Social Media’s Misguided Approach to Attachment Theory

Much like an MBTI personality type or a zodiac sign, attachment styles have been trendy throughout the last year online as a new way of categorizing how people behave in relationships. Countless charts, quizzes, lists of characteristics, and pseudo-therapeutic explanation videos can be found on TikTok and Instagram reels about the different types of secure and insecure attachment styles. 

While some of this content, like that made by actual psychologists or therapists, can be educational, the general social media trend of applying attachment theory to modern dating is slightly misleading. The online trendiness of ‘understanding your attachment style’ has largely resulted in framing unhealthy attachment styles as fixed instead of changeable. This creates a space on social media where attachment styles are frequently transformed into excuses for emotional immaturity and certain types of poor behavior in relationships.

Your attachment style, likely learned or developed in your childhood from prominent relationships you observed, governs how you approach and behave in relationships in your adulthood. There are four generally agreed-upon categories of attachment styles backed by psychological research: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized.

Unsurprisingly, the attachment style you see the least content about online (despite it being the most desirable) is secure attachment. Secure attachment is categorized by trust, flexibility, and the ability to communicate and understand your emotions effectively. Insecure attachment styles are much more of a hot topic online, in particular the anxious and avoidant attachment styles, known to clash with one another in a relationship.

Anxious-avoidant relationships are depicted as a constant “push-pull” cycle in which an anxiously attached person craves reassurance and fears abandonment while an avoidantly attached person craves space and fears vulnerability. Avoidant attachment is the biggest culprit of the side of the attachment style “trend” that justifies red-flag relationship behavior more than explains it– on-off cycles of affection, emotional manipulation, ‘lovebombing’, and even cheating are frequently attributed to avoidant attachment instead of the more glaring cause: emotional immaturity. 

Attachment theory is hardly the only one to have fallen victim to the so-called ‘Instagram Therapy’ era, but it’s still important to take all psychological information we receive through social media with a grain of salt. If online platforms are the only way we absorb topics like this one, we also risk absorbing a slightly misleading narrative about our own behavior as well as the kind of negative behavior in relationships we should not be so ready to sweep under the rug.

• #dating
• anxious attachment
• avoidant attachment
• college
• mental health
• relationships
• social media