Attachment Style Test: Secure, Anxious or Avoidant?
Take a free attachment style test to see if you're secure, anxious, avoidant, or fearful, how the four styles work, and what your result means.
By Maya Feldman, personality writer
An attachment style is the characteristic pattern of expectations, emotions, and behaviors you bring to close relationships, shaped by the bonds you formed with your earliest caregivers. An attachment style test measures that pattern by scoring how you respond to statements about intimacy, trust, and conflict, then places you into one of four categories: secure, anxious, avoidant, or fearful. The result describes how comfortable you are with closeness and how much you worry about being abandoned.
The concept comes from attachment theory, developed by British psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s and tested experimentally by Mary Ainsworth. Ainsworth’s “Strange Situation” study (published in 1978) watched infants react to a caregiver leaving and returning, and identified three consistent patterns: secure, avoidant, and anxious. A fourth, disorganized, was added by Mary Main and Judith Solomon in 1986. In 1987, Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver extended these patterns to adult romantic relationships, which is what a modern attachment style test actually measures. If you want to see where this sits among broader assessments, start with the free personality test.
What are the four attachment styles?
There are four adult attachment styles, defined by Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz in 1991 along two dimensions: how anxious you feel about a relationship, and how much you avoid closeness. Each style reflects a different combination of those two dimensions.
| Style | Anxiety | Avoidance | Core pattern |
|---|---|---|---|
| Secure | Low | Low | Comfortable with intimacy and independence; trusts easily. |
| Anxious (preoccupied) | High | Low | Craves closeness, fears abandonment, seeks reassurance. |
| Avoidant (dismissing) | Low | High | Values self-reliance, keeps emotional distance, downplays needs. |
| Fearful (disorganized) | High | High | Wants closeness but distrusts it; approaches then withdraws. |
Roughly 50 to 60 percent of adults in North American samples score as secure, making it the most common style. The three insecure styles — anxious, avoidant, and fearful — divide the rest. Your score is best read as a position on two sliding scales rather than a fixed box, because most people carry traits of more than one style.
How does an attachment style test work?
An attachment style test works by asking you to rate your agreement with a set of statements about how you feel in close relationships. The most widely used research instrument, the Experiences in Close Relationships scale (Brennan, Clark, and Shaver, 1998), uses 36 items: 18 measure attachment anxiety (“I worry that partners won’t care about me as much as I care about them”) and 18 measure attachment avoidance (“I prefer not to show a partner how I feel deep down”). The test averages your answers into two scores, and your combination of high or low on each dimension maps to one of the four styles above.
Good tests report both dimensions, not just a single label, because attachment lives on a spectrum. A free online version usually shortens the item count to keep it under five minutes, which trades a little precision for speed.
Secure vs anxious vs avoidant: what is the difference?
The difference between secure, anxious, and avoidant attachment is how each one handles the need for closeness. A secure person moves toward a partner during stress and can also be alone without distress. An anxious person moves toward the partner intensely and feels threatened by distance, so they pursue reassurance. An avoidant person moves away, treating independence as safer than reliance, and tends to suppress rather than express distress. Fearful attachment combines the anxious pull and the avoidant push, producing an approach-then-retreat cycle.
These patterns can shape how you argue, how quickly you trust, and how you give and receive affection — which is why attachment overlaps with your love language test results and other personality tests for relationships.
What is the best free attachment style test?
The best free attachment style test is one built on the two-dimension model (anxiety and avoidance) and validated against the Experiences in Close Relationships scale, because that scale has the strongest research backing. Quiz-style tests that hand you a single dramatic label without showing your two underlying scores tell you less and overstate their certainty. Look for a test that reports where you fall on each dimension, explains the model it uses, and names its source — the same standards that separate a real assessment from entertainment.
What else should you know about your attachment style?
Two questions matter once you have a result: whether the pattern can change, and how much the test can really prove.
Can your attachment style change?
Yes, your attachment style can change. Research on adults finds that attachment is moderately stable but not fixed — major life events, therapy, and a steady relationship with a secure partner can move someone toward security over months and years. Some longitudinal research suggests that roughly a quarter to a third of people shift categories across their lives, though estimates vary by study and time span. Treat your result as a snapshot of your current relational habits, not a permanent trait.
Is the attachment style test scientific?
The attachment style test is partly scientific. The underlying dimensions of anxiety and avoidance are among the most validated ideas in relationship psychology, and the research scales show good reliability. The short, free online versions are weaker: they use fewer questions, rarely publish their validity data, and can nudge you toward a flattering read. Attachment describes tendencies, not a diagnosis, so honest results depend on answering how you actually behave rather than how you wish you did. For the full picture of what these instruments can and cannot prove, see how accurate personality tests are.
Frequently asked questions
Which attachment style is the most common?
Secure attachment is the most common style. Across studies of adults in Western samples, about 50 to 60 percent score as secure, while the anxious, avoidant, and fearful styles share the remaining 40 to 50 percent.
Can you have more than one attachment style?
Yes, you can show traits of more than one attachment style. Because attachment is measured on two continuous dimensions, most people sit between categories rather than landing purely in one, and your style can differ slightly across relationships.
Is anxious or avoidant attachment worse?
Neither anxious nor avoidant attachment is worse; they are different insecure patterns. Both are linked to relationship strain, but each responds to different work — anxious styles benefit from self-soothing and trust-building, while avoidant styles benefit from practicing openness. Building the skill to read your own reactions, measured by an emotional intelligence (EQ) test, helps with both.
How is attachment style different from a love language?
An attachment style describes how safe you feel getting close to someone, while a love language describes how you prefer to express and receive affection. Attachment is the deeper relational blueprint; love language is one way that blueprint shows up in daily behavior.