Quick answer
Hazan and Shaver measured happy, friendly, trusting love and acceptance of faults. A 1991 scale linked higher fear-of-intimacy scores with less self-disclosure.
On July 26, 1985, the Rocky Mountain News printed a love quiz in the Lifestyles section and also flagged it on the front page: "Tell us about the love of your life; experts ask 95 questions about your most important romance." Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver reported that quiz in 1987 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in "Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process." Readers described their single most important love relationship, past or current. Of those relationships, 61 percent were current and 39 percent were past.
People often want a list of intimacy signs. The closest research stand-ins on the page are three documented pieces: what Hazan and Shaver actually measured in the secure group, the APA dictionary's adult line on attachment, and a negative link Descutner and Thelen reported between fear-of-intimacy scores and self-disclosure.
The paragraph secure readers checked
The quiz asked for one of three self-descriptions. The secure wording was: "I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me. I don't often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me." In the newspaper sample, 319 people, 56 percent, chose it.
Classification and description are not the same result. Secure respondents described that love as especially happy, friendly, and trusting, and they emphasized accepting the partner despite faults. That cluster is the study's picture of this group's romance. It is not a set of behaviors to spy on at dinner. Acceptance of faults keeps the picture from meaning "we never disagree." The secure respondents were not described as people who had found a flawless partner. They emphasized accepting the partner they had.
How the other two groups compared on those measures
On happiness, friendship, trust, and fear of closeness, secure subjects differed from both insecure groups, who did not differ from each other. The happier, friendlier, more trusting description, with less fear of closeness, separated the secure readers from everyone else. It did not separate avoidant readers from anxious/ambivalent readers. On those dimensions the two insecure groups sat together, and both sat apart from the secure group.
Avoidant subjects were the least accepting. Their item began, "I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others," and continued through difficulty trusting completely, difficulty depending, nervousness when anyone gets too close, and partners who want more intimacy than feels comfortable. The authors characterized avoidant lovers by fear of intimacy, emotional highs and lows, and jealousy. They never had the highest mean on a positive love-experience dimension. If acceptance of faults is a secure-group emphasis, the paper places the avoidant group farthest from it.
The anxious/ambivalent paragraph is a different pattern. On happiness, friendship, trust, and fear of closeness, the two insecure groups did not differ. Obsession and jealousy findings are not recycled here as signs of intimacy.
Mean reported length was 10.02 years among secure respondents, 5.97 years among avoidant respondents, and 4.86 years among anxious/ambivalent respondents. Average age in all three groups was 36, so the length gap is not an age gap inside this sample. Reported divorce was 6 percent secure, 12 percent avoidant, and 10 percent anxious/ambivalent. Those figures describe the people who mailed the quiz back. They do not forecast your relationship.
What a dictionary adds about adulthood
The APA Dictionary of Psychology updated its "attachment" entry on April 19, 2018. The entry defines attachment as the emotional bond between a human infant, or a young nonhuman animal, and its parent figure or caregiver, developed as a step in establishing a feeling of security and shown by calmness while that person is present. It also says attachment denotes the tendency to form such bonds with certain other individuals in infancy, as well as the tendency in adulthood to seek emotionally supportive social relationships.
That last clause is the adult definition worth keeping beside the romance quiz. Seeking emotionally supportive social relationships is broader than one sexual partnership. The dictionary does not say the support must be romantic, married, or exclusive, and it does not supply symptoms. It names a tendency. If you have been using "attachment" as a private nickname for dating anxiety, the 2018 wording pulls the word back toward a wider adult habit: looking for relationships that offer emotional support.
Neither source is an intake form. One reports how a secure group described a romance. The other names an adult tendency to seek emotionally supportive relationships.
Fear-of-intimacy scores and self-disclosure
In 1991, Carol J. Descutner and Mark H. Thelen published "Development and validation of a Fear-of-Intimacy Scale" in Psychological Assessment. It is a 35-item self-report of anxiety about close dating relationships. They reported high internal consistency and test-retest reliability. This article will not reproduce the items. Copying a questionnaire would look like a test you can score at home. The result that speaks to intimacy is the direction of the correlations.
