Attachment Style Test

What is an attachment style?

An attachment style is the characteristic way you form and maintain close bonds — how comfortable you are depending on others, how you react when someone pulls away, and what closeness costs or gives you. The concept goes back to John Bowlby's attachment theory and Mary Ainsworth's research on infants, but the version this test uses is the adult model developed in the late 1980s and refined by Brennan, Clark, and Shaver: adult attachment varies along two continuous dimensions, attachment anxiety (how much you worry about being abandoned or unloved) and attachment avoidance (how uncomfortable closeness and dependence feel).

Your position on those two dimensions yields one of four styles. Neither dimension is a flaw — they are strategies that once made sense, usually learned early, and they keep shaping adult friendships and romantic relationships until they're noticed.

The four adult attachment styles

Secure (low anxiety, low avoidance). Closeness and independence both feel fine. Roughly half of adults test secure. Conflict gets repaired rather than catastrophized or avoided.
Anxious / preoccupied (high anxiety, low avoidance). Deep investment in relationships paired with persistent worry about losing them. Slow replies and cancelled plans register as threats; reassurance helps, but only briefly.
Avoidant / dismissive (low anxiety, high avoidance). Self-reliance feels safer than dependence. Relationships matter, but the impulse to reach out rarely fires — so ties tend to thin out quietly over time.
Fearful-avoidant / disorganized (high anxiety, high avoidance). Craving closeness while finding it threatening — a push-pull pattern that is the rarest of the four and the one most often linked to earlier relational hurt.

How this test works

You rate 12 statements on a five-point scale. Six statements measure attachment anxiety, six measure avoidance, and several are reverse-scored so straight-lining doesn't produce a clean result. Your two dimension scores are shown as meters, and the combination maps to one of the four styles, with a profile of how that style typically shows up in friendships and romantic relationships — and what reliably helps it.

Two honest caveats. First, this is a self-reflection inspired by the research model, not a clinical instrument: a 12-item quiz cannot diagnose anything, and no online test can. Second, attachment styles are tendencies, not types carved in stone — most people show different patterns with different people, and research on "earned security" shows styles can shift toward secure through stable relationships, deliberate practice, or therapy.

Why your attachment style matters for friendships, not just romance

Attachment research grew up around romantic couples, but the same two dimensions run through friendship. Anxious-leaning people over-read a friend's silence and exhaust themselves seeking reassurance; avoidant-leaning people under-reach and let good friendships starve by accident; fearful-avoidant people cycle between intensity and withdrawal. The practical fix is similar across styles: replace guesswork with a light structure. Knowing when you actually last spoke to someone — rather than how long it feels — calms anxious spirals and counteracts avoidant drift alike. That's the premise our contact-rhythm calculator and friendship checkup are built on.

If you want to go deeper on the romantic side, take the relationship quiz, or explore how your broader temperament shapes your bonds with the Big Five personality test. And if you'd like gentle, private help staying reliably in touch with the people who matter — whatever your style — join the Endearist waitlist.

How this test was built

The two dimensions this test reports — anxiety and avoidance — are the ones Brennan, Clark and Shaver arrived at in 1998, when they factor-analysed the English-language attachment measures that existed at the time and found they reduced to those two axes. That work produced the ECR, a 36-item research scale. This is a short adaptation written for self-reflection, not the ECR itself: fewer items, plain-language statements, and no clinical scoring. It will give you a usable read on where you sit; it is not a diagnosis and cannot substitute for one.

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Frequently asked questions

What are the four attachment styles?

The four adult attachment styles are secure, anxious (preoccupied), avoidant (dismissive), and fearful-avoidant (disorganised). They come from your position on two independent dimensions: attachment anxiety, meaning how much you fear being abandoned, and attachment avoidance, meaning how uncomfortable closeness and dependence feel. Roughly half of adults score secure — low on both.

How accurate is a 12-question attachment style test?

Accurate enough to show you which dimension runs high, and not accurate enough to diagnose anything. This test is a self-reflection built on the two-dimensional adult attachment model of Brennan, Clark and Shaver, not the clinical instrument itself. Treat a strong result as a hypothesis worth testing against your actual relationships rather than a label.

Can your attachment style change?

Yes. Attachment styles are tendencies, not fixed types. Research on earned security shows people move toward the secure end through stable relationships, deliberate practice at asking directly for what they need, and therapy. Most people also test differently with different people — you can lean anxious with one partner and secure with a long-standing friend.

Is this attachment test free, and are my answers stored?

It is free with no signup, and nothing is stored. The whole test runs inside your browser: your ratings are never sent to a server, never saved after you close the tab, and never attached to an email address. Several attachment tests deliver the result by email — this one shows it on the page immediately.