The Three Attachment Styles Assessment
Identify your wiring for intimacy as anxious, avoidant, or secure
Adult attachment theory, originally developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth for parent-child bonds, applies directly to romantic relationships. Research shows that roughly 50% of the population is secure, 20% is anxious, and 25% is avoidant, with the remaining percentage falling into a rare anxious-avoidant (disorganized) combination. Each style represents a distinct strategy for regulating closeness and dealing with intimacy in relationships.
The anxious style is characterized by a preoccupation with the relationship and a heightened sensitivity to any perceived threat to closeness. The avoidant style prioritizes self-sufficiency and feels uncomfortable with too much intimacy, employing deactivating strategies to maintain emotional distance. The secure style is comfortable with intimacy, communicates needs directly, and does not play games.
Identifying your style is the foundational step because it explains the recurring patterns in your love life that may otherwise seem baffling. Once you know your style, you can predict how you will behave in relationships, understand why certain partners trigger intense reactions in you, and begin making more conscious choices about whom you date and how you handle conflict.
- Attachment is a biological need, not a sign of weakness—we are wired to seek proximity to a significant other.
- Your attachment style is relatively stable but not immutable—it can shift with awareness and the right relationship.
- Each style has a characteristic way of handling intimacy, conflict, sex, communication, and expectations.
- Roughly 50% secure, 20% anxious, 25% avoidant distribution means insecure styles are very common, not pathological.
- Your attachment system can be activated or deactivated depending on your partner's behavior and attachment style.
- Take the attachment style questionnaireComplete the self-assessment questionnaire provided in the book that measures your tendencies across multiple relationship scenarios. Answer based on how you actually behave in relationships, not how you think you should behave. The questionnaire covers your comfort with closeness, your worry about abandonment, and your need for independence.
- Review your relationship history for patternsExamine your past relationships for recurring themes. Do you tend to worry that partners will leave? Do you feel suffocated when someone gets too close? Do you find it natural to depend on others and have them depend on you? Look at how relationships ended and what role you played in the dynamics.
- Identify your dominant activation patternsNotice what happens when your attachment system is activated—when a partner does not return a call, expresses a desire for more space, or seems emotionally unavailable. Anxious people become preoccupied and hypervigilant. Avoidant people withdraw and emphasize independence. Secure people communicate their needs calmly.
- Accept your style without judgmentRecognize that your attachment style developed for good reasons and is not a character flaw. Understanding it is the first step toward navigating relationships more effectively, either by finding compatible partners or by developing strategies to manage your attachment needs.
Greg kept ending relationships after the initial excitement faded, always finding fault with his partners—one was too clingy, another was not intellectual enough, a third was great but 'the spark was gone.' After learning about attachment styles, he recognized these as classic deactivating strategies: mentally cataloging a partner's imperfections to create emotional distance whenever intimacy increased.
The framework originates from John Bowlby's attachment theory in the 1950s and Mary Ainsworth's famous 'strange situation' experiments with infants in the 1970s. Levine and Heller extended this research to adult romantic relationships, drawing on studies by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver who first demonstrated in 1987 that the same three attachment patterns observed in infants—secure, anxious, and avoidant—appear in adult love relationships. The book synthesizes decades of research into a practical identification system.