get close to others and are comfortable depending on them. They are also comfortable having someone else depend on themselves. When two people have secure attachment styles they enjoy the healthiest of relationships.

Avoidant:

Those with an avoidant attachment style seek excessive space and will distance themselves from their romantic partners. This style is common in men, though there are many avoidant women as well. Secure individuals find a good balance between independence and closeness, knowing how to maintain their healthy individuality while also allowing their partner to get close to them.

Avoidants, on the other hand, equate intimacy with a loss of freedom and generally view closeness as a bad thing. They often develop these beliefs as a result of having been smothered by a primary caregiver in their past. For example, someone smothered by his or her parent or parents as a child may have developed an incorrect belief from a young age that letting anyone close to them will result in pain. As a result, an avoidant will do anything he or she can to avoid a repeat of that scenario and keep their romantic partners at bay.

Secure people find a good balance of individuality and intimacy. They know how to have healthy individuality, but they also know how to be close to someone else and give up a little bit of their individuality for the relationship.

Avoidant people equate intimacy as a bad thing, as they have often been smothered by someone in their past. An example of this could be a man who was smothered by his mother growing up. They view closeness as a negative aspect of the relationship and they look for too much space in their relationships. And remember, if you’re reading this and thinking of parallels in your life, you can make changes in your behavior and move away from the avoidant attachment style.

When I first took the Attachment Style quiz, it correctly indicated that I was anxious. Now I am predominantly secure. It took work, and I still exhibit some anxious qualities, but change is possible. You are not stuck — you can change. You can grow to become secure, and even if your partner is anxious or avoidant, the relationship can work.

As I mentioned earlier, people who are avoidant take up the majority of the dating pool because most people who are secure are already in long-term relationships. If you’re single or you’re ready to start dating, be cautious with people who exhibit avoidant behavior. We want what we can’t have, and that behavior often entices us. Rejection breeds obsession.

Pay close attention to people who are avoidant when you are dating. If you feel attracted to someone, make sure you know the difference between a spark and a genuine attraction. When you feel a spark for someone (initial excitement, high energy, a big pull, etc.), instead genuinely liking them, it’s possible that you are feeling excited about their distant behavior because you’re recreating some kind of abandonment from your past.

Women often say, “He’s so great, but I’m just not attracted to him.” If the guy doesn’t take care of himself or is a feminine man, that’s fine. But if he’s secure and the lack of spark is actually a healthy lack of drama, put some more thought and effort into it and give him a chance. There may be potential for a really healthy, loving, stable relationship.

You may not feel attracted to someone because deep down you’re afraid of stability. Someone with a good job and a nice house might make you feel uneasy because the possibility of intimacy is so clear and attainable. You may not feel ready or worthy to go there. It can feel safer to have fun with the actor who turns his phone off for three days in a row because it’s a low risk, low reward relationship. And you may even believe that’s the spark you’ve been looking for when really it’s just a high of doing something different and maybe even wrong.

That’s not a spark. That’s your Anxious activating system telling you to run. Have you ever seen a Hollywood movie where the couple fights the whole time and at the last second they magically make it work? That doesn’t happen in real life. The divorce rates in this country are so high because we believe that kind of behavior is fine in a relationship because “they love each other,” but it will ultimately lead to heartbreak.

Long-term, healthy relationships come from two people who are secure.

Anxious:

The third attachment style is anxious. While anxious people are open to intimacy, they often create or expect too much intimacy and then obsess about the relationship.

Have you ever texted someone and felt nervous if they didn’t text you back right away? Most people have, which is why everyone has some anxious attachment style in them. Don’t worry if you behave like that occasionally, but if it’s recurring in your relationships you have an anxious attachment style.

Being anxious means you’re preoccupied with your relationship and worrying about it constantly. This ties into how you feel about yourself because you also start to question if your partner loves you back. You begin to look for external validation that you are loved. If a secure person texts their partner and the partner doesn’t respond immediately, they won’t worry about it. An anxious person texts their partner and assumes something is wrong is they don’t hear back right away.

Because of subconscious thoughts and our habit of recreating old patterns, Anxious people often find themselves in relationships with avoidant people. I’ll explain more below, but this means they’re with people who bring the worst out in them.

The Anxious-Avoidant Trap:

The process of an anxious person thinking they feel a spark for an avoidant person is called the Anxious-Avoidant trap. An anxious person who craves intimacy and an Avoidant person who doesn’t want any can be like magnets to each other. But this isn’t real attraction – as I mentioned before, we want what we can’t have. I’ve experienced this is my past and I’m sure a lot of people have as well.

This is the most common pairing of Attachment Styles (after two secure people in a relationship) because two avoidant people and two anxious people can’t usually make it past the first date. Even though anxious and avoidant people can stay together for a long time, it’s a really unhealthy relationship.

In this trap, the avoidant person will give the bare minimum and the anxious person will pull and pull because they are always looking for more validation that they’re never going to get. Relationships do take work, but there’s a difference between a relationship and a healthy relationship. The work should never fall on only one person.

It’s very normal to go through bumps in your relationship and I believe that many people give up on relationships too soon. However, one of my favorite quotes is, “Relationships are worth fighting for as long as you’re not the only person fighting.” It requires work from both sides, but partners often pull away, don’t face their issues, and just give up.

You need to come together in the conflict. I believe that relationships are the foundation of society, so investing in them is crucial. Invest in and work through them instead of deciding to leave when the first problem comes up. Look inward, take responsibility, and have a partner who’s willing to do the same.

We often don’t recognize when this happens in our relationships. We need to pull these subconscious actions into the present and be aware and conscious of them to change.

Summary of the 3 Attachment Styles:

1. Secure: Someone who is comfortable with intimacy, warm, loving, and is available for their partner. They don’t take things personally when their partner is not available.

2. Anxious: Someone who wants too much intimacy and closeness. They are preoccupied with and obsessed about the relationship.

3. Avoidant: Someone who wants too much space. They equate intimacy as a bad thing and often push away their partner.