Attachment Style and Intimacy among Romantic Relationships

Abstract

The study was aimed to investigate the relation between attachment styles and intimacy among romantic relationships (dating, cohabiting and married) and gender difference and difference between the types of relationship status (dating, cohabiting and married) in each of the variables. Attachment styles has 3 different styles- Secure, Ambivalent and Avoidant and intimacy which has 5 different types- Emotional, Social, Sexual, Intellectual, Recreational and 1 conventionality scale. A set of two questionnaires were used in this study regarding each of the variables. A total of 150 young adults of the age 18-40 years participated in online survey, using Google forms, in which 58% were males and the rest 42% were females among these 49% were dating individuals, 31% cohabiting and the rest 19% were married. The result showed the relation between secure attachment style with all 5 intimacy types, a significant negative relation was seen between ambivalent attachment style and emotional intimacy. And a significant negative relation between avoidant attachment style and social intimacy. There was no significant difference found between secure attachment and avoidant attachment among gender. However, there was a gender difference present in avoidant attachment with males having higher level of avoidant attachment. There was a gender difference found in one of the types of intimacy indicating females having higher level of intellectual intimacy. The results on one-way Anova showed that there was no difference in attachment styles among dating, cohabiting and married individuals. And one-way Anova for intimacy types showed that the emotional intimacy was higher for married individuals.