Attachment Styles in Relationships

Q: How do I find out my attachment style?

With a test that measures the two axes from the research: abandonment anxiety and avoidance of intimacy. The MyLoveLab test draws on the ECR-R scale and gives you one of the four styles in about fifteen minutes. But a style shows most clearly over time, in what you do when the bond gets uncertain, not in one isolated gesture.

Q: Can you change your attachment style?

Yes. Attachment is stable, but only moderately so: the past weighs on you, it doesn’t lock you in. Research has documented earned security: adults who started out with a hard beginning build fully secure bonds. It happens experience by experience, each time a signal gets a response, and by noticing those responses.

What this dimension covers

Attachment is a survival system wired into every one of us. It has one job: to keep watch over whether the people who matter to you are available. On calm days, it sleeps. The moment the bond feels threatened, a message that doesn’t come, a sharper tone, a need for space after a close moment, it wakes up, and it reacts before you think.

Your attachment style is the strategy this system learned before your earliest memories, by holding on to whatever kept the bond safest. Research doesn’t measure four boxes, it measures two dials: abandonment anxiety (how alarming the idea of losing the bond is to you) and avoidance of intimacy (how uncomfortable you get when closeness runs high). The four styles, Secure, Anxious, Avoidant, Disorganized, are regions on this map, not identities.

So this dimension covers three things: understanding your own system and its triggers, reading your partner’s without pinning a label on them, and above all building security together. Because here is the most important news in this dimension: where you start is not your destiny. Security is earned, experience by experience, each time a signal gets a response.

Signs that something is stuck

A message left unanswered for two hours puts you in a state that even you find out of proportion.
After a very close moment, you need space, or you catch yourself listing the other person’s flaws.
You follow up, you ask questions, you keep watch, and the more you do it, the more the other person pulls away.
You go quiet so you won’t make things worse, and the other person takes your silence for indifference.
You spin in the same loop: one chases, the other withdraws, and neither of you wants it.
You tell yourself “that’s just how I am” or “that’s just how they are,” as if it were a final category.
You don’t dare say what you’re really afraid of, so you show something else: blame, coldness, sarcasm.
You doubt the bond even when everything is fine, or you don’t notice the responses you do get.

What the research says

Attachment theory comes from John Bowlby, who described this survival system in children, and then from Mary Ainsworth, who observed the first styles and the role of the “secure base”: the bond you set out from to explore and come back to when things get shaky. Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver extended it to adult couples in 1987. Today it is one of the best-documented frameworks for understanding how we react to closeness, distance and insecurity in a relationship.

Measurement rests on two axes, anxiety and avoidance, formalized by Kelly Brennan, Catherine Clark and Phillip Shaver in 1998, then refined in Chris Fraley’s ECR-R scale in 2000. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver described the two main strategies that follow: hyperactivation (amplifying signals, following up, protesting) and deactivation (shutting signals down, pulling away, minimizing). The same gesture can come from two opposite systems: you never read a style from one isolated gesture.

Sue Johnson, with emotionally focused therapy, showed how the two systems fit together in a couple: the pursue-withdraw cycle, where one partner’s move sets off the other’s alarm, with no first link. She also put into words the single question every attachment system asks, “are you there for me?”, and its three answers: accessibility, responsiveness, engagement. In 2006, James Coan provided one of the finest proofs of co-regulation: under brain imaging, holding your partner’s hand measurably calms the brain’s response to threat.

Finally, Mary Main used the Adult Attachment Interview to document a decisive phenomenon: earned security. Adults who started out with a hard beginning build fully secure bonds, and their signature is neither forgetting nor luck, it is a coherent story, one you can tell in full, calmly, and make sense of.

The authors behind this dimension: John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, The ECR-R scale (Fraley, Waller, and Brennan), Sue Johnson, Amir Levine and Rachel Heller, Brené Brown. Each page explains their background, their concepts, their studies and the limits of their work.

How MyLoveLab measures it

The MyLoveLab test measures attachment in two ways. First, your style, from questions inspired by the ECR-R scale, along the two axes: what you feel when the bond seems uncertain, and what you feel when closeness gets high. You get one of the four styles, and it becomes part of your relationship profile. Second, the Attachment and security dimension, with a score out of 100: the feeling that you can count on the other person, without constant doubt or monitoring.

This style is not a verdict. It is the region where you are right now, in this relationship, and it moves. Each of you takes the test on your own: if your partner takes it too, you’ll see how your two systems respond to each other, and that is often where everything becomes clear.

