What’s my attachment style?

You go on a great first date. Really great. He says he’ll text you. It’s now been nineteen hours. You’ve checked if your phone is broken. You’ve turned it off and on again. You’ve sent yourself a test message. It works. You’ve started drafting a message that says “no worries if not!” even though there are, very much, worries.

Your friend, meanwhile, is dating someone lovely who texts back immediately, says “I miss you” and wants to meet her parents. And she’s thinking about moving to Lisbon. Alone. Possibly tomorrow.

Your partner says “we need to talk,” and for the next six hours, until they explain it’s about the holiday booking, you plan the entire breakup, who keeps the sofa, and how you’ll announce it on Instagram.

Someone you’re seeing says “I love you” for the first time, and your body’s immediate response, before your brain can stop it, is to say “thanks!” and then pretend you need to check on something in the kitchen.

You go on holiday with your partner. On day three, they want to spend an afternoon alone, reading. You say “of course, totally fine!” And then you sit in the hotel café wondering what you did wrong.

And then someone at dinner says it. The phrase. “Oh, that’s because you’ve got an anxious attachment style. And he’s avoidant. That’s why it’ll never work.” Everyone nods. Someone else says they’re “disorganised.” Someone says they’re “securely attached,” in the tone of someone who’s just told you they run marathons.

Attachment styles have become the new star signs. People put them in dating profiles. There are quizzes, podcasts, TikToks, books, and at least one person you know who’s diagnosed their entire family.

But where does all this actually come from? Who decided you’re “anxious” or “avoidant”? And can a label really explain why you said “thanks” when someone said “I love you”?

To find out, we need a British psychiatrist who was raised mostly by a nanny, an American-Canadian psychologist who studied what babies do when their mum leaves the room for three minutes, and an Austrian philosopher with a very large beard who wrote a short, strange book about the word “you.”

Here’s how attachment styles are usually explained online: there are four types of people, secure, anxious, avoidant and disorganised, and you are one of them, probably forever, and it explains every relationship you’ve ever had. Especially the bad ones.

So where did these four types actually come from?

From one-year-olds. In the 1970s, the psychologist Mary Ainsworth invited mothers and their babies, around twelve months old, into a small room at a university in Baltimore. The room had toys, two chairs, and a one-way mirror with researchers hiding behind it. Over about twenty minutes, in short episodes of roughly three minutes each, a friendly stranger came in, the mother quietly left, came back, left again, and came back again. And the researchers watched one thing above all: what the baby did when Mum came back.

That’s it. That’s the famous experiment. It’s called the Strange Situation, which sounds like a horror film but is really just a slightly awkward playdate.

From watching those babies, Ainsworth described three patterns. A fourth, “disorganised,” was added years later by two other researchers, Mary Main and Judith Solomon. So the categories everyone uses to explain why their ex didn’t text back were originally created to describe what toddlers do when their mother walks back into a room after three minutes.

And the adult version? From a newspaper. In 1987, two researchers, Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, wondered whether adults might have similar patterns in romantic love. So they printed a “love quiz” in a local newspaper in Denver, the Rocky Mountain News. Readers were asked to pick which of three short paragraphs best described how they felt in relationships, and post their answers in. Hundreds did.

It was a genuinely important study, and it launched an enormous field of research. But it’s still funny that the idea now used to diagnose your entire love life started as a quiz next to the weather forecast.

And one more crime. On TikTok, you’ll hear people talk about “the anxious-avoidant trap”: one anxious partner and one avoidant partner, chasing and running from each other forever. But in Ainsworth’s original work, “anxious-avoidant” wasn’t a couple. It was the name of one type of baby. The internet split one toddler into two people and made them date.

Here’s what most of those videos also leave out. Modern researchers mostly don’t think of attachment as four neat boxes. They measure it on two sliding scales: how anxious you are about closeness, and how much you avoid it. Everyone is somewhere on both. And where you are can change, with time, with different relationships, and with a partner who actually texts back.

So you’re not a type. You’re a position on a map. And you can move.

Meet John Bowlby. Born in London in 1907, into a very posh family. His father was surgeon to the King. And, in the style of upper-class British families of the time, little John was raised mostly by nannies. He saw his mother for about an hour a day, usually at teatime, when he was brought downstairs, clean and presentable, for a quick visit.

