Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love

by Amir Levine

All I had to guide me was the common belief that many of us grow up with: The belief that love conquers all. And so I let love conquer me.

adults show patterns of attachment to their romantic partners similar to the patterns of attachment of children with their parents.

Adult attachment designates three main “attachment styles,” or manners in which people perceive and respond to intimacy in romantic relationships, which parallel those found in children: Secure, Anxious, and Avoidant. Basically, secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving; anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships, and tend to worry about their partner’s ability to love them back; avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness. In addition, people with each of these attachment styles differ in: their view of intimacy and togetherness the way they deal with conflict their attitude toward sex their ability to communicate their wishes and needs their expectations from their partner and the relationship

Just over 50 percent are secure, around 20 percent are anxious, 25 percent are avoidant, and the remaining 3 to 5 percent fall into the fourth, less common category (combination anxious and avoidant).

in romantic situations, we are programmed to act in a predetermined manner.

They spoke two different languages and exacerbated each other’s natural tendencies—hers to seek physical and emotional closeness and his to prefer independence and shy away from intimacy.

it’s not impossible for someone to change their attachment style—on average, one in four people do so over a four-year period—most

Attachment theory is based on the assertion that the need to be in a close relationship is embedded in our genes. It was John Bowlby’s stroke of genius that brought him to the realization that we’ve been programmed by evolution to single out a few specific individuals in our lives and make them precious to us. We’ve been bred to be dependent on a significant other.

Bowlby proposed that throughout evolution, genetic selection favored people who became attached because it provided a survival advantage.

the brain has a biological mechanism specifically responsible for creating and regulating our connection with our attachment figures (parents,

This mechanism, called the attachment system, consists of emotions and behaviors that ensure that we remain safe and protected by staying close to our loved ones. The mechanism explains why a child parted from their mother becomes frantic, searches wildly, or cries uncontrollably until they reestablish contact with her. These reactions are coined protest behavior, and we all still exhibit them as grown-ups.

None of the attachment styles is in itself seen as “pathological.”

People with a secure attachment style know how to communicate their own expectations and respond to their partner’s needs effectively without having to resort to protest behavior.

At certain high-pressure moments during the race and often after an argument, Karen needed Tim to hold her hand. Tim was hesitant to do so; it felt too close, and besides, he didn’t want to succumb to her every whim.

He didn’t want to succumb to her every whim. —too close

Adult attachment theory teaches us that Karen’s basic assumption, that she can and should control her emotional needs and soothe herself in the face of stress, is simply wrong. She assumed the problem was that she is too needy. Research findings support the exact opposite. Getting attached means that our brain becomes wired to seek the support of our partner by ensuring the partner’s psychological and physical proximity. If our partner fails to reassure us, we are programmed to continue our attempts to achieve closeness until the partner does.

Indeed, if he knew that by responding to her need early on, he would have had to devote less time to “putting out fires” caused by her compounded distress later—he might have been inclined to hold her hand when he noticed that she was starting to get anxious, instead of waiting until she demanded it.

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.

The three statements corresponded to the three attachment styles and read as follows: I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me. I don’t often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me. (Measure of the secure attachment style) I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being. (Measure of the avoidant attachment style) I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn’t really love me or won’t want to stay with me. I want to merge completely with another person and this desire sometimes scares people away. (Measure of the anxious attachment style)

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. The emphasis on differentiation that is held by most of today’s popular psychology approaches to adult relationships does not hold water from a biological perspective. Dependency is a fact; it is not a choice or a preference.

The study demonstrates that when two people form an intimate relationship, they regulate each other’s psychological and emotional well-being. Their physical proximity and availability influence the stress response. How can we be expected to maintain a high level of differentiation between ourselves and our partners if our basic biology is influenced by them to such an extent?

once we choose someone special, powerful and often uncontrollable forces come into play. New patterns of behavior kick in regardless of how independent we are and despite our conscious wills. 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 an attachment figure in the room was enough to allow a child to go out into a previously unknown environment and explore with confidence. This presence is known as a secure base. It is the knowledge that you are backed by someone who is supportive and whom you can rely on with 100 percent certainty and turn to in times of need.

we feel secure, like the infant in the strange situation test when her mother is present, the world is at our feet. We can take risks, be creative, and pursue our dreams. And if we lack that sense of security? If we are unsure whether the person closest to us, our romantic partner, truly believes in us and supports us and will be there for us in times of need, we’ll find it much harder to maintain focus and engage in life.

