9781529032178

Secure people don’t always hook up with one another—they date and marry
people of all three attachment styles. The good news is that if you’re secure,
you have the potential to get along with people who have anxious or
avoidant attachment styles—but only if you are able to maintain your
secure frame of mind. If you find yourself becoming less secure, not only
do you lose a priceless gift, but you also experience less happiness and
satisfaction in your relationships.
If you’re secure, one of the reasons you’re able to maintain a satisfying
relationship with someone who has an insecure attachment style is because
he or she will gradually become more secure as a result of being with you.
When you date someone anxious, this is most often what happens. One of
the things that Mary Ainsworth observed in the mother-infant relationship
was that secure mothers were a special breed. It’s not that they tended more
to their children, or held them more than mothers of anxious or avoidant
children, but they seemed to possess a kind of “sixth sense” and intuitively
knew when the child wanted to be held. They sensed their child’s emerging
distress and acted on it before it turned into a full-blown fit. And if the child
did get distressed, they just seemed to know how to soothe her.
We find this phenomenon in adult couples too. Secure adults naturally
know how to soothe their partners and take care of them—it’s an innate
talent. This can be seen in the couple’s transition to parenthood. Jeffry
Simpson from the University of Minnesota and Steven Rholes from Texas
A&M University—coeditors of the book Attachment Theory and Close
Relationships, together with Lorne Campbell and Carol Wilson—found that
during the shift into parenthood, anxiously attached women were more
likely to move toward security in their interactions with their partners if
they perceived their spouses as available, supportive, and accepting during
pregnancy—all secure traits. In other words, secure adults’ sensitivity and
encouragement have the same effect on their partners as the secure mother’s
on her infant, enough to create a shift in their partners’ attachment style.
A word of caution, however. Sometimes secure people, despite their
innate talent for warding off potentially unsuitable matches and making
their partners more secure, can find themselves in bad relationships. This
can happen not only when they’re inexperienced but also when they
respond to their long-term partner’s unacceptable behavior, by continuing to
give them the benefit of the doubt and tolerate their actions.