His favourite nanny left the family when he was about four. He later said it felt like losing a mother. At seven, he was sent away to boarding school. Decades later, he said he wouldn’t send a dog away to boarding school at that age.

So when Bowlby grew up and became a psychiatrist, his big question was, perhaps not surprisingly: what happens to children when they’re separated from the people they love?

He trained as a psychoanalyst in London, in the middle of the Klein and Anna Freud wars from chapter 2. Melanie Klein herself supervised his work for a while. And they clashed. One famous story: Bowlby was treating a little boy, and the boy’s mother was clearly very anxious and going through a hard time. Bowlby wanted to talk to her. Klein told him not to. What mattered, for Klein, was the child’s inner fantasy world, not what was actually happening at home. Bowlby thought that was madness. Real mothers, real separations, real events mattered. Possibly more than anything.

So he went looking for evidence. And he found some of it in the strangest places.

He read about Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian scientist who found that baby geese attach themselves to the first moving thing they see after hatching. Lorenz made sure that thing was him. So there are famous photos of a grown man walking through a field, followed in a neat little line by a family of goslings who were completely convinced he was their mother.

And he followed the work of Harry Harlow, an American psychologist who did some very upsetting experiments with baby rhesus monkeys. He gave them two fake “mothers”: one made of bare wire that gave milk, and one covered in soft cloth that gave nothing. Freud would have predicted the babies would love whoever fed them. They didn’t. They clung to the soft one, and only went over to the wire one to drink. When they were frightened, they ran straight to the cloth mother. Love wasn’t about food. It was about comfort.

Bowlby put it all together into attachment theory. Babies aren’t just attached to whoever feeds them. They’re born with a deep, biological need to stay close to a protective person, because, for most of human history, a baby alone was a baby in danger. Crying, clinging, following: that’s not being “needy.” It’s a survival system.

And the most important part: from thousands of tiny daily experiences, the child builds what Bowlby called an internal working model. A kind of inner map that answers two questions. When I need someone, will they come? And am I the kind of person people come for? That map, he said, gets carried into adult relationships.

His ideas also changed the real world. In the early 1950s, parents in many British hospitals were only allowed to visit their sick children for an hour or so a week, because it was thought that visits “upset” them. Bowlby’s colleague James Robertson made a short, heartbreaking film of a two-year-old girl alone in hospital for eight days. It helped change the rules. If parents can stay with their children in hospital today, that film is part of the reason.

Now meet Mary Ainsworth. Born in Ohio in 1913, raised in Toronto. In 1950, she moved to London and answered a job advert in a newspaper. The job was working with John Bowlby. Probably the most important job advert in the history of psychology.

Ainsworth wanted to see attachment in real life, not just in theory. So she went to Uganda and spent months visiting mothers and babies in their homes, watching and taking notes. Then she did the same in Baltimore. And she noticed that babies use their mother as a secure base: a safe home base they explore away from, keep checking back with, and run back to when something scary happens. Like a little astronaut on a spacewalk, attached to the ship by a cable.

Then she designed the Strange Situation, the slightly awkward playdate from earlier, and watched what happened when Mum came back after leaving for three minutes. Here’s what she saw, roughly:

Secure babies were upset when Mum left. When she came back, they went to her, got a cuddle, calmed down quickly, and went back to playing. Simple. The cable held.

Avoidant babies seemed not to care. When Mum came back, they ignored her and kept looking at the toys. Very cool. Very independent. Except later studies measured their heart rates, and found they were just as stressed as the others. They’d just learned not to show it. That’s the baby who grows up into the adult who answers “I love you” with “thanks!”

Resistant, or ambivalent, babies were extremely upset when Mum left. When she came back, they wanted to be picked up, and then pushed her away, and kept crying. They couldn’t settle. That’s the baby who grows up into the adult refreshing their phone at hour nineteen.

Disorganised babies, the category added later, showed confused, contradictory behaviour: freezing, approaching and backing away, as if they didn’t know what to do. Researchers have linked this pattern to caregiving that frightens the child, and it’s the most serious of the four.

Almost nobody on TikTok mentions this: Ainsworth found that these patterns weren’t really about the baby’s personality. They were mainly about the relationship: how responsive the mother had been, day after day, at home. A baby could be secure with one parent and insecure with the other. The pattern lived between two people, not inside one.

