About Bondlings

What Bondlings is

Bondlings grew out of a simple idea: attachment research has a lot to say about everyday relationships, but much of what circulates online is either oversimplified or presented with more certainty than the research allows. We want to offer something in between, clear enough to be useful and honest about its limits.

The site has three parts. The attachment style quiz places you on two dimensions, anxiety and avoidance. The style pages describe the secure, anxious, avoidant and fearful-avoidant patterns in depth. The wiki covers the background, from the history of attachment theory to questions such as whether attachment styles can change.

The four figures you see across the site, Harbor, Spark, Island and Pendulum, are illustrations of each style’s typical way of handling closeness. They are meant to make the patterns easier to picture, not to put people in boxes.

What we do and do not do

We do:

• offer the quiz and all content for free,
• explain how the quiz calculates your result, openly, on how the quiz works,
• cite the research we rely on in every article,
• describe styles as tendencies that can change.

We do not:

• diagnose anything. Bondlings is for self-reflection, not a clinical test, and our content is not a substitute for professional advice,
• claim that our quiz is validated. It has not been tested in a validation study,
• ask you to create an account. There are no accounts,
• collect your answers. They stay in your browser.

If you are going through a hard time, please see getting support.

Sources we build on

Our content rests on published attachment research, including the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth on attachment in childhood, Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver on adult romantic attachment, Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz on the four-category model, Kelly Brennan, Catherine Clark and Phillip Shaver on the two dimensions of anxiety and avoidance, and Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver’s overview of adult attachment. Each article lists its references at the end. The quiz statements are our own; the method page explains why.

Contact

If you spot an error, have a question or want to suggest a topic, you can reach us through the contact details in our legal notice. We correct mistakes when they are pointed out.