This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Attached" by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Is avoidant attachment in adults a bad thing? Why do avoidant attachers act the way they do? Is it possible to change your attachment style?
About 25% of the population are avoidant attachers. These people often have trouble maintaining a long-term, stable relationship because they push their partners away, idealize self-reliance, romanticize past relationships, and fall into the “one-and-only” trap.
Keep reading to learn more about avoidant attachment in adults and how they can work to improve their relationships.
Your Life as an Avoidant Attacher
Avoidant attachment in adults is relatively common. If you’re in the 25 percent of the population with an avoidant attachment style, you aren’t free of the basic tenets of attachment theory. All humans—including you—need physical and emotional proximity to an attachment figure. However, your behavior is probably stopping you from finding a stable, happy relationship and fulfilling your deep-seated desire to connect with a partner in a meaningful way.
Any avoidant reading this will likely wonder if they’re the exception to the rule—is it possible they were born without that particular gene? But research shows that even avoidants have a desire to attach to others:
The research: As a way of accessing the unconscious minds of avoidant attachers, psychologists have them participate in word recognition tests. In these tests, words flash quickly across a screen, and researchers record how long it takes the subjects to recognize and report each word.
They’ve discovered that avoidant subjects’ brains are highly tuned in to words that express need, desire, closeness, dependency, or marriage. The avoidants describe these words as having threatening or negative connotations. But avoidants are much slower to notice words that express separation, abandonment, or loss, and those words don’t incite any strong emotion or reaction.
However, when the subjects are distracted—they’re instructed to simultaneously perform another task, like solving a simple puzzle, while the words flash across the screen—their reaction to all these words is equally fast.
The conclusion? When avoidant attachers’ brains are distracted by other activities, they can no longer suppress the impactful concepts of separation and loss. In other words, an avoidant attacher’s desire for human connection is always present, and it takes focused brain effort for them to suppress it. Avoidants aren’t granted an exception from the biological desire to attach; they’re just skilled at sidelining it.
How Avoidant Attachers React to Their Partners
If you have an avoidant attachment style but believe you genuinely desire a close, intimate relationship, it’s worth taking the time to examine how you behave when other people try to get close.
First off, understand that you are always maneuvering for independence and negotiating how to keep your relationships at a comfortable distance. This occurs on an everyday basis in even the smallest of ways.
Just like anxious attachers use “activating strategies” to try to bring their partners closer (like texting or calling multiple times a day or repeatedly telling their partners how much they love them), avoidant attachers use “deactivating strategies” to keep a romantic partner at arm’s length. It’s their way of turning off their natural attachment mechanism. It’s apparent in their communications, actions, attitudes, and beliefs.
If you’re an avoidant attacher, you experience the following fairly often:
- You feel deeply lonely even when you’re in a relationship. You constantly wonder if there isn’t someone better out there for you.
- You connect with your romantic partner at certain times, but you always keep a modicum of mental and emotional distance. You feel threatened by a high level of intimacy.
- When you’re in a relationship, you relish opportunities to do things without your partner, either socially or at work.
- You often fantasize about an escape route to get out of your relationship.
- You have extremely inflexible ideas about what you’re looking for in a partner (for example, you might believe he or she has to be well-educated, under the age of 40, never married, successful in business, and willing to live in the countryside).
- You tend to hyper-focus on your partner’s small imperfections: the ways he or she chews food, dresses, or talks. You can’t ignore his or her flaws.
- You idealize a past relationship: “I’ve never been able to get over Joe/Josie, and that’s why I can’t commit to Juan/Juanita.”
- You often fall into relationships that can’t go anywhere, like with someone who is married or lives halfway around the globe.
- Even after you’ve been with someone for years, you’ll still think you’re not quite ready to commit.
- You keep secrets from your partner and answer questions vaguely as a way of maintaining a sense of autonomy.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Attached summary :
- Why your partner behaves the way they do
- How your attachment style affects your relationship
- How to distance yourself from unhealthy relationships
