The Scoop: Secure attachment in relationships can change your life for the better, but it can be tricky for many couples to foster them. We spoke to Julie Menanno, founder of The Secure Relationship, about how attachment styles can inform our romantic relationships, what anxiously-attached relationships look like, and how to make your relationship more secure. With Julie’s advice, it’s possible to break out of your relationship cycles and build a trusting and safe relationship.
If you’re ever on social media, you’ve probably seen some content about the ills of toxic behavior, dating red flags, and unhealthy relationships. These posts do a great job of encouraging readers to be mindful about how they treat the people in their lives and protect themselves against mistreatment. Many therapists and relationship experts provide useful and free information on their social media accounts that can save lives and relationships.
But at the same time, broad, influencer-led, context-devoid posts misinform viewers and make them see any disagreement or discomfort in their connections as toxic relationship-enders. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all model to relationships, so judging your partner based on whether they say they would date you if you were a worm or how well they clean up ketchup isn’t the best way to gauge their quality as a partner. But to the untrained eye, it can be hard to know which resources to ignore and which to trust.

Fortunately, some science-led experts offer balanced relationship advice online. Enter Julie Menanno, couples’ therapist and founder of The Secure Relationship.
Julie created the wildly popular The Secure Relationship Instagram account to provide actionable advice on relationships. Julie hired a handful of expert coaches to expand The Secure Relationship into a thriving practice with group work, individual coaching sessions, courses, and more resources to help couples and individuals improve their relationships.
So, how do you know if you’re in a healthy relationship? For some people, it’s intuitive, but for others, it may be hard to tell. “It’s really paying attention to how you feel,” Julie told our team. When you’re in an insecure relationship, you may feel “a sense of unease of disconnection.”
We spoke with Julie to understand what attachment styles are and where they come from, how they shape our romantic relationships, and how to nurture secure relationships that add to your happiness instead of draining it.
What Are Attachment Styles, Really?
Attachment styles come up a lot in relation to romantic relationships, but that isn’t where they start. According to The Secure Relationship blog, “Our attachment style, shaped in early childhood, often mirrors the dynamics we experienced with our caregivers. As adults, these styles manifest in our romantic relationships, where emotional stakes are highest.”
We learn to relate to the people closest to us early in our development, and we tend to mimic those same behaviors as adults in our romantic relationships. “There’s a parallel between the attachment relationship between parent and child and in couples,” Julie said. “It’s a different type of relationship, but the attachment bonds are super similar.”

The four attachment styles are secure attachment, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, and disorganized attachment.
Securely-attached people feel confident in their partners and their relationships. They trust and feel comfortable sharing their feelings.
Anxiously-attached individuals have a hard time trusting their partners, both in terms of loyalty and dependability. They may worry that their partner will leave them, stop loving them, or cheat.
Avoidant partners have a hard time getting close and may panic when faced with vulnerability. When their partners try to get closer, they may draw away.
Those with a disorganized attachment have a combination of anxious and avoidant traits. Most people tend to behave on a spectrum of anxiety or avoidance in their relationships, though they may be more or less secure in different relationships and at different points in their lives.
Just because you tend toward an attachment style other than secure doesn’t mean you can’t grow more secure in your relationship. It takes work, yes, but it’s possible. Most of the time, it starts with growing more secure in yourself.
“If you don’t have an emotionally supportive relationship with your own self, that is definitely going to get in the way of your ability to participate in an emotionally supportive relationship with a partner,” Julie said.
Identifying Insecurity
While it can be harder to know that your relationship is 100% rock-solid, when your relationship is fragile, you can feel it. “If you’re spending a lot of time feeling angsty, anxious, or disconnected, that’s not a good sign,” Julie said.
When you’re in an insecure relationship, you may feel anxiety looming in the background, making it difficult to trust your partner or the stability of your relationship. In some relationships, that may look like worrying that your partner is cheating on you. In others, that may be reading any off day as a sign that you’re headed for a breakup.
Still, in other relationships, the insecurity may come in and out at different points. Partners in these relationships may be able to avoid bad feelings for a while, but get totally sucked into a rut when they come up.

“They’ll hum along when nothing’s going wrong and pretend like everything’s okay and dissociate from the bad stuff that happens,” Julie explained. “But then all of a sudden, they keep finding themselves back in these same negative cycles over and over. These negative cycles keep popping back up.”
Partners who have an anxious attachment style may have a hard time isolating insecurity in themselves from insecurity in their relationship. While your attachment style is correlated with the patterns you experience in your relationship, your anxieties may be based more on how you feel about relationships generally than how you feel about your specific partner.
“Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) was developed by Dr. Sue Johnson and is rooted in attachment theory.” — The Secure Relationship
Your anxieties are a sign of unmet needs, but the way to meet those needs isn’t one size fits all.
“Just because you have unmet needs doesn’t mean it’s necessarily all your partner’s fault,” Julie said “You could be contributing to relationship problems that are leading to these negative cycles that end up with mutually unmet needs. So you do have to trust your feelings, but you don’t necessarily trust the ways that you make sense of the problem.”
That’s part of the reason it’s so important to do the self-work of securing your attachment style. While it’s important to pay attention to bad feelings that arise in your relationships, you also don’t want to cut yourself off from genuine love because of a personal inability to trust.
Tips for Fostering Healthy Relationships
If you want to have a secure relationship, you need to work on both your relationship with your partner and your relationship with yourself. Fortunately, when you’re in a loving relationship, self-work and relationship-work aren’t mutually exclusive – you can do them at the same time.
While quality time, physical connection, and everything in between are important, the key to strengthening your relationship is working on the closeness of your emotional bond. “The tone’s going to be set by the quality of the emotional relationship,” Julie said.
But for many couples, fostering a relationship of safety and vulnerability is easier said than done. They need to learn the emotional tools and behaviors to communicate productively with each other. According to Julie, “being able to validate each other’s concerns, being curious with each other, being able to understand each other’s vulnerability, being able to be vulnerable, being able to have healthy assertions” are all skills that couples should try and strengthen to work on the emotional health of their relationships.

At the same time, working on yourself is important for your general happiness, as well as your ability to be open and trusting with your partner. When you’re operating from a place of anxiety, you’ll have a harder time navigating conflict in a loving and productive way. But if you can identify the triggers in yourself and your relationship, you can begin to work through them on your own and with the support of your partner.
“If you can figure out what’s really going on underneath the surface, what are the unmet attachment needs, what are the hurts and vulnerabilities and even the shame and views of self that aren’t being talked about, that’s the work,” Julie said.
Being in a secure relationship isn’t about avoiding all conflict or discomfort. All couples disagree, and all people have negative feelings or emotions at times that can color how they operate within their relationships. But in a secure relationship, you trust that you can navigate those tough days safely and lovingly.
With a secure relationship, there’s a “felt sense of safety and closeness,” Julie said. “That’s the baseline. We know we can reach each other. We know if we get into this fight or negative cycle, then we can repair it and figure out what went wrong and get back on track.”