Your Attachment Style Is a Label, Not a Type

Somewhere in the last few years, "what's your attachment style" moved out of the therapist's office and into the screening questions before a first date. It shows up in dating-app bios now, alongside Myers-Briggs letters. 1

The categories were built for infants. John Bowlby was trying to explain why separated babies cried and clung. Mary Ainsworth put twelve-month-olds through a laboratory procedure of leaving and reunion, and about sixty percent of them came out secure, with smaller groups anxious and avoidant. 2 Hazan and Shaver carried the same frame onto adult romance in 1987, and in 2010 Amir Levine and Rachel Heller's Attached sold over three million copies. Levine now says the styles became "scarlet letters" that define a person's character. 3

The number that circulates about dating apps, that forty-four percent of users are anxious-preoccupied, comes from a survey of 44,435 people run by a company that sells attachment-repair courses and a dating toolkit. Its own data note says the findings are associations. 4

The two questions the packaging skips have been tested. Taxometric analyses across two samples found individual differences fit a continuous model better than a categorical one, which makes a "style" a region drawn on two scales rather than a kind of person. 5 A fifty-nine-year study of just over six hundred people, followed from age 13 to 72, found attachment anxiety declines with age, avoidance declines steadily across the whole span, and being in a relationship predicted lower levels of both. 6

What the label describes is a habit that shows up when you are scared of losing something. Habits move when the room does.