Attachment is part of how we relate to others from an early age. Attachment is about the emotional bond that exists between two people — usually in a family or marriage context. Understanding your own attachment style and that of your spouse can help you figure out why you do the things you do during conflict or even everyday married life. 

Understanding attachment can also help you see what you might do differently in order to secure and strengthen the bond between you and your spouse. Attachment is fundamental to marriage — so read through this article and the next three if you really want to learn about what is probably the most significant undercurrent in marriage.

This is the first of a four-part series on attachment. This article will focus on anxious attachment and how it affects a couples’ relationship in marriage. 

How Your Attachment Style Develops

The basic idea of attachment theory is that how you were loved as an infant becomes critical to how you relate to significant others in your life as an adult. When you are a baby, your primary caregiver, usually a parent, will have a unique way of relating to you. We refer to this caregiver as an attachment figure. When you get married, your spouse becomes your key attachment figure. When you have kids, you become an important attachment figure to them. But we start with our own primary caregiver and the essential components of how they relate to you centre on this one fundamental question: was my attachment figure nearby, accessible, and attentive to me?

If a child grows up in an environment with an attachment figure who is available to meet their attachment needs, the child will grow up feeling loved, secure, and confident. The child is then likely to explore his or her environment more freely, play with others and be sociable.[1]

Attachment in Adulthood

The challenges or attachment injuries a person experiences in childhood impact not only them, but also the way they relate to their spouse. See our previous article: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) and the Impact on Your Marriage. For an adult, the attachment system that was formed in childhood gives rise to the emotional bond that develops between him or her and their romantic partner. Two researchers took Bowlby’s studies of attachment and explored them in the context of marriage.[2] They noted certain parallels: infants/caregivers and adult romantic relationships share the following features:

Both feel safe when the other is nearby and responsive

Both engage in close, intimate bodily contact

Both feel insecure when the other is inaccessible

Both share discoveries with one another

Both study one another’s facial features carefully

Typically, once a person’s attachment style is established in childhood it remains with the individual through their adulthood. 

Two terms that we will use frequently when talking about attachment are the words avoidance and anxiety. Avoidance is about whether or not a person is comfortable with closeness to a significant other. Do you seek connection and being seen? Or do you shy away from it or even really run from it? Anxiety is about your trust in the security of your connection. Do you feel at peace that your significant other is available, responsive and committed? Or are you needing to reassure yourself of this sometimes or even all the time? 

Each person has an attachment style to their spouse. Sometimes, one spouse is one style, and the other spouse is a different one. For example, if you are anxious about your connection to your partner, your partner may be securely attached to you, which means the problem is not that your partner is unavailable or unreliable, but that you are not able to rest in and trust that he or she is available. That’s the part you have to take responsibility for. Conversely, your partner may begin the marriage as a securely attached person,