Measure your Attachment dimension in 15 minutes

How the program works on it

Ten levels that run from understanding your own system to a new role: becoming a secure base for the other person. The first three levels observe, the next four build security in daily life and in the storm, and the last three make it last, through hard times and over the long run.

1Where your attachment style comes from, your profile is not your personality, two dials rather than four boxes, two strategies for one intention, and security that can be earned.
2Your alarm system, the engine under the hood, the map of your triggers (often non-events), protest behavior, the fire extinguisher, and the window between the alarm and the wheel.
3Reading your partner, you will never see their system, only its outputs: the dictionary of the two volumes, the gentle hypothesis, reading without hurting.
4Negative cycles, the two-person machine with no first link, the three dances, the hidden engine, naming the common enemy, and changing steps mid-dance.
5Building security, the three answers to the one question: a door with a working doorbell, answering the emotion rather than the problem, attention as the currency of the bond.
6Calming your storms, when the body takes the wheel, the brake pedal, the power of a held hand, asking for and offering comfort, your storm protocol.
7The conversations that bring you closer, a short guided format for saying what’s underneath in three layers, and above all learning to receive, the hardest turn.
8Earned security, where you start is not your destiny: the story that filters, the notebook of responses received, updating the story in three steps.
9Attachment through hard times, the enemy comes from outside: announcing your stress, teaming up against the crisis, distance and reunion, repairing the slips.
10Becoming a secure base, the harbor and the open sea: the “go ahead” that brings you closer, calm availability, a base and not an engine, your charter.

Exercise to try tonight · level 5

“Not now, but at 9”

The big misunderstanding to dissolve: accessible doesn’t mean available. Nobody can be available all the time, and promising it creates impossible debts. What your partner’s system needs to know is something else: that the door has a working doorbell. What does damage is never the delay, it’s the vagueness.

The next time a signal from the other person arrives at a bad moment (you’re busy, drained, somewhere else in your head), notice your usual reflex: the “hmm,” the “we’ll see,” the silence.
Replace it with a clear appointment, in one sentence: “I can’t really right now, but at 9 p.m. I’m all yours.”
Keep the time. It’s what turns a “not now” into a complete gesture of security.

A “not now” that comes with a time and is kept reassures more than a distracted “yes.” The alarm doesn’t measure how deep the responses are, it measures how reliable they are.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find out my attachment style?

With a test that measures the two axes from the research: abandonment anxiety and avoidance of intimacy. The MyLoveLab test draws on the ECR-R scale and gives you one of the four styles in about fifteen minutes. But a style shows most clearly over time, in what you do when the bond gets uncertain, not in one isolated gesture.

Is an anxious and an avoidant pairing doomed?

No, but it is the combination that most easily produces the pursue-withdraw cycle: one turns the volume up, the other cuts it off, and each sets off the other’s alarm. The good news is that this cycle doesn’t survive being seen clearly. It takes only one of you changing steps to make it stall.

Can you change your attachment style?

Yes. Attachment is stable, but only moderately so: the past weighs on you, it doesn’t lock you in. Research has documented earned security: adults who started out with a hard beginning build fully secure bonds. It happens experience by experience, each time a signal gets a response, and by noticing those responses.

My partner is distant. Is that avoidance?

Maybe, maybe not. You will never see their system, only its outputs, and the same gesture can protect very different things. The right reading is a hypothesis, checked later, when things are calm, with a gentle question: “I get the feeling that…, am I wrong?” Never a label said out loud, even an accurate one, especially an accurate one.

Does the MyLoveLab test measure attachment?

Yes, in two ways: your attachment style (Secure, Anxious, Avoidant, Disorganized), which becomes part of your relationship profile, and the Attachment and security dimension, with a score out of 100. Each of you takes the test on your own; if your partner takes it too, you can compare your two systems.

Going further

The test measures this dimension along with the other six. Take it to get your score, your level (fragile, needs work, solid or excellent) and which dimension to start with in the program.

Podcasts on this topic

To keep going by listening: French-language shows hosted by therapists and psychologists, chosen for this dimension. The official players are on our podcasts page.

Couples En Thérapie, Mathilde Defer (psychologist and couples therapist for over 8 years)
Les chemins du couple, Céline Domecq (therapist and coach for over 15 years, specializing in couple relationships)
L’Espace du Couple, Florentine d’Aulnois-Wang (couples therapist, author of “Les Clés de votre intelligence amoureuse”)
Amour, Café & Thérapie, Laura Baldini (psychotherapist specializing in couple relationships)