Knowing your attachment style can help to nurture and strengthen your friendships

Friendships need to be nurtured. Knowing your attachment style could help your relationships and deal with rough patches, says a US psychologist

Though the characters in the hit sitcom ‘Friends’ had romantic relationships, their deep friendships endured. Picture: Warner Bros Television

Friends — where would we be without them? Lonely, that’s where. Even having just one or two is crucial for our wellbeing, despite our ingrained cultural belief that romantic love is the only kind that matters. It’s not.

Platonic love — the love of our friends — is, according to Marsilio Ficino, the 15th-century Italian scholar who coined the term, the highest form of love.

From Chandler and Joey to Rachel and Monica, Harry, Ron and Hermione to Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha, friendships can — and do — outlast romantic partnerships, yet are culturally less valued.

A new book by US psychologist Dr Marisa Franco, Platonic, looks at the importance of friendship, and how our attachment style impacts how we make and maintain them. Attachment theory was originally developed by British psychologist John Bowlby (1907-1990), who defined it as “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings”.

There are three main attachment styles — secure, anxious and avoidant — evolving from our earliest relationships in infancy.

“If our caregivers were warm and validating, we become secure,” writes Franco. If they were cold, unresponsive, or rejecting, we develop insecure attachment, where we perceive the wider world as threatening. This bleeds into our adult relationships — we’ve all had needy friends (anxious attachment) or emotionally shut-down friends (avoidant attachment) — or we may be these kinds of friends ourselves.

“It’s hard to categorise attachment — it’s more of a spectrum,” Franco, a professor at the University of Maryland in the US, tells me via Zoom. “It’s also a dynamic — other people will affect ours.” Like if someone is distant, it could make us anxious, or make us withdraw, depending on our attachment style.

She describes her own attachment style as fairly secure.

“I don’t think anyone can say they’re totally secure,” she says. “Handling conflict still makes me anxious. When I was younger I was more anxiously attached — women tend to be more anxious, men tend to be more avoidant. There were lots of typical gender roles in my family — women are taught to sacrifice their sense of self to make men feel comfortable.”

Secure attachment — “assuming people like you”— is the ideal. As we age, we become more secure in our attachments, largely as we become more secure within ourselves — our attachment style is more likely to change than to stay the same. This is good news for anxiously attached people, who tend to assume they’re going to be rejected, or avoidantly attached people, who believe the same, but pretend they don’t care.

Franco explains how developing secure attachment involves “relating to yourself, being able to make your own internal dialogue secure — being self-compassionate, kind, validating towards yourself”, rather than having a harshly critical inner voice.

“A lot of insecure attachment is an inability to deal with our emotions. Anxious people get really overwhelmed by emotions, and avoidant people completely disconnect from theirs. Secure people have a more harmonious relationship with their emotions — anxious and avoidant people either wallow in them or completely disconnect from them.”

A new book by US psychologist Dr Marisa Franco, Platonic, looks at the importance of friendship, and how our attachment style impacts how we make and maintain them

Best practices

For making and keeping friends, Franco suggests six practices — taking the initiative by reaching out to people, expressing vulnerability within the friendship, being authentic, calmly dealing with conflict (which she calls “harmonising with anger”), offering generosity (time and thought, more than material things), and showing affection through compliments, praise, encouragement, appreciation.

But what if things go wrong? Conflict in friendships can be devastating simply because we don’t quite know what to do with it. It’s not like we can have make-up sex afterwards — so we avoid friendship conflict at all costs, rather than tackling it head-on. Franco urges courage, rather than avoidance.

“Conflict is part of intimacy, but it has not been normalised in friendships,” she says. “People are less inclined to engage in conflict with friends as we don’t have the same safety nets as with romantic partners — we don’t have formalised commitments like marriage or family ties. So we can fear abandonment in friendship conflict — yet sometimes if you don’t bring up the issue, it’s you who will leave, because you may get resentful and withdraw.

“There’s a narrative around friendship that it should be easy, light, and fun. So when there’s a problem, we just leave.”

Yet resolving the conflict can deepen the relationship: “People who value their friendships are more open about conflict rather than backing away. Psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner talks about how we feel safer when we know that if we rupture, we can repair.”

This rupture/repair happened to me with a close friend – being a bit of an avoidant, I withdrew from a 15-year friendship because I felt hurt about something and struggled to articulate it. Luckily my friend’s attachment style was more secure than mine, and after months of missing each other, she reached out. We talked it through and resolved it. It definitely deepened the connection and the trust.

Ebb and flow

Franco reminds us that while friendships ebb and flow — long distance friendships tend to be “flexible rather than fragile”— they need to be balanced: “Think about your friendship like the chapters of a book — if all the chapters are ‘ebb’, that’s not good — it may reflect an unhealthy friendship.”

