Attachment theory is a scientific theory of intimate relationships. It's been around for many decades, and by now it's pretty famous and there are many books and academic papers about it. It really helped me to understand how blue pill and red pill ideas fit together, so I thought you might like it.

According to the theory, everyone has one of four attachment types. I'm curious which type you might be. Here are the types, quoted from Levine & Heller's book, "Attached":

(1) Secure. "Being warm and loving in a relationship comes naturally to you. You enjoy being intimate without becoming overly worried about your relationships. You take things in stride when it comes to romance and don't get easily upset over relationship matters. You effectively communicate your needs and feelings to your partner and are strong at reading your partner's emotional cues and responding to them."

(2) Anxious. "You love to be very close to your romantic partners and have the capacity for great intimacy. You often fear, however, that your partner does not wish to be as close as you would like him/her to be. Relationships tend to consume a large part of your emotional energy. You tend to be very sensitive to small fluctuations in your partner's moods and actions, and although your senses are often accurate, you take your partner's behaviors too personally."

(3) Avoidant. "It is very important for you to maintain your independence and self-sufficiency and you often prefer autonomy to intimate relationships. Even though you do want to be close to others, you feel uncomfortable with too much closeness and tend to keep your partner at arm's length. You don't spend much time worrying about your romantic relationships or about being rejected. You tend not to open up to partners and they often complain that you are emotionally distant."

(4) Anxious-avoidant. What it sounds like - a combination of both. Perhaps relationships consume a large part of your emotional energy (anxious) and you keep your partner at arm's length (avoidant).

If you want to take an internet test for this, you can find one here: http://www.web-research-design.net/cgi-bin/crq/crq.pl -- this test will give you separate anxiety and avoidance scores, each between 1 and 7. So you can be very anxious but not very avoidant, etc.

My questions are:

  1. Which type are you?
  2. Which types do you think are ideal or most successful in a man or woman?