Latest Study: Single People Do NOT Have Attachment Problems (Part I)

By Bella DePaulo, Ph.D. on January 05, 2009 in Living Single

There's breaking news, and this time it is good: Single people don't have "issues" with attachment. In a study published in the latest issue of the journal Personal Relationships (described below), there were three attachment criteria, and single people did just as well as coupled people on all three.

• First, single people were no more likely than coupled people to feel anxious about rejection or abandonment.

• Second, they were no more likely than coupled people to try to avoid intimacy or interdependence.

• Attachment figures are people we like to be near in times of need, and who provide comfort and support in times of stress. That leads to the third criterion, the number of such people: Single people had about the same number of attachment figures as coupled people did.

The findings underscore what I have been trying to convey in Singled Out and here in this blog. Single people are not alone. Even when they live alone, they are not emotionally isolated. They have people in their lives who are important to them - people they like to be with, people who are there for them when they most need someone.

Single people, rather than having romantic partners as attachment figures, may instead develop secure attachments to friends, siblings, other relatives, or other categories of people. We should, once and for all, stop describing single people as "unattached."

MORE:

http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/200901/latest-study-single-people-do-not-have-attachment-problems-part-i

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EDIT to add link to her book "Singled Out"

Have a few close friends and associates.

Feel no need to substitute same with pointless romantic attachments.

she does so in a way which misrepresents attachment theory and attachment research. Frankly she comes across the same as any other academician with an axe to grind (which describes about 75% of them or more if you ask me) except she does it in a non-peer reviewed publication (of course, many of those researchers with axes to grind do the grinding in their reviews of papers but that's another issue).

Attachment theory says that parent/child relationship is an attachment relationship (attachment is defined very specifically and is not the same as the way none attachment researchers use the word attached - attachment researchers would not refer to people who are not in a romantic relationship as "unattached" - if they were to use that term it would refer to someone who as a very specific pathological attachment disorder which is quite rare). Attachment theory also says that the parent/child relationship is the prototype for later attachment relationships. It does not say that the later attachment relationships have to be romantic relationships. Nor do attachment researchers say that single people are not/can not be securely attached. The constraints of quasi-experimental design make is easier to study romantically attached individuals which is why most adult attachment research is conducted on couples.

Sorry to be nit-picky but as someone who studied attachment and both romantic and non-romantic relationship for 10 years and who has seen far to much psychological research misrepresented (not just attachment research) in non-academic sources, I find it frustrating when someone who knows research also misrepresents it to make a point. It just ends up making all researchers look bad.

That she uses the term "attached" interchangeably as both a term describing social status and a psychological term which could describe a disorder is not as relevant to me as the points she makes regarding how single people are stereotyped.

She could make her point without distorting an entire field of study.