The secure answer on a 1985 love quiz is worth keeping

Published 2026-04-16 · 6 min read · By LovePinnacle Editorial

On July 26, 1985, the Rocky Mountain News printed a love quiz in the Lifestyles section and flagged it on the front page, inviting readers to describe the love of their life. Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver later published the work in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1987. Readers were asked about a single most important romance, past or current. In the sample, 61% of those relationships were current and 39% were past. The quiz was a study instrument that happened to run in a newspaper. It wasn't a stack of lines for a poster.

A dated source beats a floating line

People pass around sentences about love with no speaker, no date, and no page. A primary letter is safer than that kind of floating quotation. You can look up who wrote it, where they were, and when. This essay won't paste famous correspondence. Other writing already quotes an eighteenth-century letter, and copying those sentences again would only dress this page in borrowed intimacy. The lines worth keeping here were printed as questionnaire stems. They're public, they have authors, and they were choices on a form, not decorations.

That limit is the point. A stem isn't wiser because it sounds soft. It's more trustworthy because you can see the question people actually answered. If a graphic offers you a sentence about intimacy and can't tell you who said it, put it down. You already have wording that was tied to a sample, a year, and a journal.

Who checked which box

Self-classification in the newspaper sample sorted into three groups. Secure was N=319, 56%. Avoidant was N=145, 25%. Anxious/ambivalent was N=110, 19%. Twenty-one people skipped the item. Twenty-five checked more than one. The item forced several issues into one choice, which the authors named as a limit. Some readers refused the single box. That refusal belongs in the story, because a clean percentage can hide a messy question.

Secure respondents described that love as especially happy, friendly, and trusting. They emphasized accepting the partner despite faults. On happiness, friendship, trust, and fear of closeness, secure subjects differed from both insecure groups, and the two insecure groups didn't differ from each other. Avoidant subjects were the least accepting. Across the positive love-experience dimensions in the paper, avoidant lovers never had the highest mean.

The avoidant portrait in the paper includes fear of intimacy, emotional highs and lows, and jealousy. The anxious/ambivalent portrait includes obsession, desire for reciprocation and union, emotional highs and lows, and jealousy, and that group stood apart on obsessive preoccupation, sexual attraction, desire for union, desire for reciprocation, and love at first sight. Those are group descriptions from one quiz. They aren't instructions for how you should feel this month. The center of this essay is the secure description, because that's the wording people keep trying to replace with unsourced lines.

The paper also printed an avoidant stem and an anxious/ambivalent stem. This essay leaves both unquoted on purpose. You can open the 1987 article if you need the other two wordings. Pasting all three would turn a study item into a little gallery of lines, which is the habit this piece is refusing. One full stem is enough to show what a sourced line looks like, and the secure one is the line that matches the happy, friendly, trusting description above.

The stem worth keeping

Here is the secure stem, quoted in full because it's the line this piece is willing to stand behind:

"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."

Read it as a description some people endorsed, not as a vow you must recite to deserve love. The content is specific. Closeness is relatively easy, not effortless in every hour. Depending and being depended on are both allowed. Worry about abandonment isn't the daily weather. Worry about someone getting too close isn't the daily weather either. Beside that stem, the secure readers' written picture of love stressed happiness, friendliness, trust, and acceptance of faults. Acceptance of faults is the part floating quotations often skip, because it's less pretty than a promise. It's also the part that matches a real partner, who will have faults.

You can hold the stem next to your own relationship without turning the quiz into a diagnosis. Ask which clauses sound like your week and which clauses sound like a wish. If depending on someone still feels like a trap, the stem is information about a difference, not a scolding. If you want closeness and also panic when it arrives, you aren't failing a poem. You're noticing that this particular wording was one option among three, and that plenty of the newspaper readers chose a different option.

Mean reported length in that sample was 10.02 years for secure respondents, 5.97 years for avoidant respondents, and 4.86 years for anxious/ambivalent respondents. Average age in all three groups was 36. Divorce was reported by 6% of the secure group, 12% of the avoidant group, and 10% of the anxious/ambivalent group. Those figures describe the readers who answered. They don't assign your relationship a length, and they don't predict your divorce. A shorter relationship in the avoidant or anxious group is a sample result, not a sentence.

What the authors wouldn't let the quiz prove

Study 2 was a check on the newspaper, not a second round of pretty lines. It included 108 undergraduates, 38 men and 70 women, mean age 18, in a course called Understanding Human Conflict. It wasn't a self-selected newspaper sample. Across both studies the authors reported approximately 56% secure, 24% avoidant, and 20% anxious/ambivalent. The rough split is similar. The samples aren't the same kind of people, and the authors didn't pretend they were.

Their own limits are part of the quote's meaning. Newspaper respondents self-select and tend to be slightly more educated and more often women. The style item forces several issues into one choice. Child-parent bonds differ from adult romance, because romance is mutual and it usually includes sexual attraction. Correlations with parent history were significant but not strong, and the authors thought those links likely weaken with age. Some adults revise their models in later relationships. On that point they cite Main, Kaplan, and Cassidy, 1985, on parents who broke a cross-generational pattern. The results suggest, but don't prove, that the same sorts of forces that affect infant attachment may affect these adult choices.

So the stem is a good line to keep and a bad line to worship. It's better than a quotation with no source. It's still one option on a 1985 form, answered by people who chose to participate, in language that bundles several feelings together. If you want words for intimacy, start there, and then look at the partner in front of you, faults included. A friendly, trusting description that can survive a fault will do more for you than a prettier sentence nobody can trace.

Which clause in that secure wording sounds like a relationship you're actually in, and which clause is still a wish?

Where the wording comes from

• Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, "Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52(3), 511–524, 1987. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511
• The secure stem above is the newspaper self-classification item quoted in that paper.

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