Signs of Secure Attachment Style: 5 Most Common Traits in Adult Relationships

The signs of a secure attachment are the first green flags you should look out for when dating a potential new partner. Your attachment style influences how you handle relationships, and a secure attachment corresponds with lots of positive behaviors that help to make and maintain healthy, supportive relationships. Knowing your own attachment type can also help you to understand your own relationship patterns.

In this post, we’re diving into secure attachment styles: what they look like, how to recognise secure traits in yourself or your partner, why you should know your own attachment style, and how to find out if you have a secure attachment type.

DISCOVER YOUR ATTACHMENT STYLE

What Does Secure Attachment Style Look Like?

Your attachment style has a significant impact on your approach to life and relationships (Bowlby, 1988). For example, someone with a secure attachment style might be more likely to go for a promotion at work, successfully mend a ruptured friendship, or take a leap to move somewhere better suited to their lifestyle. We’d all like to be emotionally balanced, positive risk-takers – so how and why does a secure attachment lead to these attributes?

How Secure Attachment Develops

When we’re born, we’re extremely reliant on our caregivers for survival. Even though we don’t yet understand the world, we develop an innate response to our primary caregiver’s behavior which goes on to influence our development long-term. Your primary caregiver is whoever took on the responsibility of looking after you, regardless of whether or not they were a parent.

This is how your attachment style develops in infancy – if you have a primary caregiver who responds appropriately when you cry, you develop a sense of trust that your needs will be met. Your caregiver’s responses should be quick and consistent in order to develop a secure attachment. This is particularly important during the first 18 months of life, when your attachment style is the most likely to change.

Examples of Secure Attachment in Adults

This sense of trust that develops in a secure attachment goes on to provide the scaffolding not only for your relationships to others, but also for your relationship with yourself. As secure children have learned that their caregiver will consistently be there for them, they are more likely to explore, to take positive risks, and to be able to cope with their feelings when their caregiver isn’t there.

This trend persists into adulthood: in an incredible study spanning 30 years of research, scientists found that adults with secure attachments are more likely to be self-assured, better at emotional regulation, more adept at managing social situations, and more adaptable to life changes and stressors.

Secure Attachments in Relationships

In relationships, secure attachments have been associated with quicker problem solving and reduced feelings of negativity during difficult discussions. One landmark study in 1990 found that secure attachment styles were associated with greater senses of trust and commitment within a romantic relationship, more positive emotions, and greater general satisfaction.

It’s clear that having a secure attachment can benefit the quality and longevity of our romantic relationships. Understanding your own attachment style and working towards security is important, but understanding your partner’s attachment style is equally as important when you’re building a relationship together.

You might have a sense of your partner’s attachment style if you’ve been together for a while, but in the early days of dating it can sometimes be harder to tell. When you first start getting to know a potential partner, there are 5 big signs of secure attachment that you can look out for…

Main Signs of Secure Attachment

In 2004, a group of psychologists investigated how couples interacted with each other and how their behavior corresponded to their attachment styles. They then categorized and analyzed their behavior, resulting in a scientist-approved list of the 5 most common relationship traits in securely attached partners:

Values Intimacy

A person with secure attachment in a relationship is more likely to value intimacy with their partner. They care about building trust and closeness in a relationship, and their approach to the beginning of a relationship will usually feel easy and well-paced – not staggered or love-bombed.

Shows Ability for Intimacy and Warmth

As well as valuing intimacy, partners with secure attachment styles demonstrate that they are able to build the intimacy they look for with others. They are open to developing trust, and they show their partners kindness and warmth even when they are feeling negative emotions.

Balance of Personal Responsibility

Because they are self-reliant yet warm to others, secure partners in relationships are able to balance caring for others with caring for themselves. They are able to look after others without neglecting their own needs.

TAKE A LOOK AT THE SECURE ATTACHMENT WORKBOOK

Comfortable with Ability to Comfort

Secure partners trust in their ability to comfort others, rather than worrying their support may be too much or too little. They feel that they know how to support their partners appropriately, because they have a strong internal model of what appropriate support looks like.

Acknowledges Contributions to Issues

Nobody is perfect and no relationship is without challenges, and securely attached partners know this. They are able to acknowledge and recognize their contributions to a relationship problem and work towards a solution, without feeling the need to assign blame.

Signs of Insecure Attachment

As well as the 5 traits most often associated with secure attachment styles, these researchers also detailed 5 traits that were least commonly associated with secure attachment styles. They were:

1. Focusing on their partner’s faults and assigning blame instead of problem solving
2. Pulling back if offered comfort
3. Difficulty regulating emotions, or often overwhelmed with negative feelings
4. Does not offer comfort
5. Displays hostility or coercion towards their partner

Regarding insecure attachment styles, avoidant partners were more likely to minimize or ignore their partner’s distress and present themselves as independent or immune to vulnerability. Anxious partners were more likely to be concerned with and draw attention to their own problems, make “overly strong demands” for affection, and show disproportionate hostility, frustration, and anger.

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Discover If You Have a Secure Attachment Style

If you don’t recognize the signs of secure attachment style in yourself or your partner, don’t worry; even though your first 18 months are pivotal to developing a secure attachment style, your attachment style is not set in stone for life.

Maturity, building self-efficacy, and positive interpretations of life events can all contribute to developing a secure attachment style over time – and researchers find that we do skew closer toward secure attachments as we age (Chopik et al., 2024).

Interestingly, this research appears to show that the correlation between self-efficacy and secure attachment is a two-way street. Even though secure attachments support self-confidence and self-esteem, achieving our goals and building self-efficacy first appears to strengthen our security in attachments in turn.

Knowing your current attachment style can help you to understand your feelings and experiences in relationships, including the one you have with yourself. Armed with this information, you are better equipped to tackle life’s challenges – particularly if you find yourself facing the same difficulties over and over and you’re not quite sure why.

Discover whether you have a secure attachment style now with our Attachment Quiz.

Conclusion

Adults with secure attachment types are more likely to have an innate sense of trust, responsibility, and adaptability than those without, and they demonstrate more positive behaviors within the context of relationships. People with secure attachment styles are particularly effective when it comes to supporting their partner, working through relational difficulties, and building genuine trust and closeness.

Even though our early lives form the basis of our attachment types, researchers have discovered that our attachment types can change over time. However, this requires motivation and a real desire to change – although positive relationship experiences can support the development of a secure attachment style, dating a person with a secure attachment won’t change your own attachment style overnight.

References 

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Clinical applications of attachment theory.

Chopik, W. J., Weidmann, R., & Oh, J. (2024). Attachment security and how to get it. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 18(1), e12808.

Sesemann, E. M., Kruse, J., Gardner, B. C., Broadbent, C. L., & Spencer, T. A. (2017). Observed attachment and self-report affect within romantic relationships. Journal of couple & Relationship Therapy, 16(2), 102-121.

Simpson, J. A. (1990). Influence of attachment styles on romantic relationships. Journal of personality and social psychology, 59(5), 971.

Sroufe, L. A. (2005). Attachment and development: A prospective, longitudinal study from birth to adulthood. Attachment & Human Development, 7(4), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616730500365928

Wampler, K. S., Riggs, B., & Kimball, T. G. (2004). Observing attachment behavior in couples: The adult attachment behavior q‐set (AABQ). Family process, 43(3), 315-335.