7.
Getting Comfortably Close: The Secure Attachment Style
Writing about people with a secure attachment style seems like a boring task. After all, what is there to say? If you’re secure, you’re very reliable, consistent, and trustworthy. You don’t try to dodge intimacy or go nuts over your relationships. There’s very little drama in your romantic ties—no high and lows, no yo-yos and roller coasters to speak of. So what is there to say?”
Actually, there’s a lot to say! In the process of understanding attachment and how a secure bond can transform someone’s life, we’ve grown to admire and appreciate the secures of the world. They’re attuned to their partners’ emotional and physical cues and know how to respond to them. Their emotional system doesn’t get too riled up in the face of threat (as with the anxious) but doesn’t get shut down either (as with the avoidant). In this chapter, you’ll learn more about the secure traits and what makes them unique. And if you’re secure and don’t usually seek help in the relationship arena, you’ll be forewarned because you too may one day stumble into an ineffective relationship that can affect you in a deleterious way.

THE SECURE BUFFERING EFFECT

Time and again, research shows that the best predictor of happiness in a relationship is a secure attachment style. Studies demonstrate that individuals with a secure attachment style report higher levels of satisfaction in their relationships than people with other attachment styles. Patrick Keelan, as part of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto, conducted a study to test this issue. Together with the late psychology professor Kenneth Dion and his longtime research partner and wife, Karen Dion, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, they followed over one hundred university students who were in dating relationships over a four-month period. They found that secure individuals maintained high levels of relationship satisfaction, commitment, and trust. In contrast, insecure individuals reported decreasing levels of all three over the same four months.
But what happens when secure and insecure interact? In a separate experiment, researchers got observers to rate couples’ functioning during a joint interaction. It’s no surprise that secure couples—those in which both partners were secure—functioned better than insecure couples—those in which both partners were either anxious or avoidant. But what was more interesting was that there was no observed difference between secure couples and “mixed” couples— those with only one secure partner. They both showed less conflict and were rated as better functioning than were the “insecure” dyads.
So not only do people with a secure attachment style fare better in relationships, they also create a buffering effect, somehow managing to raise their insecure partner’s relationship satisfaction and functioning to their own high level. This is a very important finding. It means that if you’re with someone secure, they nurture you into a more secure stance.

TELL ME, IS IT MAGIC?

What is it about people with a secure attachment style that creates this “magical” effect on their relationships? Are secures always the most friendly, likable, or sociable people around? Can you recognize them on the basis of their charm, composure, or self-confidence? The answer to all these questions is no. As with the other attachment styles, personality or physical traits won’t give secures away. Secure people fit almost every description across the personality spectrum:
• Aaron, 30, a chemical engineer, is an introvert with a strong dislike of social events. He spends most of his free time working, reading, or with his brothers and parents and finds it hard to make new connections. He had his first sexual experience two years ago.
• Brenda, 27, a movie producer, acts as a social hub, knows everyone, and is always where the action is. She had one serious boyfriend from age 18 to 24 and has been seeing other people ever since.
• Gregory, 50, an electrical engineer and divorced father of two, is very outgoing and easy to get along with. He’s still licking his wounds from his failed marriage and is on the lookout for wife number two.
Secures come in every possible shape, size, and form. Something else distinguishes them that is harder to recognize, at least at first. Janet, 41, experienced that “something” firsthand:
Overwhelmed by the amount of work she’d left unfinished before the weekend, Janet woke up Monday morning in a state of dread. She was convinced that there was no way she’d ever get through the enormous pile on her desk, and her situation made her feel incompetent. She turned to her husband, Stan, who was lying in bed besides her and—out of nowhere—told him how disappointed she was with his business’s progress and how worried she was that he wasn’t going to make it. Stan was taken aback, but responded to Janet’s attack without any visible trace of animosity. “I understand that you’re frightened and there might be some comfort for you if I feel frightened too, but if you’re trying to encourage me to be more efficient at work—which you often do—this isn’t the best way to do it.”
Janet was dumbfounded. She knew he was right—that she’d been expressing only her own concerns. Seeing that she was tearful, Stan offered to drive her to work. In the car, she apologized. She hadn’t meant the stuff she’d said, but she was in such an emotional funk that everything seemed dreary to her.
It was then that she realized what a wonderfully supportive husband Stan was. If he had attacked her out of the blue, she’d have struck back and World War III would have broken out. She wouldn’t have stayed collected enough to see what was really going on, to understand that it wasn’t about her but about him. Stan’s ability to handle the situation in the way he did required a real emotional gift. “I have to remember how good it feels to be on the receiving end of that and offer some in return someday,” she thought to herself.

