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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Amir Levine
Read between
May 14 - July 5, 2025
If your parents were sensitive, available, and responsive, you should have a secure attachment style; if they were inconsistently responsive, you should develop an anxious attachment style; and if they were distant, rigid, and unresponsive, you should develop an avoidant attachment style.
Getting attached means that our brain becomes wired to seek the support of our partner by ensuring the partner’s psychological and physical proximity.
Attachment principles teach us that most people are only as needy as their unmet needs. When their emotional needs are met, and the earlier the better, they usually turn their attention outward. This is sometimes referred to in attachment literature as the “dependency paradox”: The more effectively dependent people are on one another, the more independent and daring they become.
Numerous studies show that once we become attached to someone, the two of us form one physiological unit. Our partner regulates our blood pressure, our heart rate, our breathing, and the levels of hormones in our blood. We are no longer separate entities.
when two people form an intimate relationship, they regulate each other’s psychological and emotional well-being.
Once we choose a partner, there is no question about whether dependency exists or not. It always does.
If you want to take the road to independence and happiness, find the right person to depend on and travel down it with that person.
Having a partner who is inconsistently available or supportive can be a truly demoralizing and debilitating experience that can literally stunt our growth and stymie our health.
Keep in mind that when you’re excited about someone, your objectivity is compromised and you tend to create a rosy picture of them.
avoidants often sound like Paul—they attribute their single status to external circumstances,
the attachment system is the mechanism in our brain responsible for tracking and monitoring the safety and availability of our attachment figures.
This is an important lesson for someone with an anxious attachment style: If you just wait a little longer before reacting and jumping to conclusions, you will have an uncanny ability to decipher the world around you and use it to your advantage. But shoot from the hip, and you’re all over the place making misjudgments and hurting yourself.
This is a very important insight for anyone in a relationship. The more attuned you are to your partner’s needs at the early stages—and they to yours—the less energy you will need to expend attending to them later.
This means that once your attachment system is activated, you will find it much harder to “turn it off” if you have an anxious attachment style.
Two researchers in the field of adult attachment, Paula Pietromonaco, of the University of Massachusetts, and Katherine Carnelley, of the University of Southampton in the UK, found that avoidant individuals actually prefer anxiously attached people. Another study, by Jeffry Simpson of the University of Minnesota, showed that anxious women are more likely to date avoidant men.
True love, in the evolutionary sense, means peace of mind.
People with an avoidant attachment style tend to end their relationships more frequently.
Avoidants are in the dating pool more frequently and for longer periods of time.
People with a secure attachment style take a very long time to reappear in the dating pool, if at all.
Avoidants don’t date each other; they are more likely to date people with different attachment styles.
Don’t let emotional unavailability turn you on.
They aren’t good or bad, they are simply your needs.
Can this person provide what I need in order to be happy?
recognize and rule out people with an avoidant attachment style early on.
Not everyone has relationship needs compatible with your own, and that’s fine. Let them find someone else who wants to be kept at arm’s length, and you can go about finding someone who will make you happy.
The only way to make sure that you meet potential soul mates is to go out with a lot of people.
“Happiness only real when shared.”
The experiments show that although you may be avoidant, your attachment “machinery” is still in place—making you just as vulnerable to threats of separation. Only when your mental energy is needed elsewhere and you are caught off guard, however, do these emotions and feelings emerge.
Whereas people with a secure attachment style find it easy to accept their partners, flaws and all, to depend on them, and to believe that they’re special and unique—for
‘Of course you can—and should—count on other people, you do it all the time anyway. We all do.’
This is not an easy task if you have an avoidant attachment style, but it is possible if you allow yourself to open up enough to truly see your partner.
It’s no surprise that secure couples—those in which both partners were secure—functioned better than insecure couples—those in which both partners were either anxious or avoidant. But what was more interesting was that there was no observed difference between secure couples and “mixed” couples—those with only one secure partner.
Secures come in every possible shape, size, and form.
They simply aren’t as sensitive to the negative cues of the world.
Our memories are not like old books in the library, lying there dusty and unchanged; they are rather like a living, breathing entity. What we remember today of our past is in fact a product of editing and reshaping that occurs over the years whenever we recall that particular memory.
that it does exist and it’s not even a rare occurrence. After all, secure people make up over 50 percent of the population and their inner circle is treated like royalty.
As part of a reaction to a breakup, our brain experiences the departure of an attachment figure in a similar way to that in which it registers physical pain.
Expressing your needs and expectations to your partner in a direct, nonaccusatory manner is an incredibly powerful tool.
Effective communication works on the understanding that we all have very specific needs in relationships, many of which are determined by your attachment style. They aren’t good or bad, they simply are what they are.
In order to be happy in a relationship, we need to find a way to communicate our attachment needs clearly without resorting to attacks or defensiveness.
To choose the right partner.
To make sure your needs are met in the relationship, whether it is a brand-new one or one of long standing.
The beauty of effective communication is that it allows you to turn a supposed weakness into an asset.
If you are avoidant, the first step, therefore, is to acknowledge your need for space—whether emotional or physical—when things get too close, and then learn how to communicate that need. Explain to your partner in advance that you need some time alone when you feel things getting too mushy and that it’s not a problem with them but rather your own need in any relationship (this bit is important!).
all couples—even secure ones—have their fair share of fights.
But attachment theory shows us that our happiness is actually dependent on our mate’s and vice versa.
