On July 26, 1985, the Rocky Mountain News ran a love quiz across the front of its Lifestyles section and trailed it with a banner on the paper’s front page: tell us about the love of your life. Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, then at the University of Denver, used the replies for a study published two years later. One of the three self-portraits they offered is still the shortest accurate description of anxious, or anxious/ambivalent, romantic attachment:
“I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn’t really love me or won’t want to stay with me. I want to get very close to my partner, and this sometimes scares people away.”
That paragraph was a research prompt, not a symptom list from a diagnostic manual. About 19 percent of the first 620 newspaper replies, and about 20 percent of a later student sample, chose it. The people who chose it were not a clinical group. They were readers and undergraduates describing one important romance. Even so, what they reported is specific enough to correct the cartoon of “neediness.”
If you want the wider map of secure, avoidant, and resistant patterns first, start with the four attachment styles, explained without the usual chart.
What the infant studies were looking at
Hazan and Shaver were translating Mary Ainsworth, not inventing a new illness. In Patterns of Attachment (1978), Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall described infants who cried more, explored less even with the caregiver present, and mixed bids for contact with anger. Hazan and Shaver summarize the caregiving side of that pattern as slow or inconsistent responding, including interruptions that forced affection on the adult’s timetable rather than the infant’s signal. The infant’s strategy, in Bowlby’s language as Hazan and Shaver retell it, is protest: crying, searching, and resisting other people’s attempts to soothe, because the person who matters has gone.
Protest made sense in a crib. It is a bid to bring the caregiver back. The adult version is harder to see because it wears ordinary clothes: a second text, a reread of a short reply, a fight that is really a question about whether the bond is still there. Calling that “too much” skips the function. The function is to close a gap that feels dangerous to the person.
Seven signs, tied to what those studies actually measured
These seven are readings of the Hazan and Shaver findings and of Ainsworth’s resistant pattern. They are not a scale with a cutoff, and ticking several of them does not mean you “have” a disorder. Where a scene is invented to make the finding concrete, it is marked as an illustrative example.
*1. The worry that love is about to be withdrawn.* The self-description above is the finding in the person’s own words: a standing fear that the partner does not really love you or will not stay. Picture an illustrative evening: Jordan, a high-school counselor in Columbus, reads “running late” at 6:40 p.m. and spends the next twenty minutes building a story in which the relationship is already over. The text said only that a meeting ran long. The alarm is the pattern.
*2. A hunger for closeness that the other person experiences as pressure.* Hazan and Shaver’s paragraph says the wish to “get very close” sometimes scares people away. In their results, anxious/ambivalent respondents scored high on desire for union and desire for reciprocation, and those scores separated them from both secure and avoidant respondents. The wish is for an answer, not for drama. The strain comes when the answer is demanded faster than the other person can give it.
*3. Love that feels like obsession.* In the newspaper sample, anxious/ambivalent adults described their most important love as involving obsession, emotional highs and lows, strong sexual attraction, and jealousy. Hazan and Shaver noted the fit with Tennov’s 1979 description of limerence and with Hindy and Schwarz’s 1984 work on anxious romantic attachment. This is preoccupation, the relationship occupying the foreground of the day. It is not proof that the relationship is unusually deep.
*4. Falling easily, and rarely feeling that it is the real thing.* On the belief items, anxious/ambivalent respondents said it was easy to fall in love and that they often felt themselves beginning to fall, while also saying, as avoidant respondents did, that they rarely found what they would call real love. In the student sample, 32 percent of the anxious/ambivalent group endorsed “It’s easy to fall in love,” against 15 percent of the secure group and none of the avoidant group. The chase and the disappointment can be the same habit.
*5. Jealousy and sharp emotional swings.* Emotional extremes and jealousy were the love-experience scales on which all three groups in Study 1 were statistically distinct, with anxious/ambivalent respondents at the high end. A spike of jealousy is not, by itself, an attachment classification. A life organized around scanning for rivals is closer to what the scale was catching.
*6. A harsh reading of the self. In Study 2, anxious/ambivalent students reported more self-doubts, a sense of being misunderstood and underappreciated, and a belief that other people were less willing than they were to commit. Bowlby’s working-model language, quoted by Hazan and Shaver from Separation* (1973), treats the model of the self and the model of the other as a pair. If you expect others to leave, it is a short step to deciding you are the reason.
