Knowing your ‘attachment style’ could make you a smarter dater”

Children use their guardian as a “secure base” from which to explore the world, come back and be comforted. Firestone studied the reactions of infants and parents in a lab setting; the children were separated from their caregivers, left with a stranger, and then reunited. She found that the children who had responsive caretakers dealt with the separation easier — these children had a secure attachment style. Children whose primary caretakers only sometimes met their needs — perhaps they had trouble reading their babies’ cues, or were preoccupied with other tasks outside of nurturing — were anxious attachers. They didn’t like being left, clinging to their guardians and using “protest behaviors” to get attention. Some were avoidant, resulting from a detached caregiver; they learned to fend for themselves and project high self-confidence, acting unaffected if their primary caretaker comes or goes. A rare fourth style, disorganized attachment, was later identified; this is where children have no reasonable way to meet
their needs, often resulting from caregiver abuse or neglect.

Eventually, those infant-caretaker relationships map onto our adult romantic relationships. Secure attachers feel comfortable with intimacy and develop romantic ties relatively easily. Anxious attachers fear abandonment and the loss of their partner’s love (as do fearful attachers, the adult version of disorganized). Avoidant attachers never get too close or “connect,” says Firestone; they refuse to rely on romantic partners and often see those partners as “needy” if they require too much intimacy.

Attachment theory originated in the 1940s and has seen a recent boom of interest and research. Journalist Peter Lovenheim, who wrote a new book on attachment theory, “The Attachment Effect: Exploring the Powerful Ways Our Earliest Bond Shapes Our Relationships and Lives,” said he learned about attachment theory after coming out of a 20-year marriage with three kids. He entered a new relationship “that felt like an emotional roller coaster,” he explains. “Then, I was visiting my daughter at college, and found a psych textbook in her dorm room detailing attachment theory — specifically the ‘anxious-avoidant trap’ where opposing attachment styles become a couple. The authors described what I’d been experiencing to a T.”

Estimates suggest roughly 50 percent of the population is secure, 20 percent is anxious, 25 percent is avoidant and 5 percent is fearful. Before you conclude there are “bad styles” (insecure types) or “good styles” (secure), though, Lovenheim points to research on attachment in the workplace that shows how anxious and avoidant types have unique value. “Researchers got a group of people together, and they measured their attachment styles,” he explains. “They told the participants they were going to analyze data on a computer screen. But that wasn’t the point of the study. They had rigged the computer so it started smoking.”

As Lovenheim describes, researchers wanted to see how attachment informed participants’ reaction to the threat. Anxious attachers were the first to detect the smoke, and avoidants were the first to find a way out of the situation. The scientists concluded how these findings fit within the attachment model of relationships. “Anxious types are attuned to personal threats, whereas avoidants shun close relationships in favor of self-reliance,” Lovenheim says.

Sensitivity and self-sufficiency have their places, and so anxious and avoidant types have adapted to their environments. They have learned to meet their needs without a fully responsive caregiver. “These types are variations on the norm,” Levine says. “As I come to think of attachment now, it’s more of working model versus styles; it is something you’re still working with, and it’s subject to change with different sets of expectations and beliefs about the world. Your working model decides what cues you pay attention to and what you ignore.”