Which is exactly where our next guest, a bearded philosopher from Vienna, had been looking all along.

Meet Martin Buber. Born in Vienna in 1878. Philosopher, storyteller, translator, and owner of one of the most magnificent beards in the history of thought. If you picture a wise old man from a fairy tale, the one who lives on a mountain and answers riddles, you’re picturing Martin Buber. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize around seventeen times, in two different categories, and never won. The beard did not take it personally.

And here’s why he belongs in an attachment chapter. When Martin was about three, his parents separated, and his mother left. He was sent to live with his grandparents in Lviv. Nobody explained anything to him. He spent a long time waiting for her to come back.

One day, when he was four, he was standing on a balcony with an older girl who was looking after him. And, out of nowhere, she said to him: “No, she will never come back.”

He never forgot that moment. Decades later, he invented a word for it. In German, a real meeting between two people is a Begegnung. So he made up its opposite: Vergegnung. A mismeeting. A moment when two people are in the same place and completely miss each other.

He did see his mother again, twenty years later. And he said that when he looked into her eyes, he heard the word Vergegnung once more.

So, like Bowlby, a man who lost his mother early spent his life thinking about what it means to really meet someone.

His most famous book is called Ich und Du, published in 1923. And yes, of course, it’s another translation crime. In English, it’s known as I and Thou. “Thou” sounds very solemn, very religious, very church-on-Sunday. But in German, Du is the most ordinary word there is. It’s the informal “you”: the one you use with your best friend, your mum, your dog. It’s the Spanish tú, not usted. When the book was retranslated into English in 1970, the new translator spent pages complaining about “Thou.” But the old title had already stuck. So a book about intimacy is known by a title that sounds like a Victorian funeral.

The big idea is surprisingly simple.

Buber said there are two basic ways of relating to anything: two “primary words.”

The first is I-It. That’s when you relate to something, or someone, as an object: something to use, describe, measure or get something from. The barista is “the coffee person.” The bus driver is “the bus.” The colleague is “the one who approves invoices.” And that’s not evil. You can’t have a deep spiritual encounter with every barista. Life would grind to a halt. Most of life has to be I-It.

The second is I-Thou, or better, I-You. That’s when you meet someone as a whole person, fully present, not as a category, a function or a means to something. You’re not analysing them. You’re not thinking about what they can do for you. You’re just with them, completely. It might be a deep conversation at 2am. A look across a room. Your grandmother laughing at something silly. A baby looking straight into your eyes. Buber said it can even happen with a tree, or an animal.

He had his own example from childhood. On his grandparents’ farm, there was a dapple-grey horse, and when he was eleven, he used to sneak into the stable and stroke its neck. And sometimes he felt something enormous: not “I am stroking a horse,” but a real meeting between two living beings. And then, one day, he noticed his own hand doing the stroking, and thought about how nice it felt. And just like that, the moment was gone. The horse had become an It again. Something he was using to feel good.

That’s the sad, beautiful part of Buber’s theory. You can’t hold I-Thou forever. Every You eventually becomes an It again. Your best friend becomes “the one who’s always late.” The person you fell in love with becomes “the one who stacks the dishwasher wrong.” It’s not betrayal. It’s just how life moves. The question is whether you keep finding your way back.

His most famous line: all real living is meeting.

Buber said the most important thing in a relationship isn’t inside you, or inside the other person. It’s in the space between you. He even had a word for it: “the between.” Which is exactly what Ainsworth discovered with her babies in Baltimore: the pattern didn’t live inside the baby. It lived between two people.

One last story, which Buber himself told, and which changed his life. As a young man, he was very into mystical religious experiences. One morning, after a few hours of deep spiritual ecstasy, a young man came to visit him. Buber was polite, friendly and answered his questions. But he wasn’t really there. His mind was still somewhere else. Not long after, he learned that the young man had died in the war, and he realised that the visitor had come with a real, life-or-death question that Buber had never truly heard.

From then on, Buber said, he gave up chasing special experiences far away. Real spirituality, he decided, wasn’t up a mountain. It was in turning up, properly, for the person standing in front of you.

