What is your attachment style with your significant others?

This week I got to teach attachment theory in the childhood development course. It is not the first time that I teach this topic, but it is the first time that I felt I bond with it. Attachment is a relatively stable emotional connection that children have with their primary caregiver, or adults have with their spouses, friends or lovers. There are several types of attachment: secure, insecure/resistance, insecure/avoidance, and insecure/disoriented. Well, maybe you can guess from the name what each type of attachment looks like or perhaps not, but let's use four small stories to explain them. As attachment types tend to stay consistence from childhood to adulthood, it is usually studied on infants, but the story I am sharing here is for marriage or romantic relationship. A Secure Attachment Professor D is the only Asian woman in our department. We started to grow close to each other because we have the same kind of unpleasant experience with our advisors. I love to hear her talk about her marriage stories.

Even after almost thirty years of marriage, they still have the habit of going for a stroll together after dinner for an hour, sometime three hours. They not only use the time to share what happened during that day, but they share ideas, thoughts and help each other grow. She never worried about losing him even if when they were in a long distance relationship for more than seven years. Their marriage is an excellent example of a securely attached relationship.

B Insecure/Resistance Attachment Unlike Professor D, younger girls sometimes do not have such secure attachment with their boyfriends. A lot of the time, building secure attachment needs mutual efforts, but too many efforts will cause side-effects. H and J is a couple who refuse to separate from each other even for a second. They took courses together. When they eat, J would sit on H's lap and feed him. They have no other friends just each other, literally like joined twin. There was nothing wrong with such relationship, as long as they feel happy. However, we all know no matter how close the relationship is, when it comes to career, we still need to face it by ourselves. After graduation, they had to work in different cities, and it was a devastating experience for both of them, so J quitted her job and went to H's city. The problem was H still needed to go to work, so he cannot be around J all the time as before. Eventually, J got bipolar depression. This story sounds very extreme, but it actually happened around me. Just like a baby resist being separated from his or her mother, J resisted the fact that she had to live by herself without H being around. No one can be with you all the time, in the end, we need to face the world alone eventually. We need to have the inner strength to support ourselves. We can seek for support from our parents or spouse, but they cannot be there for us all the time. We also need to be supportive of them as well, or you will be too much a burden for others.

C Insecure/Avoidance Attachment It is kind of lucky if we find someone who wants to spend all the time with us, like H and J. Contrarily, we may found someone avoid us most of the time. My best friend S was dating a guy who's very knowledgable and mature, call F. They looked like a perfect match. While I felt so happy for her, she came to me and told me her story. F comes from a single parent family. The divorce of his parents traumatized him. It is hard for him to get close with someone, so he never had a relationship over three months. When S asked him to meet with her father, F disappeared without any explanation. Even before this happened, F was not acting like a 'normal' boyfriend. As they lived far away from each other, they only got together during the weekend. F rarely drove to S's place, so S was the one who always drove a long way to see F. Moreover, during the weekdays, sometimes they do not have any communication. F used to told S, because of his parents, marriage seems impossible for him. All of his behavior indicated that he tried to avoid growing a secure attachment with S because he trusts nobody. He wanted to protect himself from getting hurt in a relationship by pushing his girlfriend away. When there is something that required his commitment, he chose to run away. All of the above proof that the attachment style does carry from childhood to adulthood with a high level of persistence.

D Insecure/Disoriented Attachment S had a sad love story, but I am not any luckier before. My ex-boyfriend was even more confusing. He was a really attractive person, charming, talented, and the dream of many girls. I thought I was blessed to have his love. However, the happy days did not last very long. He became very unpredictable. Sometimes, he said he loves me forever, and he would never leave me. However, after a few days, he refused to see me. Then he came back and said he was sorry, but he would disappear again after several days.

This relationship tortured me a lot, but at that time I did not know why he acted like a myth. When I look back, I realized I did not form a secure base for him, as I just broke up with other people and still could not accept him completely. He thought I still loved someone else and that was why he wanted to run away from me. On the other hand, he loved me, so he kept coming back. At the same time, he was too sensitive to my behaviors or words, and lots of the things I did could trigger him easily, so he ran away again. I end the relationship with him eventually by deleting all his contact information and blocked on social media. I felt like I could handle such relationship better if I tried to understand him.

That's all four types of attachment. Hope you could understand them through these little stories. John Bowlby was the great researcher who laid the foundations of attachment theory. He was influenced by Freud's theory about infants. Mary Ainsworth, a colleage of John Bowlby, provided the empirical evidence for attachment theory and explored the categories presented above. Even though the research of attachment mostly focuses on infants, it is also applicable for adults. Understanding it can help us to grow secure attachment style with people that we care about, so what is your attachment style with your loved ones?