Lexicon ·
attachment style
noun phrase, usually with secure, anxious or avoidant
- Stated meaning
- The pattern, secure, anxious or avoidant, in which a person seeks closeness, formed early and carried into adult relationships.
- Operating meaning
- A forecast taken from a quiz and issued on an early date, which explains how the relationship will fail before there is one.
- Origin
- From attachment theory, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth's work on infants and their mothers, applied to adult romance by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver in 1987.
July 22, The Raven. She told me she has realized she is a bit avoidant in relationships, because of past experience. It was the eleventh disclaimer on file and the first with a cause attached. She used the word avoidant. The phrase was not used.
Attachment theory (opens in a new window) began with infants. John Bowlby’s first statement of it came in 1958, in a paper on a child’s tie to his mother. Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation then classified babies by how they behaved when the mother came back into the room, and some were ambivalent toward her and some avoidant. In 1987 2 psychologists applied it to romantic love (opens in a new window), which gave adults the same boxes.
The boxes were then sold. Attached (opens in a new window) describes anxious people as preoccupied with their relationships and avoidant people as equating intimacy with a loss of independence. By August 2022 #attachmentstyles had 91.7 million views (opens in a new window), and the book’s co-author told a reporter, “We’re not talking about health and disease.” That year a dating app sorted its users by quiz (opens in a new window) into anxious, secure or avoidant, and its founder called adding the styles to the algorithm “a no-brainer.”
Under load, an attachment style is a forecast. Learned from a quiz and disclosed early, it names how the relationship will fail before there is one, and it assigns the failure to a childhood neither party attended. Said about oneself, avoidant is a disclaimer with a citation. The other party receives a reading list in the place where an answer would go.
A. named her style on July 22, with its cause, in one sentence. Mine was never disclosed and never measured, and no quiz was taken on either side. The file holds what a quiz would ask about me anyway: 11 of 11 dates proposed by me, 3 silences over 24 hours, all ended by me, and a message, after 4 days of silence, saying I needed to know we were aligned. I did not score it. A diagnosis volunteered by one party sat beside a record kept by the other, and the record was the longer document and the less candid one.