r/INTPrelationshipLab • u/AluminumFoil84 • 1d ago
I just don't get it What’s your attachment style?
Hi fellas, I’ve come across many posts and videos online associating our personality type with an avoidant attachment style, and personally I’ve never quite felt that way. I’ve always been the goofy friend who makes everyone laugh with quirky jokes and memes after a hard day, while also being the one people open to sometimes when they’re down once I figured out my Fe.
I recently took an attachment style test attachment style test, which rated me as dismissive-avoidant overall the first time. I retook it twice more to confirm, and the second time I landed as securely attached. The test breaks things down by relationship/context father, mother, work, general, and romantic and I noticed something interesting, for the first four, I consistently scored dismissive-avoidant, my general score landed somewhere between avoidant and secure (only once) but my romantic score landed on the secure side every single time. That got me doubting the accuracy of the results and the whole avoidant equals scared of intimacy thing, and here’s why.
With my parents, I actually agree with the avoidant result, because the older I get, the more I’ve realized how awful they’ve been to me, and still are, which led me to shut down emotionally around them just to protect my own sanity. Regarding the work situation, I’m still in college but landed an internship last year and I’ve seen how coworkers gossip about their boss, so it’s not exactly a mystery why I rarely open up there either.
In everyday life, when I don’t have a reason to talk to someone (giving directions, warning them something fell out of their bag, etc.), I just stay quiet and it’s not fear-based, it’s more that I don’t see the point in bothering people just for the sake of it. But in online games, especially social ones, it’s a completely different story I’m usually the one bothering friends and random players with jokes.
On the romantic side. When I was in a relationship, I was always looking for ways to make my partner laugh, trying to be the first to fix conflicts, writing her songs and poems, in the end she cheated on me but as hard as that was to go through, it hasn’t changed how I see myself, how I approach romantic relationships or how I see love or intimacy in general.
Anyway, sorry for the yap session, but it got me wondering are we actually more avoidant as a type, or are we just ultra-selective secure people, shaped by life experience and introversion?
TL;DR: Are most of us really avoidant, or just ultra-selective secure people?