WHEN THREAT GOES UNDETECTED

People with a secure attachment style, like Stan, are characterized by something very real but not outwardly visible—they are programmed to expect their partners to be loving and responsive and don’t worry much about losing their partners’ love. They feel extremely comfortable with intimacy and closeness and have an uncanny ability to communicate their needs and respond to their partners’ needs.
In fact, a series of studies aimed at accessing subjects’ unconscious minds (by measuring how long it takes them to report words that flash quickly on a monitor, as described in chapter 6) compared the reactions of people with anxious, avoidant, and secure attachment styles. The studies found that secures have more unconscious access to themes such as love, hugs, and closeness and less access to danger, loss, and separation. The negative threatening themes didn’t get through to them as easily. However, unlike avoidants, who didn’t react to these words initially but did react to them when they were distracted by another task, secures continued to overlook them even in the distraction condition. Unlike people with an avoidant attachment style, secures aren’t concerned with threatening relationship thoughts even when they are caught off guard. In other words, they don’t have to make an effort to repress these ideas; they simply aren’t worried about these issues—either consciously or subconsciously! What’s more, when secures were specifically—and in this experiment, consciously—asked to think about separation, abandonment, and loss, they succeeded in doing so and did become more nervous as a result, as measured by skin conductance tests (which measure the amount of sweat on the skin). Remarkably, though, when they were told to stop thinking about these topics, their skin conductance abruptly went back to normal. So it seems that what may come as hard work for some—to keep an even emotional keel in the face of threat—comes effortlessly for someone secure. They simply aren’t as sensitive to the negative cues of the world.
This stance influences every aspect of their romantic relationships. They are:
• Great conflict busters—During a fight they don’t feel the need to act defensively or to injure or punish their partner, and so prevent the situation from escalating.
• Mentally flexible—They are not threatened by criticism. They’re willing to reconsider their ways, and if necessary, revise their beliefs and strategies.
• Effective communicators—They expect others to be understanding and responsive, so expressing their feelings freely and accurately to their partners comes naturally to them.
• Not game players—They want closeness and believe others want the same, so why play games?
• Comfortable with closeness, unconcerned about boundaries—They seek intimacy and aren’t afraid of being “enmeshed.” Because they aren’t overwhelmed by a fear of being slighted (as are the anxious) or the need to deactivate (as are the avoidants), they find it easy to enjoy closeness, whether physical or emotional.
• Quick to forgive—They assume their partners’ intentions are good and are therefore likely to forgive them when they do something hurtful.
• Inclined to view sex and emotional intimacy as one—They don’t need to create distance by separating the two (by being close either emotionally or sexually but not both).
• Treat their partners like royalty—When you’ve become part of their inner circle, they treat you with love and respect.
• Secure in their power to improve the relationship—They are confident in their positive beliefs about themselves and others, which makes this assumption logical.
• Responsible for their partners’ well-being—They expect others to be responsive and loving toward them and so are responsive to others’ needs.
Many people who live with insecure partners cannot even begin to imagine how fundamentally different life with a secure person can be. For starters, they don’t engage in the “relationship dance” that therapists often refer to—whereby one partner gets closer while the other steps back in order to maintain a certain distance in the relationship at all times. Instead there’s a feeling of growing closeness and intimacy. Second, they are able to sensitively and empathically—and most important, coherently—discuss their emotions with you. Last, the secure party engulfs his or her partner in an emotionally protective shield that makes facing the outside world an easier task. We often fail to realize what a bonus these attributes are unless they’re missing. It’s no coincidence that the people most appreciative of a secure relationship are those who’ve had relationships with both secure and insecure partners. Though these people will tell you that secure and insecure relationships are worlds apart, without the knowledge of attachment theory, they too are unable to put their finger on what exactly that difference is.

WHERE DOES THIS “TALENT” COME FROM?

