Attachment theory

Attachment theory began with John Bowlby's work on infants and caregivers, and Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation studies in the 1970s. The adult version — developed by Hazan and Shaver in 1987 — proposes that the way you bonded with caregivers shapes a working model of closeness: how safe intimacy feels, and what you do when it is threatened. Modern research measures two dimensions, anxiety (how much you monitor the bond) and avoidance (how much closeness you can tolerate), rather than sorting people into rigid boxes.

The two-dimension model is one of the better-replicated findings in relationship science. Scores predict real behaviour: how people respond to a partner's silence, how they argue, how they recover after conflict. A large 2019 meta-analysis found attachment anxiety and avoidance each correlate with relationship satisfaction across hundreds of samples. Importantly, attachment is a pattern, not a life sentence — longitudinal studies show scores drift toward security in stable relationships.

Self-report questionnaires measure how you see yourself, which is not always how you behave. Categories like "anxious" or "avoidant" are simplifications of continuous scores — two people with the same label can look very different. And attachment describes a tendency, not a cause: it cannot tell you whether a specific relationship should continue. Our tests report the two dimensions with percentiles, and Luna treats them as a starting question, never a verdict.