# Your attachment style is not a personality type "I'm an anxious avoidant" is a sentence that would puzzle the people who built the measurement. Not because the feeling behind it is wrong. The feeling is usually well observed, and the person saying it has often done more honest thinking about their own patterns than most people ever do. It would puzzle them because of the grammar. *Am.* Somewhere in the last few years a research variable turned into an identity, and the change happened so quietly that almost nobody noticed the claim being smuggled in. ## The quiz that started this ran in a newspaper Two psychologists, Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, wanted to know whether adult romantic love worked anything like the bond between an infant and a caregiver. So in 1985 they printed three short paragraphs in the Rocky Mountain News and asked readers to pick the one that sounded most like them in relationships, then mail in their answers along with a longer questionnaire about their romantic history. [The paper reporting what came back](https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511) was published two years later, in 1987, and it is the one everything since has been built on. Hundreds of people wrote back. About 56 percent picked the secure description, 24 percent the avoidant one, and 20 percent the anxious-ambivalent one. The proportions landed close to what Mary Ainsworth had found in infants decades earlier, which was the whole point and a genuinely striking result. That is the origin of the thing now described online as a fixed feature of your personality: a self-selected newspaper survey where you chose one of three paragraphs. It was a good study and it opened a field that has produced thousands of papers since. It was never meant to be a diagnosis, and the field moved on from its format almost immediately. ## What researchers actually measure Here is the part that got lost on the way to the algorithm. Most attachment researchers do not sort people into types. They measure two continuous dimensions and give you a score on each. **Attachment-related anxiety** is how much you worry about a partner's availability and responsiveness. Whether the silence means something. Whether you are about to be left. **Attachment-related avoidance** is how much you prefer self-reliance over closeness. Whether depending on someone feels like relief or like exposure. The standard instrument is the Experiences in Close Relationships scale, revised by Chris Fraley, Niels Waller and Kelly Brennan in 2000. It returns two numbers. In [Fraley's own summary of the field](https://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm), "most researchers currently conceptualize and measure individual differences in attachment dimensionally rather than categorically," and the working assumption is that "attachment styles are things that vary in degree rather than kind." Note the word most. Categorical approaches have not vanished from the literature, and one major tradition built around the Adult Attachment Interview still assigns classifications. The claim here is narrower and it is the one that matters for how you talk about yourself: the dominant measurement in the research that produced these labels returns positions on two scales, not membership in a group. The four familiar names, secure, anxious, dismissive-avoidant, fearful-avoidant, are corners of the plane those two dimensions describe. They are useful shorthand for regions of a map. They are not four kinds of person, and because both dimensions are continuous, most people score somewhere between the corners rather than sitting on one. :::pullquote Attachment is two dials, not four boxes. The named types are corners of a map, and most people score somewhere in the middle of it. ::: That distinction sounds academic until you notice what the box version does. A score says: here is where you are right now, on two dimensions, relative to other people. A type says: here is what you are. One of those invites a question about conditions and the other closes it. It also flattens a real difference. Fraley notes that avoidance is not one thing: some avoidant adults are handling closeness in a way that works reasonably well for them, while others are struggling. Collapsing both into "avoidant" loses the distinction that actually matters for how someone is doing. ## Does it change? A study of more than 4,000 people says yes, sometimes This is the question the type framing quietly answers for you, and it answers it wrong. In 2021, Fraley, Omri Gillath and Pascal Deboeck published [a study](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-59857-001) in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that followed more than 4,000 people across many waves of measurement while they went about their lives. New relationships, breakups, job changes, the ordinary catalogue of events. Because the researchers had readings from before and after each event, they could watch attachment move rather than asking people to remember whether it had. It moved. Roughly half of the life events they tracked were followed by an immediate change in attachment. But only about a quarter were followed by change that lasted. Read those two numbers together, because neither is the headline on its