Attachment Style Test: How Do You Handle Closeness?

Attachment styles describe the patterns you bring to closeness: how easily you trust, what you do when someone you love feels distant, and how you handle needing other people. This test looks at four of those patterns in adults. It covers close relationships in general, so it applies to partners, close friends and anyone you lean on, not only to romance.

The 32 statements describe everyday moments, such as waiting for a reply, making up after an argument or being asked how you really feel. Each statement belongs to one style, and agreeing with it raises that style's score. At the end you see a score for all four styles, because most people recognize something of themselves in more than one.

Secure attachment means feeling at ease with both closeness and independence, and expecting problems to be workable. Anxious attachment means wanting a lot of closeness and staying alert to signs that it might slip away, which often leads to seeking reassurance. Avoidant attachment means relying mostly on yourself and stepping back when things get emotionally intense.

Fearful-avoidant attachment means wanting closeness and feeling wary of it at the same time, so you may move toward people and then pull away. None of these styles is a flaw in your character. Each one is a sensible strategy that grew out of earlier experiences, and each comes with real strengths as well as habits that can get in your way.

The British psychiatrist John Bowlby developed attachment theory from the 1950s onward, arguing that a young child's bond with their caregivers shapes how safe the child feels exploring the world. The psychologist Mary Ainsworth put his ideas to the test by watching how infants reacted when a parent briefly left a room and came back, and described what became known as secure, anxious and avoidant patterns.

In 1987, the researchers Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver proposed that adult romantic relationships follow similar patterns. In 1991, Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz described four adult styles by combining two ideas: how you see yourself and how you see other people. This questionnaire uses that four-style picture, with original statements written for this site rather than items from any published questionnaire.

Each statement uses a five-point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree, and the statements appear in a mixed order. Every style has eight statements. Your score for each style runs from 0 to 100% and shows how strongly you agreed with that style's statements, as a share of the highest possible score. It is not a percentile, so it does not compare you with other people.

The style with the highest score becomes your result, and the other three are listed below it. The four scores are separate, so you can score high on two styles at once. A high secure score next to a moderate anxious score, for example, often describes someone who is steady most of the time but gets uneasy when a relationship feels uncertain.

When your top two scores are within a few points, the questionnaire cannot separate them cleanly. Read both descriptions and notice which one fits your most important relationship right now. Many people find that one style shows up with partners and another with friends or family, which is normal and worth knowing about yourself.

Read your top style as a description of habits, not a verdict on who you are. Notice where it fits and where it doesn't, then think about a recent moment of closeness or conflict: did you reach out, wait, withdraw or swing between the two? Your attachment style test results are most useful when you connect them to real moments like that.

Attachment styles can also change. Researchers use the phrase earned security for adults who grew up with difficult relationships and later developed a steady, trusting way of relating, often through supportive partners, friendships or therapy. A low secure score today is not a life sentence. Repeated experiences of being heard, and of keeping your footing in conflict, tend to move people toward security over time.

An attachment style test looks at one specific part of life: how you behave when you need someone, or when someone needs you. Broad personality tests look at everything. The Big Five measures five general traits, such as how sociable or how emotionally steady you are, while sixteen-type tests sort people by preferences such as introversion or extraversion.

The two views work well together. Researchers often find that people who score high on Big Five neuroticism also report more attachment anxiety, but the link is far from complete, and plenty of calm people still pull away when a partner gets emotional. Taking this attachment style test next to the Big Five or the Enneagram helps you see which patterns are general and which appear only in close relationships.