Apart from the obvious reasons to walk away — like betrayal of trust — she says it’s important not to keep shoring up a one-sided friendship. “When the other person is only considering their needs, and expects you to be the one to adjust, to be flexible, it can become toxic,” she says. “Friendships should have more pros than cons. If people are mistreating you, walk away. Don’t work harder. That’s how you find other relationships with people who are as invested in you as you are in them.”

Nor are friendships static, but change as we age, in what is known as the socio-emotional selectivity hypothesis.

“In our 20s we want to expand our sense of identity, so we have the most friends we will ever have,” says Franco.

“As we get older, we’re thinking about how much time we have left, and so we focus more on quality than quantity. We prune relationships and have smaller networks. But whatever life stage we are at, or whether we have a romantic partner or not, we need to recognise the importance of friendship and question the narrative that romantic love is more important.

“Loneliness is a subjective experience — it’s about how you perceive your level of connectedness,” says Franco. “So if you’re single and have lots of friends, you may still discount it and feel unloved because you don’t have a romantic partner. But if we valued platonic partners more, we would be able to think, ‘oh, I am loved, I have really close friends who are always there for me.’ It would change this interpretation process, which would fundamentally change how lonely we feel.”

And for those who do have romantic partnerships, platonic love is a safety valve. Heterosexual women in particular are more resilient to conflict in their intimate relationships when they have good friendships outside of these relationships, says Franco. We need different people for different support.

Franco describes how research into loneliness shows there are three types — intimate loneliness (a desire for intimate relationships, like a spouse), relational loneliness (a desire for someone close to you, like a friend) and collective loneliness (a desire to be part of a group working towards a common goal).

“What this means is that we need an entire community to make us feel whole and that being around just one person is experiencing only one side of yourself,” she says. “It’s limiting. Especially for women, who can experience more intimacy with their female friends than they do with their romantic partners.”

But no matter who we are, no matter what our age or gender, we all need to belong, to be seen, to be loved. We all need our friends. They are gold.

• Platonic: How Understanding Your Attachment Style Can Help You Make and Keep Friends by Marisa Franco is published by Pan Macmillan

Take the Quiz 

What’s your friendship style?

For each question, pick the response that best applies to you. You may feel like more than one response applies to you, depending on the situation. If so, choose the option that fits most often.

1. When it comes to making new friends, do you tend to:

a. Make close friendships quickly that sometimes blow up 

b. Make friends slowly and steadily 

c. Keep to myself 

2. How comfortable are you being vulnerable with your friends?

a. I am uncomfortable being vulnerable with friends 

b. So vulnerable, I often overshare 

c. I build vulnerability gradually over time 

3. When a friend does something nice for you, how do you respond?

a. I like it, but I feel the need to pay them back right away

b. I appreciate the gesture and feel good afterward 

c. I tend to assume they have an ulterior motive 

4. How do you navigate conflict in friendship?

a. I ghost or withdraw because I can’t be bothered 

b. I try to ignore it because I fear they’ll abandon me if I bring it up 

c. I bring up the issue, share my perspective and try to hear their side too 

5. When there’s a problem in a friendship, do you tend to:

a. Blame your friend 

b. Blame no one; I see it more as a miscommunication than as one person being at fault 

c. Blame myself 

6. Which of the following best describes how you approach generosity in friendship?

a. I’m not particularly generous 

b. I often give too much and get resentful 

c. I’m giving but set boundaries when I start to get overwhelmed 

7. How would you describe your biggest insecurity when it comes to friendship?

a. I fear being too vulnerable with friends 

b. I fear my friends don’t really like me 

c. I feel relatively secure in my friendships 

8. How comfortable are you talking about your insecurities with friends?

a. Fairly comfortable; I trust my friends to support me 

b. I don’t; I tend to try to come off as strong 

c. Somewhat, but I tend to fear I’ll be too much or a burden 

9. How comfortable are you asking for help from friends?

a. Not very; I fear imposing on them 

b. Fairly comfortable; I trust my friends want to support me 

c. Not very; I fear being seen as weak 

10. Which of the following best describes the state of your friendships?

a. I tend to be a loner; if I have friendships, they’re quite shallow 

b. I have good friendships, but they often feel volatile 

c. I have long-standing positive friendships 

Answers 

1c, 2a, 3c, 4a, 5a, 6a, 7a, 8b, 9c, 10a indicate an avoidant attachment 

1a, 2b, 3a, 4b, 5c, 6b, 7b, 8c, 9a, 10b indicate an anxious attachment 

1b, 2c, 3b, 4c, 5b, 6c, 7c, 8a, 9b, 10c indicate a secure attachment