Tonight: a British psychiatrist who wouldn’t send a dog to boarding school, an American-Canadian psychologist who timed babies with a stopwatch, and a bearded Viennese philosopher who once had a spiritual moment with a horse.

So who wins?

No winner, and that’s genuinely the lesson.

Attachment research is real, careful and useful. Knowing that you tend to panic at hour nineteen, or that your first instinct when someone says “I love you” is to say “thanks!” and run to the kitchen, can help you understand yourself, and stop blaming yourself for it.

But Buber’s warning matters just as much: a style is a map, not a person. You’re not “an anxious.” Your partner isn’t “an avoidant.” You’re two people, with histories, meeting in the space between you.

So next time you’re refreshing your phone at hour nineteen, try two questions.

Bowlby’s question: is this panic about this person, or about an old map?

Buber’s question: am I actually meeting this person, or am I just running a test on them?

And then, maybe, one small brave thing from each of them. From Bowlby: let someone show you they can come back. From Buber: put the phone down, and when you next see them, actually look up.

The misunderstandings: The four attachment categories now widely used online came from research on infants. Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation, a laboratory procedure with one-year-olds and their mothers lasting about twenty minutes, identified secure, anxious-avoidant and anxious-resistant (ambivalent) patterns (Patterns of Attachment, 1978). The disorganised category was added by Mary Main and Judith Solomon (1986, 1990). Research on adult romantic attachment began with Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver’s 1987 study, which used a “love quiz” printed in the Rocky Mountain News. Modern researchers usually measure adult attachment on two continuous dimensions, anxiety and avoidance, rather than fixed types, and attachment can vary across relationships and change over time. In Ainsworth’s work, “anxious-avoidant” names a single infant pattern, not a pairing of two partners. Martin Buber’s Ich und Du is usually translated I and Thou, but German Du is the ordinary informal “you.”

John Bowlby (1907–1990): British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, founder of attachment theory. Drawing on ethology, including Konrad Lorenz’s work on imprinting and Harry Harlow’s studies of infant monkeys, he argued that infants have an evolved need to seek closeness to a protective caregiver, especially when frightened. Through repeated experience, children form internal working models of whether others will be available and whether they themselves are worthy of care, which shape later relationships. His 1951 WHO report Maternal Care and Mental Health and his trilogy Attachment and Loss (1969–1980) were hugely influential. The film A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital (1952), made by his colleague James Robertson, helped change hospital visiting policies for children.

Mary Ainsworth (1913–1999): American-Canadian developmental psychologist who worked with Bowlby from 1950. Through home observations in Uganda (Infancy in Uganda, 1967) and Baltimore, she developed the concept of the caregiver as a secure base from which infants explore. Her Strange Situation procedure classified infants’ responses to brief separations and reunions, and her research linked these patterns mainly to the caregiver’s sensitivity and responsiveness at home, rather than to fixed traits of the child.

Martin Buber (1878–1965): Austrian-born Jewish philosopher, later based in Jerusalem. In I and Thou (1923), he described two fundamental modes of relation: I-It, in which others are experienced as objects, categories or means to an end, and which is necessary for everyday life; and I-You (I-Thou), a direct, whole and mutual encounter with another being. Every You inevitably becomes an It again, but real life depends on returning to encounter: “All real living is meeting.” He located relationship in “the between” (das Zwischen), not inside either person, and coined Vergegnung (“mismeeting”) for moments when people fail to truly meet, a word he linked to his separation from his mother in early childhood.

Where they meet: All three see human beings as fundamentally relational, shaped by early relationships and dependent throughout life on genuine connection with others. Both Ainsworth and Buber locate the essential reality of a relationship between people, not within one individual.

Where they differ: Bowlby and Ainsworth offer an empirical, developmental theory, based on observation and measurement, that describes stable patterns of attachment. Buber offers a philosophical account of encounter that resists measurement and classification, and warns that treating people as categories, including psychological ones, can block real meeting.

Further reading:

• A Secure Base (1988) by John Bowlby, short, readable lectures summarising his ideas.
• Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller, a popular book on adult attachment. Useful, but read it with Buber’s warning in mind: you are not a category.
• Becoming Attached by Robert Karen, a lively history of attachment research, including Bowlby and Ainsworth’s stories.
• Buber’s I and Thou, Walter Kaufmann’s 1970 translation. Short, poetic and best read slowly.