As in the strange situation test, when our partners are thoroughly dependable and make us feel safe, and especially if they know how to reassure us during the hard times, we can turn our attention to all the other aspects of life that make our existence meaningful.

The question is, what happens when the person we rely on most—and in fact depend on emotionally and physically—doesn’t fulfill their attachment role?

After all, our brain assigns our partner the task of being our secure base, the person we use as an emotional anchor and a safe haven, the one we turn to in time of need. We are programmed to seek their emotional availability. But what if they aren’t consistently available?

When our partner is unable to meet our basic attachment needs, we experience a chronic sense of disquiet and tension that leaves us more exposed to various ailments. Not only is our emotional well-being sacrificed when we are in a romantic partnership with someone who doesn’t provide a secure base, but so is our physical health.

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.

Anxious: You love to be very close to your romantic partners and have the capacity for great intimacy. You often fear, however, that your partner does not wish to be as close as you would like them to be. Relationships tend to consume a large part of your emotional energy. You tend to be very sensitive to small fluctuations in your partner’s moods and actions, and although your senses are often accurate, you take your partner’s behaviors too personally. You experience a lot of negative emotions within the relationship and get easily upset. As a result, you tend to act out and say things you later regret. If the other person provides a lot of security and reassurance, however, you are able to shed much of your preoccupation and feel contented.

“All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.” So choose wisely when you are getting involved with someone, because the stakes are high: Your happiness depends on it! We find this to be particularly true for people with anxious attachment style. By being unaware of the attachment system, they risk suffering a great deal in relationships,

A SENSITIVE ATTACHMENT SYSTEM But Emily’s was not a case of masochism or borderline personality disorder. It was a simple case of an activated attachment system. People with an anxious attachment style like Emily have a supersensitive attachment system.

the attachment system is the mechanism in our brain responsible for tracking and monitoring the safety and availability of our attachment figures. If you have an anxious attachment style, you possess a unique ability to sense when your relationship is threatened. Even a slight hint that something may be wrong will activate your attachment system, and once it’s activated, you are unable to calm down until you get a clear indication from your partner that they are truly there for you and that the relationship is safe. People with other attachment styles also get activated, but they don’t pick up on subtle details that people with an anxious attachment style do.

They found that people with an anxious attachment style were more likely to perceive the offset of emotion earlier than other people.

These findings suggest that people with an anxious attachment style are indeed more vigilant to changes in others’ emotional expression and can have a higher degree of accuracy and sensitivity to other people’s cues. However, this finding comes with a caveat. The study showed that people with an anxious attachment style tend to jump to conclusions very quickly, and when they do, they tend to misinterpret people’s emotional state.

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.

Once activated, they are often consumed with thoughts that have a single purpose: to reestablish closeness with their partner. These thoughts are called activating strategies.

Activating strategies are any thoughts or feelings that compel you to get close, physically or emotionally, to your partner. Once they respond to you in a way that reestablishes securi...

Protest Behavior—Letting Your Attachment System Get the Best of You Excessive attempts to reestablish contact: Calling, texting, or e-mailing many times, waiting for a phone call, loitering by your partner’s workplace in hopes of running into them. Withdrawing: Sitting silently “engrossed” in the paper, literally turning your back on your partner, not speaking, talking with other people on the phone and ignoring them. Keeping score: Paying attention to how long it took them to return your phone call and waiting just as long to return theirs; waiting for them to make the first “make-up” move and acting distant until such time. When Ryan decided not to leave a message for Shauna after she screened his calls, he was keeping score (“If she’s not answering my calls, I won’t leave her a message”). Acting hostile: Rolling your eyes when they speak, looking away, getting up and leaving the room while they’re talking (acting hostile can transgress to outright violence at times). Threatening to leave: Making threats—“We’re not getting along, I don’t think I can do this anymore,” “I knew we weren’t really right for each other,” “I’ll be better off without you”—all the while hoping they will stop you from leaving. Manipulations: Acting busy or unapproachable. Ignoring phone calls, saying you have plans when you don’t. Making them feel jealous: Making plans to get together with an ex for lunch, going out with friends to a singles bar, telling your partner about someone who hit on you t...

