Why we repeat the same patterns in relationships — and what attachment theory says

The third relationship in a row — and the same film all over again. Again a partner who withdraws just as you want to come closer. Or the other way round: again someone who “clings too much”, and you, needing air. And with it the familiar question: “Why do I always end up in the same story with different actors?”

The answer most likely isn’t bad luck, and it isn’t that “they’re all the same”. The answer lies in one of the best-researched areas of psychology: attachment theory. The way we attached, in our first years of life, to the people who cared for us is written in deeply — and adult love is one of the few places where that early script starts up again at full force.

In this post I explain where attachment theory comes from, which four styles we recognise in adults and how each of them shows up in intimate relationships, why familiar patterns pull at us so persistently — and, most importantly: why your attachment style is not a life sentence.

Bowlby: attachment isn’t a bad habit, it’s survival

In the middle of the last century the British psychiatrist John Bowlby overturned the prevailing belief that a child “attaches” to their mother because she feeds them, and that too much comforting is spoiling. He argued the opposite: the need for closeness to a reliable adult is a biologically built-in system, as fundamental as hunger. The human infant is the most helpless creature for miles around — without an adult who stays close, it does not survive. So when a child feels fear, pain or separation, a programme switches on automatically: find your person.

Bowlby went a step further: out of thousands of small experiences with their caregivers — does she come when I cry? does she soothe me or get angry? am I allowed to bring her my fear and my anger too? — a child builds a quiet, bodily knowledge of how relationships work. That programme doesn’t disappear when we grow up. It speaks up most loudly again in exactly the place where closeness, dependence and vulnerability are once more at stake: in romantic love. So it’s no accident that adult couples often behave “childishly” during conflict — what is really behaving is our attachment system, which is as old as we are.

Ainsworth: the same room, different strategies

Bowlby’s collaborator, the psychologist Mary Ainsworth, grounded the theory with a famous experiment called the strange situation (1978): one-year-olds in an unfamiliar room went through a brief separation from their mother and then a reunion. Ainsworth was not primarily watching how hard a child cried — she was watching what strategy the child used when the mother returned.

Securely attached children showed distress at separation, sought closeness at reunion, allowed themselves to be comforted and were soon exploring again. Avoidantly attached children turned away when she came back, seemingly indifferent — even though measurements showed their stress was high; they had simply learnt that showing a need doesn’t help. Resistant-ambivalent children clung to their mother and angrily resisted comfort at the same time — a strategy that develops in the face of unpredictable responsiveness: sometimes you’re here, sometimes you’re not, so I have to keep the alarm permanently switched on. Later Mary Main and Judith Solomon described a fourth pattern, the disorganised one: children whose behaviour at reunion was contradictory and confused — approaching and freezing at once. This pattern most often develops when the person who was meant to be the source of safety was also a source of fear.

The key insight: none of these strategies is a mistake. Each was the smartest possible adaptation to the relationship the child actually had available. That goes for yours too.

Internal working models: the glasses you look at love through

Bowlby called early experiences, condensed into expectations, internal working models. They are the answers we carry below the threshold of awareness to two basic questions: Am I worthy of love and help? (the view of oneself) and Are others reliable when I need them? (the view of others).

These two models work like glasses: they don’t decide what happens in a relationship, but they do decide how we understand it. The same event — a partner replying late to a message — means “he’s busy” through one pair of glasses, “I’m losing him” through another, and “I knew I shouldn’t rely on anyone” through a third. And because we act on the meaning we read, the glasses like to create a reality that confirms them. In 1991 the psychologists Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz derived from combinations of the two questions a clear map of four adult styles — the one shown in the infographic in this post.

It’s important to understand why these models are so stubborn: they work automatically and below awareness, like the grammar of a mother tongue. Nobody decides in the morning “today I’ll read my partner’s lateness as abandonment” — it simply happens, fast and with the body included: the knot in your stomach is there before the thought has even formed. That is exactly why reading books about attachment does not, on its own, change the pattern; to even begin to recognise it, you first have to catch, in that hot moment, the difference between what happened and what your glasses made of it. It’s a slow but entirely possible practice — and the first step of any change.

Four attachment styles in adult relationships

The first to show empirically that early patterns really do live on in romantic love were Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver (1987) — the distribution of styles among adults in love was strikingly reminiscent of the one found in studies with children. How do the styles show up in a partnership?

• Secure attachment: closeness is not a threat and independence is not a betrayal. Someone like this can ask for support and offer it; conflict unsettles them but doesn’t break them apart, and after an argument they look for repair. Trust is their default setting, not a reward that has to be extracted.
• Anxious (preoccupied) attachment: the radar for distance is permanently switched on. A late reply, a changed tone, an evening without a call — anything can set off a wave of fear of abandonment and a need for reassurance: checking, calling, seeking confirmation, sometimes testing the partner. The core belief: “I have to hold on to love, or it will leave.”
• Avoidant attachment: independence as a fortress. Someone like this starts to suffocate when closeness gets too great, redirects emotional conversations into practical ones, and in conflict withdraws or “shuts down”. Not because they don’t feel — but because they learnt early that needing another person is a risk. The core belief: “I can only rely on myself.”
• Disorganised (fearful-avoidant) attachment: longing for closeness and fear of it at the same time. Relationships swing between attraction and flight, trust builds slowly and collapses quickly. This style is often linked to experiences in which closeness was once dangerous — and it deserves a particularly large amount of tenderness, not judgement.

