The Importance of Knowing Your Partner’s Attachment Style

Research with couples shows that one of the major factors underlying dissatisfaction and distress in romantic relationships is the idea that our partner is wounding us on purpose and with conscious awareness.

An attribution is a causal explanation we give for someone else’s behavior.

When negative, anxiety-inducing events occur, our human brains quickly move to find the explanation for the event. If you hear a loud noise in your house at night, you might feel impelled to go find the source. (Don’t do this if you are a character in a horror movie!) If you find the source of the noise and it is not a threat, your anxiety will go down. If you don’t find the source, your brain will stay active and keep searching for an explanation.

In relationships, if someone says something—or doesn’t say something—that makes your anxiety spike, your brain will similarly search for the source. For example, if your avoidant partner says nothing or doesn't attempt to comfort you when you share a disturbing experience at work, you may attribute (i.e., explain) their behavior as reflecting that they do not care about you. If you can’t find another explanation for their behavior, you will accept your conclusion as fact and react to it accordingly. In this case, your reaction might be to get more upset, point out their shortcomings, and accuse them of not caring.

People frequently make misattributions (faulty causal explanations) for things in ambiguous circumstances. Although your partner’s behaviors may be overtly observable, their motives may be ambiguous and need to be inferred. If you attribute your partner’s behavior to their not caring, or to their being "crazy" and overreactive, you are likely to act as if your thought is true and act on it. You might engage in protest behaviors that never get you the love you want. Or you might try to shut your partner down by leaving the room, telling them they are nuts, or shouting them down—and do you really think this will make an anxious partner feel calmer and more reassured?

Faulty attributions in relationships lead to self-fulfilling prophecies that make it much more likely you will get the exact behavior that you don’t want.

Why Attachment-Style Attributions Can Be a Solution

In couples therapy, I usually start by assessing each person’s attachment style and giving them feedback on the results in front of their partner. Knowing what your and your partner’s attachment styles are can prevent faulty attributions, “normalize” each person’s behaviors, and help you find solutions in your relationship.

To “normalize” a behavior does not mean you excuse, ignore, or accept that the behavior will continue. What it does mean is that you will be able to understand how a person with a specific attachment style typically processes events, experiences emotions, and behaves.

Using the example of an electrical circuit, it is normal for a person with an avoidant/dismissing attachment style to trip a circuit breaker when confronted with strong negative emotions, especially when they are being identified as the cause. When this happens, emotional energy stops flowing through the circuit and the person withdraws or goes cold and emotionally flat. That’s normal.

Alternately, when a person with an anxious/preoccupied attachment style is confronted with the same type of negative emotional material, their circuit breaker does not blow. Instead, all that emotional energy keeps flowing through the circuit and overheating the system. The energy has to go somewhere, so it is usually expressed in the form of loud complaints, tears, or accusations that you are a cold person who doesn’t care—all normal for a person with this attachment style.

If you know your partner’s attachment style, you will be able to understand what is normal and avoid thinking that you are singled out for some special negative treatment. With practice, you should also be able to predict how a partner will react to the situations that confront them. This will help you derive an accurate attribution for your partner’s emotions and behaviors and give you more control over your own thoughts and emotional experiences in your interactions.

If you have knowledge of your own attachment style and that of your partner, you should be able to understand and anticipate the quality of your interactions. I rarely see two people with the same attachment style come in for therapy. Most often, one person is more avoidant, and the other is more anxious—and the ways that these dyads escalate in their conversations and conflicts typically follow very similar patterns.

Here is a caveat about attachment styles: Psychologists like me tell people the name of their style so that it can be understood more easily, but the reality underlying the styles is a bit more nuanced. No matter what your attachment style is, you have some level of both attachment avoidance and anxiety. Someone with a secure attachment style, for example, is likely to have low levels of avoidance and anxiety—but they still have them. So, someone might have a secure style but still be mildly elevated on how avoidant they are. I call this “secure leaning avoidant.” You can also be “secure leaning anxious.” Similarly, if you have a disorganized/fearful attachment style, you are likely to have high levels of both attachment avoidance and anxiety, but one is usually higher.

Here's how to start using this information in your relationship:

1. Get an assessment of your and your partner’s attachment styles. Most psychologists trained in attachment theory can do this for you. When I do these assessments, I use three different measures: self-perception, close relationships, and romantic relationships. I caution against using one measure by itself from an online assessment because there is an inherent level of error involved in any personality assessment tool.
2. Cross-check your results against descriptions of each of the attachment styles that can be found in published writings. And if you don’t have access to an assessment, you can read the descriptions and see if they line up with how you experience your partner and the type of parenting they received in childhood. (You can start by accessing my descriptions of secure, avoidant/dismissing, anxious/preoccupied, and disorganized/fearful styles.)
3. Start to educate yourself on how couples with the different styles interact with each other.
4. Once you know each other’s styles and have “normalized” them, you can start communicating better, understanding what the other person needs from you and setting expectations and boundaries. For example, if I am in a relationship with an avoidant person, I can understand why they shut down in serious discussion of feelings, but I am not going to accept them routinely ceasing to talk and walking out of the room. Or, I can understand why my anxious/preoccupied partner is feeling such intense emotions, but I still need to ask them to slow down, take shorter conversational turns, and calm themselves enough to let me speak.

Once you take these steps, you can make more accurate and healthy attachment style attributions in your interactions, and thus preserve what is good about your relationship without assuming the worst about your partner. (This works in close friendships too.)

To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.

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