If you are secure, are you born with this exceptional capacity or is it something you learn along the way? John Bowlby believed that attachment styles are a function of life experience—especially of our interaction with our parents during infancy. A person will develop a secure attachment style if her parents are sensitive and responsive to her needs. Such a child will learn that she can rely on her parents, confident that they’ll be available to her whenever she needs them. But Bowlby maintained that it didn’t end there; he believed a secure child would carry this confidence into adulthood and future relationships with romantic partners.
Does the evidence support these predictions? In 2000, Leslie Atkinson, who conducts child development research at Ryerson University in Toronto, in collaboration with several other colleagues, conducted a meta-analysis that was based on forty-one prior studies. In total, the study analyzed over two thousand parent-child pairs to evaluate the connection between parent sensitivity and child attachment style. The results showed a weak but significant link between the two—children of mothers who were sensitive to their needs were more likely to have a secure attachment style, but the weak link means that, aside from methodological issues, there could be many other variables that come into play to determine a child’s attachment style. Among the factors that were found to increase a child’s chance of being secure were an easy temperament (which makes it easier for parents to be responsive), positive maternal conditions—marital satisfaction, low stress and depression, and social support—and fewer hours with a nonparental caretaker.
To complicate matters further, an idea that has been gaining scientific momentum in recent years is that we are genetically predisposed toward a certain attachment style. It was found, for example, that adult identical twins, who share 100 percent of genes, are much more likely to have the same attachment style than nonidentical twins, who share only 50 percent of genes. Both identical and fraternal twins are thought to share the same basic environment. In other words, genes too play an important role in determining our attachment style.
But even if we were secure in infancy, will it last into adulthood? To test this question, attachment researchers reassessed subjects who had been infants in the 1970s and 1980s and were now around 20 years old. Would the men and women classified as secure in early childhood remain secure as adults? The answer remains unclear: Three studies failed to find a correlation between attachment security in infancy and in adulthood, while two other studies did find a statistically significant connection between the two. What is clear is that even if there is a correlation between attachment style in childhood and in adulthood, it is weak at best.
So where does the secure attachment come from? As more studies become available, there is increasing evidence that a secure attachment style doesn’t originate from a single source. The equation of a caring and sensitive parent producing a secure-for-life child is too one-dimensional; instead it seems that an entire mosaic of factors comes together to create this attachment pattern: our early connection with our parents, our genes, and also something else—our romantic experiences as adults. On average, about 70 to 75 percent of adults remain consistently in the same attachment category at different points in their lives, while the remaining 30 to 25 to 30 percent of the population report a change in their attachment style.
Researchers attribute this change to romantic relationships in adulthood that are so powerful that they actually revise our most basic beliefs and attitudes toward connectedness. And yes, that change can happen in both directions—secure people can become less secure and people who were originally insecure can become increasingly secure. If you are insecure, this piece of information is vital and could be your ticket to happiness in relationships. If you are secure, you should be aware of this finding because you have a lot to lose by becoming less secure.
Tapping Into the Secure Mind-set—Creating a Secure Base for Your Partner
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As you recall, one of the most important roles we play in our partners’ lives is providing a secure base: creating the conditions that enable our partners to pursue their interests and explore the world in confidence. Brooke Feeney and Roxanne Thrush, of Carnegie Mellon University, in a study published in 2010, found that three specific behaviors underlie this broad term. You too can provide a secure base by adopting the following secure behaviors:
• Be available: Respond sensitively to their distress, allow them to be dependent on you when they feel the need, check in with them from time to time, and provide comfort when things go wrong.
• Don’t interfere: Provide behind-the-scenes support for their endeavors. Help in a way that leaves them with the initiative and the feeling of power. Allow them to do their own thing without trying to take over the situation, micromanage, or undermine their confidence and abilities.
• Encourage: Provide encouragement and be accepting of their learning and personal growth goals. Boost their self-esteem.

