How to make a deeper romantic connection by understanding your attachment style

It's summer and peak season to find a partner. But what if you want more than a holiday romance? Here's how to make a deeper connection by understanding your attachment style

Pic: iStock

From leisurely walks in the park to giddy conversations over rapidly melting 99s, summer has a way of setting the stage for romantic encounters. It is a time when many singletons are to be found daydreaming about overseas adventures and new connections, a time when even the most reclusive can be lured out of their solo nests to flirt and mingle.

In this bustling season of networking and schmoozing, it’s remarkable how the theory of a certain British psychologist from the late 1950s has become a noteworthy landmark in the dating world. When it comes to making modern dating calculations, his attachment theory appears to sit right up there with relationship quizzes and horoscopes (well, almost). The theory was first proposed by John Bowlby, and co-developed by his contemporaries, most notably, Harry Harlow and Mary Ainsworth.

Harlow is known for his series of controversial rhesus monkey experiments in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which infant monkeys were separated from their mothers and raised in a laboratory under conditions of social isolation. In the early 1970s, Ainsworth designed the famous “strange situation” experiment, in which she observed the behaviours of toddlers who were left very briefly in the company of a stranger, before being reunited with their caregivers. The work of both researchers lent support to the theory’s core premise, which Dublin-based psychotherapist Iseult White captures so succinctly: “We’re meant to be connected. We’re not lone animals. And our attachment relationships are a vital part of that.”

Out of the “strange situation” emerged four attachment styles, which psychologists later condensed into the three most prevalent in the general population: secure, avoidant, and anxious. Longitudinal studies have shown that these styles tend to reflect our early caregiving experiences. Or as Co Wicklow-based counselling psychologist Niamh Delmar says: “Coping mechanisms and interactions acquired as a child [often] transfer onto [adult] relationships.”

The way attachment scientists see it, our attachment styles are akin to “working models” or templates that can be mapped onto all our significant relationships in life.

Bill Chopik, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University and relationship expert, says: “You have a little theory in your head — not that you can always control — for every kind of really close person in your life. So, [you have it for] your best friend growing up, your parents, your mom, your dad, your aunts, your uncles, your childhood friends, your romantic partners, your ex-partner from two years ago—they’re all in your head. And [we believe] that they’re all correlated a little bit. So, if you’re anxious with your romantic partner, it’s likely that you’re anxious in your other relationships, too.”

While we have multiple relationships, an attachment hierarchy is undoubtedly at play, according to Amir Levine, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and co-author of Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—And Keep Love. Levine says that, just like our faithful pets, each of us has “that one person” to whom we would turn almost reflexively in a crisis. And if the vast amount of research on romantic attachments is anything to go by, our partners tend to occupy a much-revered seat at the top of our personal hierarchies.

“Our adult romantic relationships provide the equivalent of the secure base we had as a child with our parent,” says White. “There is something about these relationships that really triggers our attachment stuff in a way that close friendships [often] don’t. So, people have this sense of, ‘Oh my God, I never behave like this with my close friends. Why am I going crazy about this person I just met last night?’”

For those who have asked themselves this very question, it would seem that you are not losing it, you are simply hardwired for attachment.

Pic: iStock

Avoiding intimacy

While about 50% of us may be categorised as “secure”, what does insecure attachment look like for the rest of us—the 20% who are “anxious” and the 25% who are “avoidant”?

White describes the anxiously attached partner as someone who spends much of their time in a state of hyperarousal, constantly on high alert for any signs of emotional unavailability or disconnection from their partner. “The anxiously attached person is constantly fearing abandonment and reads into every action the other person takes,” she says. “They tend to be hypervigilant, scanning for signals of love from their partner. When they send a text, for example, and see that it has been delivered but they still get no response, they might spiral and send a string of texts at 2am.”

According to White, those of us who are anxiously attached can find ourselves mired in a self-reinforcing cycle of “drama and chaos”, as we “mistake intensity of feelings for emotional connection”.

The avoidant partner, by contrast, is someone who tends to value self-reliance and fears the closeness of intimacy. According to White, connection for the avoidantly attached not only “feels dangerous” but is hindered by fantasies of idyllic past relationships to which current or future partners fail to “measure up”.

Levine, who observes that avoidant partners tend to go to great lengths to create distance, equates avoidance tendencies with those of a stray cat: “You have to leave some milk out for them and they can come on their own terms and in their own time for it. You can’t force it. If you try to force it, they’ll just run away.”

White explains that for many of us, our attachment systems may be activated during the early stages of a new romantic relationship or when an existing relationship encounters challenges or uncertainties.

Attachment styles, when applied loosely, can help us to make sense of resulting self-sabotaging behaviours. Chopik says, “These broad descriptive categories are appealing because they describe things that we have trouble articulating. They explain why someone might be so nervous about a partner abandoning them in the middle of the night— someone they’ve been married to for five years already.”

Fixed destinies

Chopik cautions against an overreliance on popular psychology categorisation, which can lead to a certain fatalism. Far from being fixed destinies, research shows that our adult attachment styles are surprisingly amenable to change.

“The attachment style that we have as a child doesn’t really very well translate to adulthood. And many people that have a secure attachment style in childhood have insecure attachment styles in adulthood and vice versa,” Levine explains.

In light of this plasticity, Chopik believes that the identification of our anxious or avoidant tendencies should not serve to excuse us from the work of fostering deeper connections. He says: “Attachment styles explain a little bit about what you do, but they’re not permanent. Anxious and avoidant people can have successful relationships.”

The question is how?

According to White, people can “earn secure attachment” by experiencing a stable relationship. While people can grow more secure through their experiences of individual therapy, White says that she also helps couples looking for greater security. This often requires navigating the challenges and frequent stalemates that arise when one member of the couple displays anxious behaviours and the other tends towards avoidance.

For anxious partners, White emphasises the value of learning to self-soothe: “A lot of it is developing that adult observer of your emotions, learning ways to calm the dysregulation, and avoiding the temptation to act out of it. That’s because when you act out of it, you’re acting out to a projection of the other person. You’re not really relating to the person; you’re just relating to your own projection of the person.”

For avoidant partners, whom research demonstrates are particularly receptive to therapy, White advises pausing to examine the recurrent impulse to withdraw from closeness: “You need to start noticing that desire to run for the hills. Maybe you can stop, breathe, and consider whether that desire is being driven by your habitual [attachment] response or whether it really is warranted under the circumstances.”

Levine, who is also a neuroscientist, says the development of these new, more secure attachment behaviours is accompanied by “deep-seated structural changes” in the brain. He explains that our attachment styles, which are comprised of sets of beliefs and expectations, can be reshaped through the incorporation of new experiences.

“Basically, what we’re doing with these [new attachment behaviours] is that we’re disrupting deep-seated memories and expectations and rewriting them,” says Levine.

With summer now in full swing, attachment scientists and therapists alike remind us that old insecure attachment styles can be transformed, and new chapters of secure love can be written.