Attached To Attachment Styles? Why It Might Be Time To Break Up With This Dating Advice

Knowing your attachment style has become a pillar of modern-day dating. It’s been hailed as a holy grail solution to finding out how and why you act the way you do in intimate relationships. Ultimately, the self-awareness around your attachment style and its subsequent behaviors is supposed to help you nip those pesky habits in the bud and lead to the healthy, secure, and fruitful relationship you desire.

The most common attachment styles are secure, anxious, and avoidant. But as I heard more about these in the context of intimate relationships, I began to question their relevance. There were men around whom I felt anxious, and others with whom I felt secure. I was the same person throughout each experience, so how could I have different reactions when I was meant to be defined by one attachment style? As I explored more of my feelings, I came to understand that my reaction, whether secure, anxious, or avoidant, was a response to behavior on the other side of the equation.

As I dug deeper, I found that recent research shows that attachment theory may be all bark and little bite. The idea of feeling anxious, avoidant, or secure in dating is not under scrutiny. These are normal feelings, but they are not indicative of some long held onto trauma from our early childhood, as attachment theory suggests.   

What Is the Theory of Attachment?

The theory of attachment was developed by John Bowlby in 1958. Bowlby was interested in uncovering why infants displayed distressed behavior, such as crying, clinging, and aggressively searching for their parent when separated from them. He believed that this behavior was evolutionary and allowed the infant to gain attention and have their needs met, allowing them to survive to a reproductive age. 

The behavior was dictated by what Bowlby called an innate attachment behavioral system that asks, “Is my attachment figure close, and are they paying attention to me?” If a child feels this attention, then she will feel secure, loved, and confident. Bowlby believed that these feelings would then translate to all her relationships moving forward. 

Bowlby’s compatriot, Mary Ainsworth, took it further to describe the children who felt this lack. Their current and future attachments could also be considered anxious or avoidant. These infants had parents who were present, but inattentive or showing inconsistent levels of attention and love.

The secure children would experience trusting relationships where they felt that their partners would be there for them when needed. Alternatively, those with anxious attachment styles would continue to mimic the searching behaviors from childhood, would often feel threatened by abandonment, and would require longer periods of soothing once separated from their partners. Meanwhile, the avoidants would become people that could take relationships or leave them; these would become the commitment phobes among us.

Bowlby believed that attachment styles were formed in the first two and a half years of childhood. Ainsworth shortened that timeframe and believed attachment styles were solidified within the first year.

The Problems with Attachment Theory

It Doesn’t Stand Up to Modern Research

Psychologists have begun to delve into not only how ineffective Bowlby’s theory is in predicting relationship behavior, but also how his research methodology was impacted by confirmation bias. Confirmation bias suggests that before starting his study, Bowlby had reached a foregone conclusion based on his own personal experience of childhood abandonment and interactions he had with colleagues studying the early behavior of monkeys and ducks. He used his research to prove what he already thought was true.

Additional research also saw inconsistent “working models of relationships” when monitoring adolescents’ attachment to their parents and their romantic partners. This was confirmed by another study, which stated that individuals exhibit varying attachment behavior across different relationships in their lifetime.  

If you’re able to have a secure relationship with one individual and not another, perhaps part of the responsibility rests in the hands of the second individual.

This idea is empowering because it contradicts the self-blame that some people feel comes with the theory of attachment. Some proponents of attachment theory put all of the blame on the individual who is feeling the anxiety or the avoidance. But if you’re able to have a secure relationship with one individual and not another, perhaps part of the responsibility rests in the hands of the second individual. If an intimate partner is being consistent, vulnerable, open about intentions, beliefs, and feelings, while also showing that they care and they’re interested in getting to know you, then they’re significantly more likely to elicit a secure response. If you’re interacting with someone who takes days to respond, follows a ton of half-naked women on Instagram, doesn’t ask you questions about your life, and takes no interest in where it’s going, then this is likely going to elicit an anxious or avoidant response.

You Are Who You Are Until the Grave

Bowlby believed that your attachment style stayed with you to the grave. Not only is the idea of unchangeable behavior a red flag and disempowering, but it’s a cop-out that can prevent people from delving into self-work and real change.  

By putting focus on early childhood experiences, the theory of attachment disregards the impact of later relationships and how they shape our interactions as adults. A child who was characterized as avoidant or anxious because of detached parents can have a secure church community, doting grandparents, strong leaders as role models, and a comforting, trusting, and loving intimate relationship later in life. These relationships could have modeled safe, healthy, and caring interactions whose framework could be applied to all relationships moving forward. Furthermore, research shows that adults can grow out of their insecure attachment style and gain “earned secure attachment.” 

Another Way of Looking at Anxious or Avoidant Responses

Another way to look at our anxious, avoidant, or secure responses in intimate relationships is as guide signals. Maybe your anxious response isn’t a sign of an unhealthy attachment style, but instead is a strong intuitive signal that you’re heading down the wrong path with someone. Maybe your anxious response is there to tell you that the person you’re interacting with isn’t meant to be trusted.

I encourage women to ask themselves how many times the men they were anxious about became “the one” or a person that they ended up having a stable and loving relationship with. I’m going to bet rarely; instead, that person usually becomes another lesson.

We have been programmed to be disconnected from our feminine gifts of intuition and deep knowing; perhaps these gifts often show up in the form of anxiety or avoidance because they need to lead us away from trouble in a way that we can’t ignore.

Dating app usage and subsequent experiences are enough to explain the increased levels of anxiety often attributed to the anxious attachment style.

With the advent of dating sites, singles using them have reported higher levels of anxiety and lower levels of self-esteem. The usage and subsequent experiences (a.k.a. horror stories) are enough to explain the increased levels of anxiety often attributed to the anxious attachment style.

Through this new dating culture, we’ve developed new vocabulary to identify poor online behavior – ghosting, catfishing, love bombing, breadcrumbing, and limerence, to name a few. Who wouldn’t feel anxious or avoidant with these threats looming on the horizon? 

They could also be a reason why avoidant behavior is on the rise. With a constant stream of potential partners to choose from, people are becoming less likely to commit, believing that a better option is just a swipe away. Also, with increased living standards, people have the option to travel more, change jobs, move to different cities, and might veer away from commitment in favor of freedom to travel and live life on solely their terms.   

Closing Thoughts

Jerome Pagan, a prominent psychologist, believes that the theory of attachment will go the way of Freudianism – a theory that was once adhered to, but no longer holds any relevance. He instead suggests that social class, temperament, and culture are the most significant impacts on how we will relate in relationships.

While psychological research and theories are often helpful in understanding how and why we think, when it comes to the complexity of intimate relationships, sometimes the best advice comes from our own intuition. 

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