Fear-of-intimacy scores correlated positively with a loneliness measure. They correlated negatively with self-disclosure, with social intimacy, and with social desirability. Those relations held after social desirability was partialed out. The negative link with self-disclosure was not an artifact of people trying to look good on the form. Higher fear still went with lower self-disclosure once social desirability was accounted for, and the same was true for social intimacy.
Higher scores also went with briefer relationships in self-report, and with therapists' ratings of clients' fear of intimacy. Androgynous subjects had less fear of intimacy than masculine subjects and undifferentiated subjects. That comparison is about categories in the validation sample. It is not advice to adopt a gender role so that closeness will arrive. It belongs in an honest summary because it is part of what the paper reported, and it is easy to turn into a rule the authors did not write.
Advice columns sometimes flatten that negative association into "just open up." The study does not say that. It says more reported anxiety about close dating relationships went with less self-disclosure and less social intimacy, while loneliness scores moved with the fear scores. The stand-in is a relationship among measures, not a quota of stories you owe someone.
Do not memorize a cutoff. The material these notes use does not establish an average score you should treat as normal or abnormal. High internal consistency and test-retest reliability mean the items hung together and showed some repeat stability in the work they published. They do not turn a kitchen-table total into a diagnosis.
Limits on using any of this as a personal verdict
Hazan and Shaver printed limits that still apply when their paragraphs circulate as dating wisdom. Newspaper respondents self-select, and they tend to be slightly more educated and more often women. The style item forces several issues into one choice. Someone who is comfortable with closeness and also afraid of abandonment has to collapse those issues into a single box. Child-parent bonds differ from adult romance, the authors say, because romance is mutual and it usually includes sexual attraction. Correlations with parent history were significant but not strong, and they are likely to weaken with age. Some adults revise their models in later relationships. The results suggest, but do not prove, that the same sorts of forces that affect infant attachment may affect these adult choices.
Across both studies the authors reported approximately 56 percent secure, 24 percent avoidant, and 20 percent anxious/ambivalent. Study 2 was a check, not a second newspaper: 108 undergraduates, 38 men and 70 women, mean age 18, in a course called Understanding Human Conflict. The classroom sample was not self-selected from a Lifestyles page. That does not cancel the self-selection limit on the readers who chose to respond to the newspaper.
Reading these measures is education, not an assessment of your relationship and not treatment. A paragraph from 1985, a dictionary sentence, or a fear-of-intimacy correlation cannot tell you whether you are safe with someone. If anxiety about closeness is disrupting your days, a licensed clinician is the person who can evaluate that with you. These pages only describe what the studies counted.
You can still use the stand-ins without inflating them. Ask whether the romance you would call your most important one is one you would call happy, friendly, and trusting, with faults included rather than denied. Notice the scale result as a correlation, not a homework assignment. Keep the adult dictionary line in view when intimacy starts to mean only romance.
The 19 percent who chose the anxious/ambivalent paragraph are described in a separate piece.
Which stand-in do you actually have evidence for this month: a relationship you can describe as happy, friendly, trusting, and accepting of faults, or anxiety about closeness that shows up alongside less disclosure?
Notes
Hazan, C., and Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511
American Psychological Association. Attachment. APA Dictionary of Psychology, updated April 19, 2018. https://dictionary.apa.org/attachment
Descutner, C. J., and Thelen, M. H. (1991). Development and validation of a Fear-of-Intimacy Scale. Psychological Assessment, 3(2), 218–225. https://doi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.3.2.218
Frequently Asked Questions
- Does this research give you signs to count?
- These sources never publish a tally of intimacy behaviors to check off. What they report is how one group described a central romance, plus a dictionary line and a correlation.
- What did secure respondents emphasize besides happiness?
- They stressed staying with a partner even when that person had flaws. Friendliness and trust sat in the same reported picture.
- Did fear of closeness separate all three groups?
- The comfortable group differed from each of the other two. Those other two resembled one another on closeness-fear and also on happiness, friendship, and trust.
- What did the 1991 scale find about opening up?
- Greater anxiety about close dating relationships went along with revealing less, and with less social closeness. Researchers still saw that after they removed the influence of wanting to appear admirable.
- When should you see a clinician about this?
- When anxiety about getting close is disrupting ordinary days, take the question to a licensed professional. A journal summary cannot assess you.