The key ideas

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find, and Keep, Love

Amir Levine, Rachel Heller, 2010

Why are some people drawn to partners who keep pulling away, while others feel closeness as a cage? Amir Levine and Rachel Heller bring attachment theory to adult love and describe three styles: secure, anxious and avoidant. You'll learn how to tell anxiety from passion, why calm relationships can seem boring, and how to see on the first few dates whether someone is right for you.

Who it is for

For anyone drawn again and again to people who leave them feeling anxious. And for anyone who wants to understand themselves and their partner and choose relationships that feel calm.

True love, in the evolutionary sense, means peace of mind.

Why she can't leave someone who makes her unhappy

Tamara is dating Greg. She wants closeness and certainty, and Greg backs away from both: as soon as they get closer, he pulls away and dodges any commitment. One day he mentions, almost in passing, that he has always got bored of his girlfriends in the end. Tamara thinks about him all the time, stops seeing her friends, and her work suffers. She's unhappy, but she can't leave, and she doesn't understand what is happening to her.

Amir Levine is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. He discovered the power of attachment theory while working with mothers and small children, and then saw that adults in love live by similar laws. Together with his long-time friend Rachel Heller, a social psychologist, he wrote this book in 2010. The book overturns the familiar advice not to depend on your partner: as the authors see it, the need for a close person is built into us as deeply as hunger.

The main idea of the book is simple. People handle their need for closeness in different ways, and those ways have stable shapes. If you know your own shape and your partner's, a lot in a relationship stops being a mystery: why you're drawn to the same kind of person, and why the same quarrel repeats for years.

In twenty-five minutes you'll learn the three attachment styles, see how to tell anxiety from passion, and get a way to find out on the first few dates whether someone is right for you. And we'll come back to Tamara.

Depending on someone close isn't weakness

We're often given the same advice: you should be self-sufficient, nobody is responsible for your happiness, and needing another person is a sign of codependency. Levine and Heller think this advice is wrong. The word codependency came from the families of people with addictions, and applying it to any need for a partner is, in their view, a mistake.

The book rests on attachment theory. It was founded by the British psychiatrist John Bowlby and carried on by Mary Ainsworth. Ainsworth noticed that a small child explores an unfamiliar room more boldly when the mother is nearby and the child can go back to her. A close person works as a secure base that makes it easier to venture out into the world.

The authors apply this to adults. In the attachment literature it has a name: the dependency paradox. The more confidently people can rely on each other, the more independent and bold each of them becomes. Someone who knows they have support behind them dares to take a new job or have a difficult conversation.

Hence the book's first conclusion. If it matters to you that your partner is there and responds, that isn't a whim or a character flaw. It's the normal working of a system everyone has. The question isn't how to stop needing, but who can meet that need.

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About the author

Amir Levine is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who teaches at Columbia University. Rachel Heller is a social psychologist, Levine's long-time friend and co-author.

All books by this author: Amir Levine, Rachel Heller

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find, and Keep, Love Quiz

Terms from the book

  • Codependency
  • Attachment theory
  • Bowlby: John Bowlby (1907 to 1990), a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, the founder of attachment theory.
  • Ainsworth: Mary Ainsworth (1913 to 1999), an American-Canadian psychologist. She studied how small children behave when separated from and reunited with their mother, and described the first attachment styles.
  • Secure base: A concept from attachment theory: a close person you can come back to for support, which makes it easier to go out into the world.
  • Dependency paradox: An expression from the attachment literature that the authors cite: the more confidently people can rely on each other, the more independent they are.
  • Hazan: Cindy Hazan, an American psychologist. In 1987, together with Phillip Shaver, she showed that adults in romantic relationships have attachment styles too.
  • Shaver: Phillip Shaver, an American psychologist, one of the founders of research into adult attachment.
  • Secure style: An attachment style in which a person finds closeness easy and isn't afraid of being left. By the estimate the authors cite, about half of adults have it.
  • Anxious style: An attachment style in which a person longs for closeness but keeps doubting whether they're loved, and reacts sharply to any sign of distance.
  • Avoidant style: An attachment style in which a person wants a relationship but feels hemmed in as things get closer, and keeps their distance.
  • Fearful-avoidant style: A rare attachment style that combines the fear of closeness with the fear of losing it.
  • Attachment system: An inner mechanism that keeps track of whether a close person is near, and pushes us to bring them back if the bond seems under threat.
  • Activating strategies: A term from the book: thoughts and feelings that push a person with an anxious style to get close to their partner again, such as obsessive thoughts about them.
  • Protest behaviour: A term from the book: any action meant to win back a partner's attention, such as endless calls, pointed silence or attempts to make them jealous.
  • Deactivating strategies: A term from the book: the ways in which a person with an avoidant style turns down their need for closeness, such as looking for flaws in their partner.
  • Phantom ex: An image from the book, not a scientific term: an idealised former partner against whom a person with an avoidant style measures every new one.
  • Abundance philosophy: The authors' advice for the dating stage: remember that there are many suitable people, and don't stake everything on one person too early.
  • Effective communication: A term from the book: telling your partner about a need openly, specifically and without blame, and without apologising for it.

All terms

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