In this series, we publish blog posts written by our undergraduate students for the PB101 Foundations of Psychological Science course. Here, Xiang Fan explores attachment theory and how our attachment styles influence our relationships in adulthood, with particular focus on gender differences.

As this old saying goes, many real-life marriages and the media portray scenes where a girl would mostly ask her boyfriend or husband, “Do you love me?” Nevertheless, feelings of security and comfort in romantic relationships are desirable for both people in love (Rubin et al., 1981). This gender difference between women and men in a romantic relationship can be explored from evolutionary backgrounds and social cultivation perspectives.

The concept of attachment theory was first proposed by John Bowlby (1969), who defined it as a “lasting psychological connection between human beings” (p. 194) that extends and affects the quality of bonding you experience throughout the lifespan. Studies on attachment styles have long been an important topic in human development. However, much of this research has focused on attachment in children and its association with parenting (e.g. Brown & Whiteside, 2008). Less emphasis has been put on adult attachment styles and individual differences (Davis et al., 2016).

As the theory suggests, attachment develops throughout people’s lives, so it is vital to explore adults’ romantic attachment styles and their causes through a longitudinal perspective, beginning from infancy. According to Bowlby (1969), infant attachment behaviour is regulated by an innate motivational system, the attachment behavioural system, designed by natural selection to promote safety and survival. This evolutionary explanation is tightly connected to the necessity of romantic attachment: “the pair-bonding between parents is crucial to secure protection for the survival of their immature offspring” (Fraley & Shaver, 2000). The emotional bond that develops between adult romantic partners is partly a function of the same motivational system that gives rise to the emotional bond between infants and their caregivers (Shaver et al., 1988).

Despite the similarities in attachment styles between adulthood and infancy in terms of seeking security and care, romantic attachment is more reciprocal and benefits both partners mutually (Eisenman, 2006). Thus, romantic partners’ satisfactions are interdependent (Johnson et al., 2022), which requires a joint effort from both. Hence, a good relationship depends on joint effort, but the question remains: why do women ask “Do you love me?” more? It needs a deeper dive.

Potential reasons account for the gender differences

Whenever people think about a potential difference in attachment styles, attributing it to people’s distinguishing gender roles could be a reason to explain that. It is well accepted that women and men tend to be socialised differently from birth (Bem, 1993) and, as a result, men are typically less emotional and less nurturing than women. Thus, a certain attachment style that an adult is categorised to could be a strong predictor of his or her experience in romantic relationships. The evidence showed that adults who yield a secure attachment style (low feelings of attachment anxiety and avoidance) were detected to be in the majority (59 per cent) in the whole population (Mickelson et al., 1997), in a 36-item Experience in Close Relationships questionnaire (ECR). They indicated more pleasant emotional experiences regularly in their adult romantic relationships and less of a negative influence on how they resolve disputes and collaborate with their partners (Pascuzzo et al., 2013). People with low attachment avoidance also report higher satisfaction in a romantic relationship, even when facing long-distance obstacles, compared to other couples with insecure attachment types (Roberts & Pistole, 2009). However, this method of categorising people’s attachment styles during experiments has been criticised as untrustworthy because an individual’s response to an attachment style questionnaire reflects the relational schema that is activated at the time, rather than an enduring general disposition or trait (Scharfe & Bartholomew, 1994). In addition, there is not enough evidence of gender differences in attachment styles for researchers to attribute a typical style to either sex (Shi, 2003). So where this adage “happy wife, happy life” comes from needs to be tracked in other aspects.

Emotional responses within romantic bonds have long been investigated to detect the reason for the discrepancy. Feelings of insecurity in a romantic relationship tend to elicit jealousy and aggression. 79 per cent of males and 66 per cent of females considered themselves jealous (Güçlü et al., 2017). Although such emotion plays a key role in maintaining the mated pair intact (Buss, 2000), anxious jealousy is likely to deteriorate a relationship and make people frustrated (Barelds & Barelds-Dijkstra, 2007). Additionally, women suffer more from the negative impact of this since they treat potential infidelity more seriously, as suggested by Harris and Christenfeld (1996).

Romantic attachment is an integration of attachment and love that relates to preferences in mating (Dunkel et al., 2016). According to parental investment theory outlined by Robert Trivers (1972), females tend to be more picky in selecting partners since they have to sacrifice more for things like providing more direct physical care to offspring, a 9 month reproduction period, and shorter fertility time compared to males. These act as an incentive for women to be more cautious about choosing and keeping mates (Del Giudice, 2011). These different attitudes toward casual mating have been demonstrated in various comparison studies as well. For example, Shackelford et al. (2005) found that males sought more than 18 sex partners for shortmating, on average during their lifetime, whereas females desired on average less than five, though it was argued to overestimate the number after the replication by Pedersen et al. (2002). In thinking about dismissing attachment, these vastly different minds easily incur more insecurity sense for females.

Generation Z can be different

While both genders are naturally constructed with a proclivity to psychologically differ in particular ways for adaptive reasons, they do not always exhibit the same level of variation across cultures. According to social role theory (Eagly & Wood, 1999), gender-role socialisation leads to discrete gender mate preferences based on different cultural expectations. In most societies, this proximate social role explanation has shown that social expectations of higher female nurturance may assist to maintain higher emotional sensitivity and lower levels of dismissiveness in women (Valentine & Li, 2012). Nevertheless, the modern transformation of anti-sexism in social roles promoted by the current generation could be an effective strategy to narrow these gender disparities (Newman & Newman, 2020).

Taken together, a “happy wife” does not indeed mean a “happy life”. The “happy wife” motto is a misleading social narrative to be aware of, and “happy spouse” may be a more fitting way to describe the important roles of of both females and males in a fulfilling romantic relationship. Future research could look at romantic bonding in homosexual couples to further investigate the adult attachment theory in minority groups.

• This post was originally written as part of PB101: Foundations of Psychological Science, which is a core course on the BSc Psychological and Behavioural Science. It has been published with the permission of the author.
• The opinions in this post are of the author, not of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• Cover image by Ylanite Koppens from Pexels.

References

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