IT’S NOT ME; IT’S YOU—CHOOSING A PARTNER

If you have a secure attachment style, you know how to sidestep many of the obstacles that people with other attachment styles have difficulty dealing with. You naturally gravitate toward those with the capacity to make you happy. Unlike the anxious, you don’t let an activated attachment system distract you—you aren’t addicted to the highs and lows of being with someone who keeps you guessing all the time. Unlike avoidants, you aren’t diverted by false fantasies of the perfect person waiting for you or “the one” that got away, and you don’t unconsciously employ deactivating strategies that cause you to get cold feet when someone starts to get close.
As a secure, the opposite is true of you—you believe that there are many potential partners open to intimacy and closeness who would be responsive to your needs. You know you deserve to be loved and valued at all times. You are programmed to expect that. If someone sends out vibes that are not in line with these expectations—if they’re inconsistent or evasive—you automatically lose interest. Tanya, 28, a secure woman we interviewed, put it very simply:
“I’ve slept with eleven guys in my life and they’ve all wanted to have a serious relationship with me. I guess it’s something I convey. I know that I get the message across that I’m someone who’s worth getting to know, not just in bed, that if they stick around, there’s a treasure to be revealed.
“The guys I show interest in don’t play games—that is very important to me. They call immediately the next day, or at the very latest the next evening. In return, right from the start I show them that I’m interested. There were only two men in my life that waited two days to call, and I screened them both out immediately.”
Notice that Tanya wastes no time at all on men she perceives as not being responsive enough to her needs. To some, her decisions might seem rash, but for secure people such behavior comes naturally. Studies in the field of attachment have confirmed that subjects with a more secure attachment style are indeed less likely to play games. Tanya knows intuitively which partners are wrong for her. Game playing is a deal breaker as far as she is concerned. The important thing about her approach is that Tanya assumes that if her partner treats her disrespectfully, it’s indicative of his inability to be responsive in a relationship, and not of her own worth. She also doesn’t have too many negative feelings about these two men. It’s just a nonissue for her, and she instinctively moves on. This is very different from someone anxious who would probably assume that she was to blame for her date’s actions. She might start to second-guess her own behavior—“I must have come on too strong,” “I should have invited him up,” or “It was so stupid to ask about his ex”—giving the wrong people a second, third, or fourth chance.
In Tanya’s case, she’d seen enough and found it pointless to move forward with men she could tell were unable to meet her emotional needs. But in case of doubt, one of the tools most frequently used by people with a secure attachment style is effective communication—they simply surface their feelings and see how their date reacts. If their partner shows true concern for their well-being and a willingness to find a middle ground, they’ll give the relationship a chance. If not, they won’t stick around to fight what they believe to be a losing battle (see chapter 11).
Finding the Right Partner—the Secure Way
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The principles we advocate throughout this book for finding the right partner are employed intuitively by people with a secure attachment style. They include:
• Spotting “smoking guns” very early on and treating them as deal breakers.
• Effectively communicating your needs from day one.
• Subscribing to the belief that there are many (yes, many!) potential partners who could make you happy.
• Never taking blame for a date’s offensive behavior. When a partner acts inconsiderately or hurtfully, secures acknowledge that it says a lot about the other person rather than about themselves.
• Expecting to be treated with respect, dignity, and love.

DOES THIS MEAN THAT SECURES ARE IMMUNE TO RELATIONSHIP PROBLEMS?

