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

by Amir Levine

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.

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).

What’s more, the theory does not label behaviors as healthy or unhealthy. None of the attachment styles is in itself seen as “pathological.” On the contrary, romantic behaviors that had previously been seen as odd or misguided now seemed understandable, predictable, even expected.

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.

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. Karen and Tim were unaware of how to best use their emotional bond to their advantage in the race.

Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, independently of Mary Main’s work, found that adults have distinct attachment styles in romantic settings as well. They first discovered this by publishing a “love quiz” in the Rocky Mountain News, asking volunteers to mark the one statement out of three that best described their feelings and attitudes in relationships.

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?

It turns out that the ability to step into the world on our own often stems from the knowledge that there is someone beside us whom we can count on—this is the “dependency paradox.” The logic of this paradox is hard to follow at first.

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.

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.

In dating situations, your thinking will shift from “Does he or she like me?” to “Is this someone I should invest in emotionally? Is he or she capable of giving me what I need?” Going forward with a relationship will become about choices you have to make. You’ll start asking yourself questions like: “How much is this person capable of intimacy? Is he sending mixed messages or is he genuinely interested in being close?”

Jokes about how lousy you are at reading maps or how “cute” it is that you’re roly-poly.

There is no one type of personality that is avoidant, nor one that is either secure or anxious. He might be cocky and self-assured and still really crave closeness. On the flip side, she might be nerdy and clumsy and still be averse to intimacy.

Suppose you are dating someone with children from a previous marriage. She might not want to introduce you to them because she is thinking of their well-being and believes it is too early for them to deal with a new man in her life, which is perfectly legitimate. On the other hand, it could be a way for her to keep you at a distance and maintain her separate life. You have to look at the whole picture and see how this behavior fits in.

famous seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza said: “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.

They used a “morph movie” technique—a computerized movie in which a face initially displays a specific emotional expression (e.g., anger) and gradually evolves into one displaying a neutral expression. Participants were asked to stop the movie at the frame at which they believed the original emotion had dissipated. They found that people with an anxious attachment style were more likely to perceive the offset of emotion earlier than other people. Also, when the task was reversed—starting with a neutral face and gradually moving to a pronounced expression—more anxious individuals perceived the onset of the emotion earlier.

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.

Next, use this knowledge. Start assessing people you date on the basis of their ability to meet those needs. Instead of thinking how you can change yourself in order to please your partner, as so many relationship books advise, think: Can this person provide what I need in order to be happy?

Remember the experiment in which researchers showed that avoidants have the need for closeness in a relationship but make a concerted effort to repress it?

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Another problem with self-reliance is the “self” part. It forces you to ignore the needs of your partner and concentrate only on your own needs, shortchanging you of one of the most rewarding human experiences: It prevents you (and the person you love) from the joy of feeling part of something bigger than yourself.

directly at odds w prev chapter: "Instead of thinking how you can change yourself in order to please your partner, as so many relationship books advise, think: Can this person provide what I need in order to be happy?"

Mario Mikulincer, dean of the New School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel and one of the leading researchers in the field of adult attachment, together with colleagues Victor Florian and Gilad Hirschberger, from the department of psychology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel,

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