How Individuals Attachment Styles Affect the Type of Love Relationship Attachment

How Individuals Attachment Styles Affect the Type of Love Relationship

Attachment

Human beings are social beings molded by a number of personal encounters with fellow human beings, which is a process that starts during infancy. Long term relationships are heavily affected by the type of relationship encounters held at early infancy stages. Attachment entails the close emotional connection and closeness that an infant develops to a caretaker mainly due to the realization of their responsiveness in meeting their survival needs. Relationships become a factor of the close trust an individual perceives from a relationship to such an extent that the attachment figure will always be sought in the relationship.

Personal Attachment Description

1. My attachment with was warm/responsive
2. My attachment with father was ambivalent/ inconsistent

Attachment forms experienced at a tender age become very instrumental in the way individuals perceive nearly all the other relationships. Perhaps the strongest determinant on later life relationships remains to be the attachment that an individual makes with the caregiver, who almost certainly becomes one of the parents. An illustration of the above personal description is that my mother was closer to me thereby influencing my relationship perceptions within and outside the family. As individuals develop, they extrapolate their personal attachment accounts to other relationships which depend on the acquired closeness deliberations with others to define comfort in their company. In a similar way, the level of anxiety as well as perceptions of abandonment by relationship partners becomes entrenched at the very tender age (Adams and Jones, 1999).

Attachment in Love Relationships

The quality of emotional attachment that individual makes in early life defines the sort of expectations that one enters a romantic relationship with. According to Edwards (2007), romantic relationships satisfy attachment security and determine a number of other individual perceptions of their emotions. Personal preparedness to deal with conflicts, forgiveness and other emotional attributes depend on the nature of attachment experience developed during development at the infancy stage.

Individuals’ perception of the attachment figure in a romantic relationship can be an extrapolation of an attachment figure during infancy. An individual’s perceptions on the ideal attachment figure in a romantic relationship may dictate the type of a partner chosen. From the personal description in the beginning of this article, future attractions to relationships can be derived from the type of attachment formed. A girl, for instance will look for a man with attractive qualities such as those possessed by the father in order to sustain emotional development achieved in the attachment patterns. In case the girl engages in a relationship with a man off the attachment expectations, the romantic relationship may face several hurdles as satisfaction is sought.  In a similar way, a young man looking for a romantic relationship will look in a partner for qualities that resemble those of the attachment figure who could be the mother. In case a prospective partner does not offer these qualities, the apparent satisfaction in the romantic relationship drops.

According to Goodman and Mikulincer (2006), the establishment, sustenance and dissolution of romantic relationships depend on the sustainability of the romantic bond which is a factor of attachment patterns. According to the author, adult attachment depicted in romantic relationships is built on the infancy attachment with slight modifications due to changes in motivational systems between the parties involved in the relationships.  Proximity between attachment p.............