Two things to add. First: these are patterns, not pigeonholes — most of us carry one dominant style with shades of the others, and how pronounced it is varies with the relationship and the period of life. And second: the dangerous combination isn’t any single style but the dance of two — the best-known being the circle of the anxious one who pursues and the avoidant one who withdraws, each feeding the other’s fear with their own defence.

Why the familiar is what attracts us

If patterns cause so much pain, why do we keep choosing people with whom we repeat them? Because the attachment system isn’t looking for happiness first — it’s looking for the familiar. What is familiar, the nervous system reads as manageable: with a person whose withdrawals we know in our bones, we feel “at home”, even if home was not safe. That excitement around someone who is just unavailable enough isn’t always the chemistry of fate; often it’s an old alarm we mistake for passion. A calm, available person, meanwhile, can at first seem “boring” to someone with an anxious or avoidant pattern — because they don’t trigger the alarm we’re used to calling love.

On top of that there’s a confirming loop: the anxious one, by checking, triggers the withdrawal that confirms “everyone leaves me”; the avoidant one, by keeping distance, triggers the pursuit that confirms “everyone clings”. So the pattern isn’t just a memory — it’s a machine that maintains itself. And these patterns are rather fond of their own history across generations: the way our parents and grandparents attached leaves traces in the way we attach. That is exactly why a look into family history is so telling — I’ve written a separate post about everything a genogram, a drawing of your family tree of relationships, can reveal, and I also offer this kind of exploration as a standalone session.

This dance isn’t a sign that two partners are “incompatible” — often it’s a sign that they found each other precisely according to the key of their patterns. And because in a couple the two patterns set each other off, a couple is also the easiest place to break it: the anxious one can learn to say the fear instead of the reproach (“I’m afraid I’m losing you” instead of “you’re never there”), and the avoidant one to stay in contact three minutes longer than is comfortable, and to say they need a break rather than disappearing. Small shifts, but exactly at the point where the circle turns.

The most important news: attachment can change

And now the thing that makes it worth reading this far: an attachment style is not a lifelong diagnosis. Researchers — among them Glenn Roisman and colleagues in longitudinal studies — describe a phenomenon called earned security (earned secure attachment): people who grew up in difficult, unsafe attachment conditions but function securely in adulthood — they can tell the story of their history coherently, with feeling and without denial, and their relationships carry the marks of secure attachment. Security, then, is not only inherited; it can also be earned.

How? Almost always through the same mechanism by which the patterns came about: through relationship. Internal working models weren’t built out of lectures but out of experiences — and only new experiences, long enough and different enough, can overwrite them. That might be a partner with a secure style, alongside whom the alarm slowly quietens. A long friendship that holds your boundaries and your needs. And this is precisely what psychotherapy is “designed” for.

The therapeutic relationship is a kind of attachment laboratory: a relationship that is both real and safe. You bring the same patterns into it as into love — checking, withdrawing, testing — but this time the story unfolds differently: your anger doesn’t drive anyone away, your need doesn’t repel, your withdrawal is noticed and gently named, and the cracks in the relationship are repaired rather than swept under the carpet. Every such experience is a new entry in the old model. Why research finds this particular experience to be one of the strongest factors in the effectiveness of therapy, I’ve described in more detail in the post on why the therapeutic relationship heals.

Where to start with yourself

You may have recognised yourself in several descriptions at once while reading — and that is entirely normal. A style shows itself in shades: with a calm friend you can look completely secure, while beside a partner who feels precious and uncertain at the same time, the anxious part wakes up. Observing will serve you better than a label.

The first step isn’t change — it’s recognition. A few questions that can help you place your own pattern: what happens inside me when my partner withdraws — panic, cold numbness, relief? How do I ask for closeness: directly, with hints, with tests, or not at all? What do I do after an argument — seek contact, disappear, punish with silence? And perhaps the most telling of all: what type of people do I find irresistible, and how do those stories end?

It matters that you don’t use these answers as a new stick to beat yourself with (“typical me, anxious again”) — nor as a weapon in an argument (“well, you’re avoidant anyway!”). Styles are not labels for sorting people, they are a map of wounds and adaptations. Each of them was once the best possible answer of a child who wanted only one thing: to be safe and loved.

If you recognise that your relationships keep circling in a loop you can’t break on your own — or that you and your partner are dancing the pursue-and-withdraw dance that exhausts you both — that is exactly the kind of thing therapy can work with. In individual therapy we explore your working models and build a new experience of relationship; in couples therapy I work with the two of you on learning the same thing: how to see a partner’s defence as fear rather than attack. Write to me through the contact page — patterns were learnt in relationships, and in relationships they can be unlearnt.