*7. Loneliness that does not lift just because people are nearby.* Study 2 measured both trait and state loneliness. Anxious/ambivalent respondents scored highest; secure respondents scored lowest. Hazan and Shaver read that as yearning for a merger that few partners can match. Avoidant respondents admitted distance and did not report feeling as lonely. If you are surrounded and still feel unheld, the anxious pattern is one researched way to name that, not the only way.
Protest, and the collision with withdrawal
Bowlby’s protest, as Hazan and Shaver describe it from his observations of separated infants, is active searching plus resistance to substitute comfort. In an adult couple it can look like repeated contact, accusations, or a test designed to force a reply. An illustrative example: Sam sends four messages after dinner, then goes silent to see whether Ana will panic and call. The silence is still protest. It is an attempt to make the other person prove the bond.
That move collides with a partner whose strategy is to step back. The essay on avoidant attachment describes the other half of that loop. Neither strategy is a character flaw. Each one makes the other’s alarm louder. Hazan and Shaver also reported that security was not pure destiny: Hindy and Schwarz’s graduates, asked about four relationships, showed correlations only around .40 for anxious attachment from one relationship to the next. The partner and the circumstances carry real weight. A style is a tendency, not a script you run with everyone.
What the research does not license you to conclude
The newspaper relationships of secure respondents lasted about 10.02 years on average, against 4.86 years for anxious/ambivalent respondents and 5.97 for avoidant respondents. Six percent of the secure group had been divorced, against 10 percent and 12 percent. Those figures come from people who mailed in a quiz, median age 34, more women than men, slightly more educated than a random sample. Hazan and Shaver said so. They are not national divorce rates, and they are not a forecast for you.
The same paper warned that asking about only one romance hides how much a particular partner changes the picture. Fraley’s later overview is blunt on a related point: researchers still do not have a strong account of exactly which experiences revise an adult’s attachment pattern. Reading a list of signs can make the pattern visible. It does not, by itself, revise it.
You might be thinking that if you simply need less, the alarm will stop. The studies do not say that. Anxious/ambivalent respondents already doubted that they had found real love. More self-erasure would fit the harsh self-model, not correct it. What the infant work points to is a caregiver, or later a partner, whose responses are predictable enough that protest is no longer the best tool. Predictable is not the same as constant. A clear “I can talk at 8” teaches more than a vague promise to be better.
A practical limit
This essay is an explanation of published research. It is not an assessment of you, and it cannot tell you whether your relationship is safe. If checking, pleading, or panic is crowding out sleep, work, or care of a child, or if a partner uses fear to control you, talk with a licensed clinician. If you are in crisis in the United States, call or text 988. For treatment referrals, SAMHSA’s National Helpline is 1-800-662-HELP (4357); the specialists refer, they do not counsel. The site's quiz can help you compare your answers with the three Hazan and Shaver descriptions. The biography Searching for Bowlby is about the man who treated protest as information, not as weakness. The Attachment Theory Workbook is a set of reflection pages if you want that next, not a course of therapy.
Where these descriptions come from
- Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Resistant/ambivalent infant behavior, as summarized in Hazan and Shaver (1987).
- Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 2: Separation. New York: Basic Books. Working models of self and other, quoted in Hazan and Shaver (1987), p. 238 of Bowlby; protest, despair, and detachment as Hazan and Shaver recount them.
- Fraley, R. C. A brief overview of adult attachment theory and research. https://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm. On the limits of what is known about change.
- Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511 to 524. Newspaper quiz published July 26, 1985, in the Rocky Mountain News; self-description wording; Study 1 and Study 2 percentages; love-experience and loneliness results. Reachable PDF copy.
- Hindy, C. G., & Schwarz, J. C. (1984). Individual differences in the tendency toward anxious romantic attachments. Paper presented at the Second International Conference on Personal Relationships, Madison, WI. Cited by Hazan and Shaver for cross-relationship correlations around .40.
- Tennov, D. (1979). Love and Limerence. New York: Stein and Day. Cited by Hazan and Shaver as a description matching the anxious/ambivalent love experience.
Which of the seven shows up in you when a reply is late, and what would a direct request sound like instead of a test? That sentence, said once, is a better experiment than another hour of rereading the thread.