Attachment-Based Relationships
Intermediate levels of commitment
I recently read the book Polysecure, which I mostly didn’t like very much, but it did give me an interesting relationships distinction: attachment-based relationships versus non-attachment-based relationships.1
Attachment-based relationships are reliable and consistent. They’re the people who have your back, the people you go to when you’re in trouble, the people you want to share exciting things with. You’re available to spend time with your partner2, responsive when your partner reaches out, and engaged with their feelings. To put it flippantly, an attachment-based relationship is one where you can’t just disappear for six months without the person you’re in a relationship with having a justifiable complaint.
Attachment-based relationships may be romantic or platonic, primary or secondary; to be honest, I think the terminology is most useful for platonic and secondary attachment-based relationships, where negotiating levels of commitment may be difficult.
A relationship may be valuable, important, enriching to your life, loving, and intimate without being an attachment-based relationship. In fact, most people don’t have attachment-based relationships with most of the people they care about: attachment-based relationships consume time and resources, and most people have a limited ability to make the kind of commitment an attachment-based relationship requires.
In attachment-based relationships, you are your partner’s secure base and safe haven (and of course they’re yours). “Secure base” means that you make them feel safe to explore, grow, and try new things that might be scary; for example, as someone’s secure base, you might encourage them to try something new, compassionately point out their mistakes, have intellectually stimulating conversations, or support their dreams. “Safe haven” means that you are there for them when they’re in trouble, upset, or grieving: for example, as someone’s safe haven, you might help in practical ways when they’re sick, give them comfort when they’re sad, ask about their needs and feelings, or just talk to them about their day.
A useful way to think about secure bases and safe havens might be a parent’s relationship with a young child (in fact, our relationship with our parents is our model for all our attachment-based relationships in adulthood, and attachment research was originally done on the parent/child relationship). Being a secure base is like when a child checks that the parent is still there before going down the tall, scary slide. Being a safe haven is like when a child falls down and scrapes their knee, and the parent kisses them to make it all better. Our problems are more adult, but our needs from each other aren’t that different.
Polysecure uses the acronym HEART to talk about what people need from attachment-based relationships, and it might be useful to go through the acronym to figure out whether a relationship is attachment-based or whether an attachment-based relationship is meeting both your and your partner’s needs:
Here: are you present with each other? do you have regular time together where you’re focused on each other?
Expressed delight: do you tell each other about how much you appreciate each other? do you understand what you love about each other?
Attunement: do you “get” each other? do you understand each other on a deep level?
Routines: are there things you do together every day, week, month, or year that you rely on? do you share special occasions together?
Turning towards after conflict: when you’re angry at each other, do you make up afterward? do you try to understand your partner and compromise, instead of just wanting to be right?
A thing I really like about this concept is that it makes it easier to talk about intermediate levels of commitment between a primary relationship and a “well, we hang out when we have the time” secondary relationship. You don’t have to live together, merge finances, or be the most important people in each other’s lives to have an attachment-based relationship; you also don’t have to be in love with each other or have sex. An attachment-based relationship can mean playing D&D together every week, texting your partner pictures of flowers that remind you of them, dropping food off at their house when they have covid, and talking them through their anxiety before they do public speaking. These relationships are real and important, and I think being able to talk about them will make it possible to form them more intentionally and honor our commitments.
I assume that someone reading this post will come up with some cute name for this concept, possibly involving astronomical bodies, but I’m going with the terminology used in the book.
A term I am using broadly to be inclusive of both romantic and platonic relationships.
I probably was not going to read this book anytime soon, and this was *such* a useful definition for me. I have been trying to grok what is the subtle difference between folks I refer to as "partners" vs not (I do not necessarily have sex with all of them), and this got it right on the money. I do not know why it was not intuitive to me that explaining a concept from a book is helpful to do.
Such a useful concept, glad I found this through your index. And I'm not even poly in principle or practice. I've been feeling in the dark for this distinction, probably because I'm feeling a distinct lack of attachment based relationships in my life despite NOT being lonely as such.
And I feel that one of the most common causes of conflict/disappointment is a mismatch on this (and possibly a tentative hypothesis that some people want to, impossibly, have an ABR with anyone who's more than a most fleeting acquiantance.
Oh and as others said, the elements of HEART don't work for me fully here either, but the gist of the concept definitely does.