Attachment Theory Is Extremely Cool and Useful

Day 28 of Inkhaven: 30 Days of Posts

Recently, I've found attachment theory has shifted how I see relationships. The frame helped me see two things: that I was applying a strategy I'd learned from dating avoidant people to every relationship regardless of fit, and that I was undervaluing stable, secure partners.

My biggest problem was that I was approaching all relationships from the lens of dating avoidant women, who operate differently from secure and anxious women. The approach I was taking was hurtful to my anxious partner and just made her sad and confused. All she wanted was more connection and vulnerability which I could easily have provided.

The single most useful insight came from Attached and is about effective communication. The key idea is that for people with certain attachment styles (particularly those with an anxious attachment style), a huge amount of pain can be avoided by simply stating what they need or asking questions to understand the other person's position. Often these uncertainties lead to them imagining all sorts of worst case scenarios, and simply by voicing the confusion directly they can put an end to much of this narrativising.

When applying this to my situation, the hardest part was saying what I was afraid of. Telling her I worried she might lose attraction to me if I didn't play hard to get. And telling her that I wanted to do a better job of considering her needs in the context of us both having an anxious attachment style.

It was also really helpful for telling her that I was interested in the first place. We just had a conversation about it where I said that I did feel interested in her, that I wouldn't be around for that long as I was leaving the city soon, but that I wanted to make things work in the short term. I had never thought one could lay it all out so clearly in a single conversation, but it turns out doing so makes things far easier.

What is attachment theory and how can it help you?

Part of engaging with attachment theory has shown me that many takes in the wild are only loosely connected to the research. Many people's claims are based on anecdata and don't link back to particular studies.

My knowledge mostly stems from reading Attached, and watching this great YouTube lecture by Dr K. I think the lecture covers the most important parts but the book contains lots of useful and practical advice too. This post is partially a review of the book, but mostly just functions as an explainer and personal report on attachment theory.

The framework originated with an interesting experiment with a bunch of babies in the 1970s. Here's a great YouTube short from Hannah Fry explaining it.

The researchers set up mothers and two-year-old babies in a room filled with lots of nice things for a baby to play with and added a research assistant. The mothers would leave the baby in the room with the research assistant for a few minutes and then return.

While the mothers were out of the room the babies would get upset and often start crying. The mothers would return after a few minutes and reunite with the baby. The researchers were surprised to observe three distinct patterns in the babies.

• The first group cried, but quickly recovered when the mother was back and ready to keep playing with the toys. This group was classified as secure.
• The second group would be very upset and remain flustered and be inconsolable for a long time, often holding the mother and not letting go or staying close to her afterwards. This group was classified as anxious.
• The third group basically turned away and shut the mother out, acting angry rather than upset. Interestingly in this group, the babies' heart rates were roughly as elevated as in the other groups, but they pretended to be unaffected. This group was classified as avoidant.

These roughly correspond to categories that continue to exist in adults. The studies linking the baby categories to adult attachment styles tended to find small to moderate effects, but in general the patterns of behaviour, however they might change, are still useful frameworks for understanding adult relationships.

It's also worth noting that the research on adult attachment styles is softer than what we have for infants, and shouldn't be treated as settled science. It provides some useful frameworks and mental models.

Against common takes in attachment theory discussions

There is a lot to say about attachment theory, but much of it has been said elsewhere already. I highly recommend exploring one of the resources I linked above. Relationships are genuinely one of the most important areas in life, and attachment theory is the kind of frame that can make them noticeably easier to navigate.

Here are some takes I've developed from discussing attachment theory with people in the wild. These are less from my personal experience, and arise from the contrast in the literature with what people tend to say.

• "Oh but what about people who have the disorganised (anxious-avoidant) style?"
  • Typically the disorganised style is around 5 to 15% of the population on self-report instruments. But the clinically significant version, where someone has the full disorganized pattern rooted in early trauma, is much rarer.
    • The rough breakdown is something like: 56% secure, 19% anxious, 25% avoidant.
• "Surely not, there can't be so many secures!"
  • In practice it's less common to meet a single secure because they pair up and drop out, meaning the dating pool probably skews insecure especially as one gets older.
• "Oh I'm not that anxious so I probably don't have an anxious attachment style".
  • It's important to realise that the specific names, while important, do not mean that you are literally anxious or literally avoidant all the time. These behaviours show up specifically in the context of important relationships and in particular are activated by circumstances with the relationship that cause insecurity. These vary depending on attachment style.
• "I used to be x, but now I think I am secure"
  • Earned secure is definitely a real thing. On average someone has around a 1 in 4 chance over a four-year period of going from insecure to secure, though it can also go the other way.
  • One of the best ways to become more secure is to date a secure person who can model secure behaviours, though therapy and other secure relationships can also help.

While I am still learning and understanding these concepts, they have already meaningfully changed how I handle relationships.