Secure people don’t always hook up with one another—they date and marry people of all three attachment styles. The good news is that if you’re secure, you have the potential to get along with people who have anxious or avoidant attachment styles—but only if you are able to maintain your secure frame of mind. If you find yourself becoming less secure, not only do you lose a priceless gift, but you also experience less happiness and satisfaction in your relationships.
If you’re secure, one of the reasons you’re able to maintain a satisfying relationship with someone who has an insecure attachment style is because he or she will gradually become more secure as a result of being with you. When you date someone anxious, this is most often what happens. One of the things that Mary Ainsworth observed in the mother-infant relationship was that secure mothers were a special breed. It’s not that they tended more to their children, or held them more than mothers of anxious or avoidant children, but they seemed to possess a kind of “sixth sense” and intuitively knew when the child wanted to be held. They sensed their child’s emerging distress and acted on it before it turned into a full-blown fit. And if the child did get distressed, they just seemed to know how to soothe her.
We find this phenomenon in adult couples too. Secure adults naturally know how to soothe their partners and take care of them—it’s an innate talent. This can be seen in the couple’s transition to parenthood. Jeffry Simpson from the University of Minnesota and Steven Rholes from Texas A&M University—coeditors of the book Attachment Theory and Close Relationships, together with Lorne Campbell and Carol Wilson—found that during the shift into parenthood, anxiously attached women were more likely to move toward security in their interactions with their partners if they perceived their spouses as available, supportive, and accepting during pregnancy—all secure traits. In other words, secure adults’ sensitivity and encouragement have the same effect on their partners as the secure mother’s on her infant, enough to create a shift in their partners’ attachment style.
A word of caution, however. Sometimes secure people, despite their innate talent for warding off potentially unsuitable matches and making their partners more secure, can find themselves in bad relationships. This can happen not only when they’re inexperienced but also when they respond to their long-term partner’s unacceptable behavior, by continuing to give them the benefit of the doubt and tolerate their actions.
Nathan, 35, was at his wits’ end. In the eight years since he’d married Shelly, things had gone from bad to worse. Shelly’s temper tantrums, rare at first, now occurred almost daily. Her outbursts also increased in severity; she broke household objects and on one occasion even slapped him. But the problems in their relationship didn’t end there. Nathan not only caught her having online affairs, but strongly suspected that she was having real-life ones as well. Though Shelly threatened to leave many times—almost as if she was testing Nathan’s patience and tolerance—she didn’t pick up and move out. He was sure that once this “period” was over, everything would return to normal. He also saw himself as responsible for Shelly’s well-being and didn’t want to abandon her when she was going through such a “rough patch.” So he put up with the abuse and the affairs. Finally, Shelly announced that she no longer loved him, had met someone else, and was ending the marriage. Once Shelly decided to leave, Nathan accepted her decision and didn’t try to win her back.
Now with the divorce behind him, Nathan is relieved that Shelly took matters into her own hands and freed him from a difficult existence. He’s even open to meeting a new person and making her part of his life. But he still finds it hard to explain what kept him there for so long. Attachment theory offers an explanation. For one, as we’ve seen, people with a secure attachment style view their partners’ well-being as their responsibility. As long as they have reason to believe their partner is in some sort of trouble, they’ll continue to back him or her. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver, in their book Attachment in Adulthood, show that people with a secure attachment style are more likely than others to forgive their partner for wrongdoing. They explain this as a complex combination of cognitive and emotional abilities: “Forgiveness requires difficult regulatory maneuvers . . . understanding a transgressor’s needs and motives, and making generous attributions and appraisals concerning the transgressor’s traits and hurtful actions. . . . Secure people are likely to offer relatively benign explanations of their partners’ hurtful actions and be inclined to forgive the partner.” Also, as we’ve seen previously in this chapter, secure people just naturally dwell less on the negative and can turn off upsetting emotions without becoming defensively distant.
The good news is that people with a secure attachment style have healthy instincts and usually catch on very early that someone is not cut out to be their partner. The bad news is that when secure people do, on occasion, enter into a negative relationship, they might not know when to call it quits—especially if it’s a long-term, committed relationship in which they feel responsible for their partner’s happiness.

HOW CAN YOU TELL IF THINGS HAVE GONE TOO FAR?

If you’re secure but start to feel agitated, worried, or jealous (anxious traits), or if you find yourself thinking twice before expressing your feelings, or are becoming less trusting of or starting to play games with your partner (avoidant traits), it is a huge warning sign and very likely that you’re with the wrong person or that you’ve been through a difficult experience that has shaken the core of your secure foundation. Life events such as the loss of a loved one, an illness, or a divorce can cause such a shift.
If you’re still in the relationship, remember that just because you can get along with anyone doesn’t mean you have to. If you’re unhappy after having tried every way to make things work, chances are that you should move on. It’s in your best interest to end a dysfunctional relationship rather than get stuck forever with the wrong person just because you’re secure.
If you’ve experienced loss of an attachment figure, for whatever reason, remember that it wasn’t your set of beliefs that were to blame and it is well worth holding on to them. It is better to find a way to heal the wounds and maintain the hope that there are other people out there who share your need for intimacy and closeness. You can be happy again.

A FINAL WORD OF RECOGNITION FOR THE SECURES OF THIS WORLD

Before we learned about attachment theory, we took the secures of the world for granted, and even dismissed them as boring. But looking through the attachment prism, we’ve come to appreciate secure people’s talents and abilities. The goofy Homer Simpson- like colleague whom we barely noticed was suddenly transformed into a guy with impressive relationship talent who treats his wife admirably, and our get-a-life neighbor suddenly became a perceptive, caring person who keeps the entire family emotionally in check. But not all secure people are homebodies or goofy. You are not settling by going secure! Secures come in all shapes and forms. Many are good-looking and sexy. Whether plain or gorgeous, we’ve learned to appreciate them all for what they really are—the “super-mates” of evolution—and we hope that you will too.