With Valentine’s Day heading to a February 14th near you, it’s hard to go anywhere without reminders of romantic love winking at you from every corner. Red and pink hearts like confetti sprinkled everywhere. Rows of chocolates lining the grocery store shelves. Bunches of roses, bundled and ready to place into the arms of your loved one, as long as you don’t mind the inflated price.

We love love. 

When it comes to romantic love, there are the obvious elements; the initial meet-cute. The funny and flirty text threads. The first date and the coffee meetups and the butterflies in your stomach. Realizing the person across the table from you embodies the things that you find most important; faith, commitment, a future family, laughter, strength.

But there are other dynamics afoot as well, elements that often aren’t as obvious.

All of us carry in our hearts a particular type of attachment style. In the 1950s, John Bowlby first came up with the theory on how we bond with other humans. 1  He based his early work on infants and how they ‘attach’ to their primary caregivers, laying the foundation for how they would connect with people throughout their lives. Around the same time, other researchers began also looking into attachment, like Mary Ainsworth, Rudolph Schaffer, and Peggy Emerson. 2  What followed was better understanding of how humans form attachments with each other, and the ways in which those attachment styles can be healthy and life-giving or challenging and disruptive.

In the context of your romantic relationship with your spouse, you have your own attachment style and they have theirs. These attachment styles were developed over time from your connection with your parents, family, friends, and previous romantic experiences:

  • Secure: When you have a secure attachment style, you’re generally comfortable with getting close to your partner. You find it relatively easy to trust the other person and you feel very close to them. 
  • Anxious: If you have an anxious attachment style, you’ll likely find that you’re overly preoccupied with your relationship, meaning that you’re consistently concerned about the state of your relationship or you’re always trying to figure out ways to make your partner more committed to you, more connected. You’re likely very sensitive to rejection, and you may find yourself ruminating on wanting more attention and more reassurance from your partner. 
  • Avoidant: If you have an avoidant attachment style, this means that you may find close connection to someone uncomfortable or confining. You likely distance yourself emotionally, particularly during conflict or challenge. You like the feeling of being self-reliant, and you may resist situations that lead to greater closeness. 

It’s important to note that these points on attachments represent something of a spectrum. For example, you might have a more anxious attachment style, but through a healthy relationship, work with your therapist, and prayer, today you are far more likely to experience attachment in a more secure way. There are excellent tools available to you for healing issues in your attachment style and within your relationship to help you navigate love and connection from a more secure place. (If you’re a Member of Altrua HealthShare, you have access to telecounseling through your HealthWallet app.)

While you may already be familiar with attachment styles and attachment theory, you might not be as familiar with the role that your particular attachment style plays in your overall health. Wherever you fall on the attachment scale, the way you experience your relationships is processed through your physiology. When you learn more about how you connect, you can also learn more about how it impacts your physical health and what you can do to optimize both your relationship and your health. 

Your Style, Your Health 

Again, we all can have elements of each attachment style, times we feel secure, times we feel anxious, times we feel avoidant. But you may find, because of your personal history, because of your personality, that you tend to trend strongly in one style.

If you are more anxiously attached, your body can read it as stress. And when stress shows up, so do higher cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone produced by the body in response to perceived danger or overwhelm. While cortisol is an important and helpful hormone response, when cortisol remains chronically high due to work stress or relationship dynamics, the effects on your health can be marked. This increased level of cortisol for the person who is more anxiously attached in their marriage also led to the discovery that T-cell counts were lower. Your T-cells are what support your immune system. When T-cells are lower, it means that your immune system isn’t as strong in protecting you. This high-cortisol-low-T-cell mix puts you at higher risk for heart issues, metabolic challenges, and reduced immune response. There is also growing research that an anxious attachment style can lead to higher inflammation response in the body.

An anxious attachment style in your primary romantic relationship can also show up in broader social settings. If you’re more anxiously attached, your cortisol levels can also spike at a dinner party, when you’re meeting new people, or other socially challenging situations. 4 

On the other hand, avoidant attachment has its own set of health impacts. While it might seem that having a more avoidant attachment style could prevent you from the cortisol spikes experienced by an anxious attachment style, the avoidant style is at risk for loneliness. Loneliness carries its own type of stress, which, wait for it, can lead to higher cortisol. When individuals experience loneliness, their risk for heart issues, type 2 diabetes, dementia, and stroke goes up. Social connection, in particular close and meaningful relationships, are shown to be protective of health on a number of fronts. While operating out of an avoidant attachment might initially make you feel that you are protecting yourself from the emotional rollercoaster of anxious attachment, the impact on your physical health can be equally damaging and compromising.

