Attachment Styles: Why understanding them will transform your relationships
Most of us have taken a Myers-Briggs personality test at some point — cheerfully sharing our four-letter type as a fun shorthand for who we are. But here’s the truth: when it comes to understanding how you behave in close relationships, knowing your emotional attachment style is far more important, practical, and transformative than knowing whether you’re an INFJ or an ESTP. Myers-Briggs tells you how you think. Attachment theory tells you how you love — and why. Developed by psychiatrist John Bowlby and expanded by psychologist Mary Ainsworth, attachment theory proposes that the bonds we formed with our earliest caregivers create an emotional blueprint that quietly governs how we seek closeness, handle conflict, and respond to intimacy for the rest of our lives. There are four core styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Secure Attachment Secure attachment forms when a caregiver is consistently warm, present, and responsive. The child internalises a foundational belief: I am worthy of love, and others can be trusted. Why it matters in relationships: Securely attached people create a stable emotional environment for their partners. They can tolerate disagreement without it feeling like the end of the world, and they offer consistency that builds deep, lasting trust over time. Anxious Attachment Anxious attachment develops when caregiving was inconsistent — loving at times, emotionally unavailable at others. The child learns that love is unpredictable and develops a hypervigilant radar constantly scanning for signs of abandonment. Why it matters in relationships: Without awareness, anxious attachment can drive the very abandonment it fears — pushing partners away through clinginess or emotional intensity. With awareness, the anxious person can learn to self-soothe, communicate needs directly, and choose partners who offer genuine consistency rather than recreating familiar unpredictability. Avoidant Attachment Avoidant attachment emerges when a caregiver was emotionally distant or dismissive of vulnerability. The child adapts by suppressing emotional needs and becoming fiercely self-reliant. Why it matters in relationships: Avoidant individuals frequently end up in the classic anxious-avoidant cycle — the more their partner pursues, the more they retreat, which triggers more pursuit. Recognising this pattern is the first step to interrupting it. Avoidant people are not incapable of love; they simply need to learn that vulnerability is survivable. Disorganized Attachment (Fearful-Avoidant) Disorganized attachment is the most complex style, often rooted in early environments where the caregiver was simultaneously a source of comfort and fear. It leaves no coherent survival strategy — only contradiction. Why it matters in relationships: Disorganized attachment can make relationships feel like a battlefield of push and pull with no clear resolution. Understanding this style — in yourself or a partner — replaces confusion with compassion, and opens the door to targeted healing through therapy and safe relational experiences. The Bigger Picture: Why You Need to Know This Your attachment style is not a personality quirk — it is the lens through which you experience love. It shapes who you are drawn to, how you fight, how you repair, and whether intimacy feels safe or threatening. When two people’s unexamined attachment systems collide, relationships don’t just become difficult — they become stuck, cycling through the same arguments and patterns without ever understanding why. Knowing your attachment style gives you something Myers-Briggs never can: a roadmap to your most vulnerable, most relational self. It helps you stop taking your partner’s behaviour personally, recognise your own triggers before they take over, and communicate your needs honestly rather than acting them out. Most powerfully, unlike a fixed personality type, your attachment style can change. Through self-awareness, therapy, and safe relationships, moving toward secure attachment is entirely possible. You cannot choose how to love better until you understand how you currently love. That is where it all begins. Bassy Schwartz, LMFT is the founder of Core Relationships, a boutique therapy practice in the Five Towns offering individual, couples, and family therapy. Her work centers on helping clients build safer, more authentic connections by healing the patterns that block intimacy and trust. Bassy is trained in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and integrates trauma-informed care and relational insight in her approach. She believes therapy is not about “fixing” people — it’s about creating the safety to be fully human
Before you say “I do”: why pre-marital therapy is the best investment you’ll ever make