Protest behavior is any action that tries to reestablish contact with your partner and get their attention. There are many ways that protest behavior can manifest itself, anything that can jolt the other person into noticing you and responding to you. Protest behavior and activating strategies can cause you to act in ways that are harmful to the relationship. It is very important to learn to recognize them when they happen.

they found that when women with an anxious attachment style thought about negative scenarios (conflict, breakup, death of partner), emotion-related areas of the brain became “lit up” to a greater degree than in women with other attachment styles. What’s more, they found that regions of the brain associated with emotional regulation, such as the orbitofrontal cortex, were less activated than in women with other attachment styles. In other words, the brains of people with an anxious attachment style react more strongly to thoughts of loss and at the same time under-recruit regions normally used to down-regulate negative emotions. 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.

Pietromonaco and Carnelley believe that these attachment styles actually complement each other in a way. Each reaffirms the other’s beliefs about themselves and about relationships. The avoidants’ defensive self-perception that they are strong and independent is confirmed, as is the belief that others want to pull them into more closeness than they are comfortable with. The anxious types find that their perception of wanting more intimacy than their partner can provide is confirmed, as is their anticipation of ultimately being let down by significant others. So, in a way, each style is drawn to reenact a familiar script over and over again.

Don’t make yourself too available, say you’re busy even when you’re not, don’t call him—wait for him to call you, don’t appear to care too much, act mysterious. Presumably, you preserve your dignity and independence in this way and gain your partner’s respect. But in fact, what you are doing is behaving in a way that is not true to your genuine needs and feelings. You wave these aside to appear strong and self-sufficient. And indeed, these books and the advice they give are right; these behaviors may indeed make you seem more attractive. What they don’t mention, because they are unaware of attachment science, is that they will make you seem more attractive to a very particular kind of partner—an avoidant one.

The avoidant person can have their cake and eat it too, so to speak—they can enjoy the thrill and closeness you naturally project when you are together without having to consider your needs for intimacy and togetherness the rest of the time. By being someone you’re not, you’re allowing another to be with you on their own terms and come and go as they please. Another problem is that if this type of game playing is only an act for you, it’s going to backfire in the long run. First, your avoidant partner will quickly catch on to you—they are good at detecting people who want to impinge on their autonomy. Second, eventually you’ll think it’s time to let your true colors show. After all, what you really want is to reach a high degree of intimacy, to spend a lot of quality time together, to be able to let down your guard. But you’ll find that when you do so, your avoidant partner will suddenly get cold feet and start to disengage.

By using the abundance philosophy, you maintain your ability to evaluate potential partners more objectively. What you are actually doing is desensitizing your attachment system and tricking it into being easier on you. Your system will no longer get so easily activated by one person because it will be busy evaluating the availability of a lot of different people, and you won’t be as likely to obsess about anyone in particular.

studies show that if you have an avoidant attachment style, you tend to be less happy and satisfied in your relationships.

She sees need as a weakness and looks down on people who become dependent on their partner, mockingly referring to such situations as “jail time.”

tend to repress rather than express their emotions.

Six independent studies have examined how accessible attachment issues are to avoidants. They did so by measuring how long it took subjects to report words flashed quickly on a monitor. These tests operated on the well-established premise that the speed with which you report a certain word is indicative of how accessible that theme is in your mind. Researchers found that avoidants are quicker than other people to pick up on words such as “need” and “enmeshed,” related to what they consider negative characteristics of their partner’s behavior, but slower to recognize words like “separation,” “fight,” and “loss,” associated with their own attachment-related worries.