Your attachment style is not your horoscope

A parent sits on the floor in the hallway outside the baby’s room, in conflict. The baby is crying and it feels and sounds like a fire alarm, that full-throated desperate need that is supposed to bring us running to help and comfort. The parent’s entire body is responding as it was designed to do: their chest is tight from resisting that incredibly powerful urge to go in and rescue the baby from its distress. On the other side of the conflict is everything else they know. Maybe they’ve read a bunch of books, or talked to their pediatrician, or just listened to the advice of helpful friends, and all the advice told them let them cry it out. This is just what babies do. We have to help them get better at tolerating distress so they will go to sleep on their own.

There are two halves operating here: the baby crying to bring the parent close, and the parent’s urge to respond and comfort. The crying is not just an involuntary reflex. It is a signal, ancient and precise, designed by evolution to be exactly as hard to ignore as it is. Because what are the consequences, in the ancient history of the animal kingdom, of ignoring infant distress? Often, in dangerous or deprived circumstances, a child who was not responded to did not survive. Our bodies are built to respond to distress calls. And yet: the book says wait. The doctor says wait. And so they wait, or they try to.

What happens next - whether someone comes, how reliably, how warmly - is the beginning of a long story. The baby’s nervous system is plastic, easy to shape around experience. Over weeks and months, a felt sense takes shape: what love is, how it works, whether it shows up when you need it.

This is the basic architecture of attachment theory.

If you’ve spent any time online in the last few years, you probably know the shorthand: secure, anxious, avoidant. Maybe you’ve taken a quiz. Maybe you’ve told yourself you’re anxiously attached (hi), or decided your ex was definitely an avoidant, or read something explaining which attachment types you should filter out of your dating life. The content is everywhere. Some of it is reasonably accurate. A lot of it is not.

Attachment research is actually incredibly rigorous and robust for a psychological theory. Attachment itself is pervasive, woven all throughout our relational lives, and it is too important for us to fuck it up like this.

Here’s what most of the discourse misses: attachment styles are, more than anything else, a perspective. They are not personality types. They are not a horoscope. They are not a Myers-Briggs assessment, which is itself not super scientific, though at least nobody is telling you to filter your dating app to avoid INFPs.

The current discourse takes this idea of avoidant and anxious attachment, turns them into types of people, and says: watch out for that one. Protect yourself. Choose wisely.

I find this a little ironic. The anxious person, told to stay vigilant around avoidants, becomes more vigilant, which is anxious behavior. The avoidant person, exhausted by demands, decides that the anxious style is a pathology they should avoid, and retreats into self-sufficiency, which is avoidant behavior. We are enacting the conflict cycle I see every day in my therapy office on a global scale, and calling it self-awareness.

What attachment science actually describes is closer to this: the glasses you forgot you were wearing. Bowlby called it an internal working model: a set of expectations about how relationships work that forms early, updates slowly, and operates mostly below awareness. It is less like a map you consult and more like the prescription already in your lenses. Everything you see is already filtered through it.

The person who learned that love comes when you escalate, who hit the gas as a baby because amplifying distress was what worked, does not carry around a label that says “anxious.” They carry an embodied sense (along with a whole lot of thoughts) that relationships are uncertain, that connection requires vigilance, that their partner going quiet is probably a sign of something. That is not a type. That is a lens.

The person who learned that reaching does not work, and that the sensible adaptation is to stop reaching and hit the brakes instead, does not think of themselves as avoidant. They probably think of themselves as independent, maybe even low-maintenance. They also cannot quite understand why their partner seems to require so much.

These patterns are adaptations. Sensible ones, given what produced them. They are also changeable, particularly within a specific relationship. Not quickly, and not through better filtering on a dating app, but genuinely, through relationship, through new experience, through what researchers call corrective attachment experiences. The nervous system takes in new data. The prescription, over time, can be updated.

I am a couples therapist, which means I watch these two nervous systems sit across from each other on a regular basis. The discourse tends to frame the anxious/avoidant combo as a compatibility problem. I tend to think of it as an origin story. Which means it has more than one possible ending.