Couples spend thousands on venues, flowers, and catering — yet few invest in the one thing that actually determines whether the marriage lasts. Building on solid ground, not assumption Wedding planning is a masterclass in logistics. Venue, catering, flowers, guest lists, seating charts — every detail scrutinized, every dollar debated. And yet, most couples spend almost no time preparing for the actual marriage that follows. Pre-marital therapy changes that. It is not something reserved for couples “on the rocks.” It is, quite simply, one of the smartest investments two people can make before walking down the aisle. Every individual enters marriage carrying invisible luggage — unspoken expectations about money, family roles, intimacy, parenting, and conflict. Most of the time, neither partner even knows the luggage is there until it spills open during a heated argument. Pre-marital therapy creates a structured, guided space to unpack all of it before those arguments happen. According to Colorado State University’s College of Health and Human Sciences, pre-marital counseling is associated with lower rates of conflict, reduced likelihood of divorce, and higher overall relationship quality (Carlson et al., 2012). A skilled therapist helps couples identify the values and assumptions each person brings from their family of origin. How did your parents handle disagreements? What does “enough money” look like to you? These are not romantic questions, but they are profoundly important ones. Answering them together, before marriage, gives a relationship a foundation built on clarity rather than hope. Reframing the stigma Pre-marital therapy still carries a faint stigma in some circles — a sense that seeking help means something is wrong. But the couples who seek it are not troubled. They are intentional. They understand that love is a starting point, not a finish line, and that building a great marriage takes knowledge, skill, and practice — just like anything else worth doing well. Strong, happy couples go to pre-marital therapy. Forward-thinking couples go. Couples who want to arrive at their 10th, 20th, and 50th anniversaries with more love, not less — they go. It is not a warning sign. It is a green one. And the research backs this up: a 2014 meta-analysis in the Journal of Family Psychology, examining over 10,000 couples, found that those who participated in premarital counseling had a 31% lower likelihood of divorce than those who did not. Learning to fight well — before you have to Conflict in marriage is not a sign something is wrong. It is inevitable, and in many ways healthy. What matters is not whether couples fight, but how. Dr. John Gottman’s landmark research at the University of Washington demonstrated that specific patterns of conflict — not the frequency of disagreements — are among the strongest predictors of divorce, with some behavioral markers allowing researchers to predict marital failure with over 90% accuracy. Pre-marital therapy teaches practical, evidence-based communication tools: how to raise a complaint without launching an attack, how to de-escalate when emotions run high, how to repair after a rupture. These skills, learned in a calm, low-stakes environment, become muscle memory for the harder moments ahead. Couples who practice them before marriage do not just argue less painfully — they build trust in each other’s willingness to work through difficulty. That trust is worth more than any centerpiece. “Pre-marital counseling is not couples therapy for problems you don’t yet have. It is training for the relationship you want to build.” The conversations couples avoid — and why they matter most There are topics many couples sidestep because they feel too awkward, too heavy, or “too soon.” Finances are a big one. So are questions about children — not just whether to have them, but how to raise them. Religious practice, career ambition, aging parents, sexual needs, household labor — the full landscape of a shared life contains countless decisions that deserve a real conversation before they become an argument. A therapist provides the structure and safety to have those conversations. Research by Hicks et al. (2004) found that proactively discussing difficult topics before marriage — including finances, children, and religion — leads to healthier, more productive conversations about those same matters throughout the life of the marriage. Couples are often surprised to discover they were operating from very different assumptions about things they had never directly discussed. Uncovering those gaps before marriage is a gift to the relationship. An investment with lasting returns Consider the math: According to The Knot’s Real Weddings Study — which surveyed over 10,000 couples married in 2025 — the average U.S. wedding costs around $33,000 to $36,000 (if only…). A course of pre-marital therapy might cost a fraction of that — and its return compounds over a lifetime. It reduces the chance of an expensive, heartbreaking divorce, which will undoubtedly affect your children as well. It gives couples tools they will use for decades. And it signals, from the very start, that this relationship is worth showing up for — not just on the wedding day, but on every ordinary Tuesday that follows. Psychology Today reports that research by Carlson et al. (2012) found that couples who completed premarital counseling fared better in relationship outcomes than roughly 80% of couples who did not. These are not small effects. They are durable, measurable differences in the quality and longevity of marriages — and they stem from an investment that is modest compared to what most couples spend on flowers alone. The bottom line Before you finalize the seating chart, consider booking a few sessions with a therapist together. It may be the most impactful thing you do in the months before your wedding — and the returns will far outlast the food and flowers. Bassy Schwartz, LMFT is the founder of Core Relationships, a boutique therapy practice in the Five Towns offering individual, couples, and family therapy. Her work centers on helping clients build safer, more authentic connections by healing the patterns that block intimacy and trust. Bassy is trained in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and integrates
