Understanding how attachment styles work and knowing your own attachment type can not only help explain quick post-breakup recoveries; they can also help you choose a more appropriate partner—so maybe next time there’s no breakup at all. Researchers speak of three different types of attachment that can be created in infancy and that typically continue into adulthood: secure, anxious, and avoidant. (A fourth, known as fearful-avoidant attachment style, is a mix of the anxious and avoidant types, though it’s more rare.) We can easily learn our attachment type by taking a simple five-minute quiz developed by attachment researchers. The Experience in Close Relationships Quiz includes 36 statements about how you generally feel in emotionally intimate relationships. You can take the quiz here. If the quiz confirms that your attachment type is avoidant, you can actually use this knowledge to help choose an appropriate mate because some attachment types will likely make better partners for you than others. Another avoidant person, for example, is not your best choice because when relationship problems arise—as they inevitably do—just like you, they are going to be inclined to walk away. To get through the rough patches, a successful couple really needs at least one partner who is willing to stick it out and make the effort to get through the tough times. An anxious person is also not a good choice for you. In fact, the combination of anxious and avoidant is the worst pairing of attachment types because you’ll have opposite needs for intimacy: The anxious will crave closeness, while the avoidant will value independence. As a result, the anxious person, feeling pushed away, becomes even clingier and in need of reassurance—a neediness that only pushes the avoidant partner further away. It’s a likely unhealthy scenario you want to avoid. That leaves people with secure attachments—and they should be your top choice for romantic partners. Secure people will generally be best able to understand your avoidant nature and be willing to accept it and adjust their expectations about the relationship to take into account your need for privacy, independence, and alone time. Fortunately, your best choice for romantic partners—those with secure attachment—are also the largest group in the population. “While the heart can be fickle, the human brain is incredibly complex, constantly changing, and can build healthy new habits and ways of loving,” writes marriage counselor Linda Carroll, M.S., at mbg. “Practicing mindfulness is essential for any change. In relationships, shifting from reactiveness to responsiveness can lift us out of our early attachment patterns toward a healthier, more secure style.” If you want to be closer to a partner than you otherwise might normally be, try using your instinctual desire for independence in a different way: by realizing you can independently choose to be more intimate, that it’s your own choice to do so, not something being forced upon you. You can also put limits on the couple time: perhaps being close on the weekends but keeping plenty of alone time during the week, or vice versa. The point is, you can move toward greater intimacy in stages, as it feels comfortable, without giving up all your privacy. Remember, with any prospective partner you meet, you should be honest about your own attachment type and what it means. There’s no point in pretending to be more eager than you are for intimacy, cuddles, and soul-mating. You want, after all, to find someone who accepts your attachment type and will be comfortable with you just as you are. His five previous books include In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time, winner of a Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the First Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize, and Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf, a firsthand attempt to understand the food chain. Currently, Lovenheim teaches narrative nonfiction at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and splits his time between his hometown of Rochester, New York, and Washington, D.C.