own. Attachment is not fixed, which the type framing gets wrong. It is also not easily rewritten, which the more optimistic corner of the internet gets wrong. Most disturbances fade back toward where you were. Some do not. That fits what the field calls a prototype model: a fairly stable underlying tendency, with real fluctuation on top of it, and occasional lasting movement in the tendency itself. Long-run stability in the research runs somewhere around .25 to .39, which is the statistical way of saying that knowing your score today tells you something real about your score in a few years, and nowhere near everything. ## The finding worth actually keeping Buried in that same study is the sentence that changes what you can do with any of this. How people construed an event was related to whether it produced enduring change. Not the event. The reading of it. Two people get left. One concludes that this is what happens, that it confirms something they already suspected about how relationships go for them. The other concludes that a particular relationship with a particular person ended for particular reasons. The research does not say the second person is being naive. It says the meaning each of them assigned is bound up with whether the experience became part of how they approach the next person. Be careful about what this does and does not establish. It is an association in observational data, not proof that changing your interpretation changes your attachment. Nobody randomly assigned people to construe their breakups differently. The direction could run the other way, with a person's existing attachment shaping how they read the event in the first place, and that is a genuinely likely part of the story. Even so, it points somewhere useful, and the pointing costs nothing to follow. ## What to do with this **Say it as a score, not a species.** "I'm anxious" is a claim about what you are. "I score high on attachment anxiety, and it spikes when someone goes quiet" is a claim about a pattern under conditions. The second one is more accurate, and it is the version that leaves a door open. **Notice the conditions.** Attachment scores are measured against people, not in a vacuum, and they can read differently across different relationships. If you are consistently more anxious with one person than you have been with anyone else, that is information about the pair and not only about you. **Do not use it as a filter.** The most common practical use of attachment language in dating right now is screening out an entire named category before meeting anyone. Given that most people sit between the corners, that a type is not a stable thing to screen for, and that the [chemistry between two specific people has resisted prediction from every trait researchers have thrown at it](/blog/can-an-algorithm-predict-chemistry), that is a lot of weight to put on a quiz result. **Take the free quizzes for what they are.** A ten-item web quiz that returns one of four names is not the ECR-R, and it does not report where you fall on two dimensions relative to a comparison sample. It is a conversation starter. It is a fine one. **Get real help if the pattern is costing you.** If high attachment anxiety or avoidance is doing real damage to your relationships, a therapist who works with attachment, and emotionally focused therapy in particular, is the honest answer here rather than an article. We are not qualified to be, and a blog post has never known anything about your situation. ## The part Bloom is built around None of the above is a product problem, and we are not going to pretend it is. But one piece of it is. The type framing thrives in an environment that rewards fast sorting of people you have not met, because a category is the only thing you can sort on when you have nothing else. A format that shows you a hundred faces an hour will always push you toward labels, and we wrote about what that does to judgment in [why a feed of strangers makes you feel like inventory](/blog/why-a-feed-of-strangers-makes-you-feel-like-inventory). Bloom is built the other way around. Profiles are made to be read rather than skimmed, and the free plan gives you a set number of likes a day, because a bounded day is the condition under which anyone evaluates another person as a person. And since attachment shows up in how two people actually treat each other over time, Relationship Mode is aimed there: prompts and shared journeys for the relationship you already have, which is where the observable version of all this lives. The habits on that side of the ledger are the subject of [bids for connection](/blog/bids-for-connection). ## Two dials The research is less tidy than the four-box version and considerably more encouraging. You have two scores rather than a category. They sit on a fairly stable foundation, they move with what happens to you, and about a quarter of the time that movement sticks. Whether it sticks appears to have something to do with the story you tell yourself about what happened, which is the one part of this you have any hands on. That is not a personality type. It is a position, and positions are things you can move from. Bloom is pre-launch, starting in Utah along the Wasatch Front. The only thing to do today is [join the waitlist](/#waitlist) and grow with us.