Moving the Needle toward Secure Attachment

So you’re recognized that you tend to be anxious in your relationship. Or you can see where you are avoidant. You acknowledge that not only for the health of your relationship but also for your physical health that you want to live more in the secure attachment range.

“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear…”

I John 4:18

How do you do that?

🫵 Begin with You: Acknowledge that you likely have come into marriage with a set of attachment dynamics already in play, built from your family of origin and other close relationships in your life up to this point. The more you know about your personal attachment style, the better you’ll be able to understand the expectations, needs, and feelings you bring into your romantic relationship. (You can find a free quiz to discover your attachment style here.)

🛜 Get Clear on Your Relationship Dynamics: While you and your spouse bring a certain level of attachment style into the beginning of your relationship, over time, you develop relational dynamics that can either lead to more secure attachment with each other or can lead to leaning more strongly into more unhealthy attachment behaviors. Notice the patterns that pop up for you as a couple. In a conflict, who is more likely to shut down? Who is more likely to want to keep talking? Who seems to need more reassurance? Who sometimes feels smothered? These kinds of clues can help you understand how each of your attachment styles shows up in your relationship. (For a classic book on attachment style and relationships, check out Dr. Sue Johnson’s Hold Me Tight.)

👓 Bring in the Expert: Increasing your self awareness about attachment, both individually and as a couple, isn’t something you need to navigate on your own. A qualified counselor or therapist can help you and your spouse create new connection, heal old attachment wounds, and put you on the road to living more securely in your relationship. If you’re a Member of Altrua HealthShare, you have access to telecounseling through your HealthWallet app. This feature of your membership puts you in touch with excellent professionals who can help you identify the strengths in your love and provide tools for where you need it. If you’re not yet a Member of Altrua HealthShare or you have questions about your membership, reach out to a Member Services Representative today for more information at 1-888-244-3839. Altrua HealthShare knows that true health is not just physical, but is also mental and spiritual, which is why they were one of the first health shares to offer counseling and therapy support to Members.

🍎 Focus on Physical Health as You Establish Attachment Health: When attachment styles become dysregulated, people tend to engage in unhealthy actions: overeating, drinking heavily, risky behavior, and other means of coping. When people experience more secure attachment, their overall health practices also improve. Even if you find yourself needing to work on your attachment issues, eating well, avoiding harmful substances, getting in that daily walk, making sleep a priority can all go a long way in also helping you in your attachment work. Dr. Andrea Lein writes, “Adults with secure attachment are better able to recover from stress and use healthy coping mechanisms to maintain a balanced emotional state.”

And check this out: people who are more securely attached in their relationships are more likely to get to that doctor’s appointment and to follow treatments and protocols. Even as you are working on your relational health, get in those well-checks, important testing, and other medical appointments. Engaging in important self-care in this way helps you know that you can trust yourself to take care of yourself. 

“Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.

Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.”

 Romans 12:9-10

💪🏽 ❣️While you might think of your approach to your most important relationships as disconnected from your physical health, it’s actually deeply connected. Making improvements in one area helps create greater health in the other. This Valentine’s Day, do more for your relationship than the obligatory flowers and chocolate. Take some time to learn more about your relationship and your part in it. A happy Valentine is a securely attached Valentine!

1  https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-01038-001
2  https://www.simplypsychology.org/stages-of-attachment-identified-by-john-bowlby-and-schaffer-emerson-1964.html
3  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3816388/
4  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4298031/
5  https://www.columbiadoctors.org/news/how-loneliness-impacts-your-health-and-ways-make-connections#:~:text=What%20is%20the%20relationship%20between,%2C%20anxiety%2C%20and%20depression).
6  https://www.who.int/news/item/30-06-2025-social-connection-linked-to-improved-heath-and-reduced-risk-of-early-death
7  https://positivepsychology.com/secure-attachment-style/
8  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6187440/