A small quiz

What’s my attachment style?

Secure, anxious, avoidant or both at once: how do you love?

10 questions 2 minutes start the quiz ↓

Two birds on a blossom branch, one leaning close and one sitting slightly apart, soft spring light, soft watercolour illustration

Secure, anxious, avoidant or both at once: how do you love?

Attachment styles are not personality types and they are certainly not diagnoses. They are the habits your nervous system built when you were small, in a situation you did not choose, and they made sense at the time. They also change, more than most people are told. Ten ordinary situations follow. Answer as you actually are with someone you care about, not as you are with people who do not matter to you yet.

2 minutes · 10 questions

the questions in this quiz

  1. Your partner takes much longer than usual to reply. What happens in the first ten minutes?

    • You notice, and get on with your day
    • You start building explanations, and most of them are about you
    • You barely register it
    • A flash of worry, and then you decide you did not care anyway

  2. Someone you are seeing gets closer than you expected, quickly. What does your body do?

    • Warms, and you check whether you feel the same
    • Lights up. Finally
    • Steps back before you have decided anything
    • Wants it and braces against it in the same second

  3. After a disagreement, what do you want most?

    • To sort it out and then let it go
    • Reassurance that the two of you are still all right
    • Space and quiet
    • Space and reassurance, and you cannot ask for either

  4. How do you ask for something you need?

    • Fairly directly, and you can survive a no
    • Carefully, with a long run-up, or by hinting
    • You tend to solve it yourself instead
    • You do not, and then it comes out sideways later

  5. Someone is warm one week and distant the next. What happens to your interest?

    • It cools. Inconsistency is not attractive to you
    • It intensifies
    • You go polite, and quietly lose interest
    • It intensifies, and you dislike that it does

  6. Things are going genuinely well. What do you notice in yourself?

    • You enjoy it
    • You start waiting for it to change
    • You start noticing small things that irritate you
    • Happy, and slightly claustrophobic

  7. Someone says I love you for the first time, and means it.

    • You feel warm, and you answer honestly
    • Relief, and then you want to hear it again
    • You feel put on the spot
    • A rush, and an urge to leave the room

  8. A weekend apart, with no contact planned.

    • Fine. You look forward to catching up afterward
    • Hard. You would want a check-in
    • Genuinely lovely
    • Relieving at first, then unbearable

  9. Growing up, what did you learn about needing people?

    • That it was mostly all right to need things
    • That you had to be good, or loud, to be noticed
    • That it was easier to manage on your own
    • That the same person could be safety and worry

  10. When somebody withdraws from you, what is your instinct?

    • Ask what is going on
    • Reach more, and faster
    • Match it, and withdraw further
    • Reach, get nothing, then shut down completely

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