Adult Attachment Questionnaire: A Free Printable Version With a Scoring Guide

You do not need a costly assessment or a viral personality quiz to get an honest read on how you show up in close relationships. You need a decent set of questions and a scoring key that does not flatter you.

An adult attachment questionnaire is a self-report tool that measures two things: how much you worry about a partner’s availability and affection (attachment anxiety), and how much you pull away from closeness and from leaning on others (attachment avoidance). The better instruments, in the tradition of the Experiences in Close Relationships measures, place you along those two continuous dimensions rather than dropping you into one tidy box (Brennan, Clark & Shaver, 1998). Below is a printable version you can score yourself, a plain guide for reading the two numbers it produces, and a firm reminder throughout: a questionnaire is a mirror for reflection, not a diagnosis.

What an adult attachment questionnaire actually measures

Early attachment research handed people categories: secure, anxious, avoidant, pick one. It was intuitive, and it was also lossy. When Brennan, Clark and Shaver (1998) gathered nearly every English-language self-report attachment item they could find and ran them through a factor analysis, almost all of the meaningful variation collapsed onto just two underlying dimensions. Nearly everything a good questionnaire is really asking reduces to those two axes.

The first is attachment anxiety: the degree to which you fear being abandoned, crave reassurance, and stay alert to signs your partner might be pulling back. High on this axis, a delayed reply or a flat tone can feel like evidence the bond is in trouble. The second is attachment avoidance: the degree to which you are uncomfortable with closeness and dependence, and prefer to handle things on your own rather than turn to a partner. High on this axis, a request for more intimacy can register as pressure rather than warmth.

The reason dimensions beat categories is that most people are not a pure type. You get a score on each axis, and the two combine. Two people both labeled “anxious” by a pop quiz can differ enormously once you also know their avoidance score. A single category throws that information away; two numbers keep it. Brennan, Clark and Shaver (1998) argued that this dimensional approach captures adult attachment more faithfully than sorting people into groups, because the groups are really just regions on a map that everyone occupies somewhere. If you want the fuller picture of how these patterns form and shift, the attachment styles pillar lays out the whole landscape, and there is a separate walk-through of attachment theory in adult relationships if you want the background before you score yourself.

Worth naming a common failure mode here: people take one quiz, get the word “avoidant,” and treat it as a fixed trait, like eye color. That is not what the measurement is doing. It is estimating where you sit on two continuums right now, in the relationships you have in mind. That is a very different, and much more useful, claim.

The printable adult attachment questionnaire and how to score it

Here is a short questionnaire in the spirit of the ECR-style dimensions. The items are original and paraphrased, not lifted from any copyrighted instrument, so print this page or copy the list onto paper without worry. Think of a current or recent romantic relationship as you answer.

Rate each statement from 1 to 7, where 1 means strongly disagree, 4 means neutral, and 7 means strongly agree. Do not overthink any single item. Your first honest reaction is the useful one.

1. I worry that my partner will stop wanting to be with me.
2. I would rather my partner not see how I really feel underneath.
3. I need frequent reassurance that I am loved.
4. I find it hard to let myself truly depend on my partner.
5. When my partner seems distant, I assume I have done something wrong.
6. I turn to my partner easily for comfort when I am upset.
7. I rarely worry about being left.
8. I would sooner solve a problem alone than ask my partner for help.
9. I get anxious when my partner does not respond to me quickly.
10. I am comfortable sharing my private thoughts and fears with my partner.
11. I often wish my partner’s feelings for me were as strong as mine for them.
12. I feel crowded when a partner wants a lot of emotional closeness.
13. I feel calm and secure about my partner’s commitment to me.
14. I find it difficult to open up, even when I want to.
15. The thought of my partner leaving is hard to shake once it arrives.
16. It is easy for me to be affectionate and close.

Now score it. Five items are reverse-scored because they describe the low end of a dimension. For those items, flip your rating using a simple rule: your reversed score equals 8 minus what you wrote (so 1 becomes 7, 2 becomes 6, 3 becomes 5, 4 stays 4, and so on).

Reverse-score these five items first: 6, 7, 10, 13, 16.

Attachment anxiety = add your scores for items 1, 3, 5, 7 (reversed), 9, 11, 13 (reversed), 15, then divide by 8.

Attachment avoidance = add your scores for items 2, 4, 6 (reversed), 8, 10 (reversed), 12, 14, 16 (reversed), then divide by 8.

You now hold two numbers, each somewhere between 1 and 7. The midpoint of the scale is 4, so as a rough orientation, an average clearly above 4 leans high on that dimension and an average clearly below 4 leans low. The wide band around the middle is genuinely mixed, and that is normal, not a failure of the test. There are no official cutoffs for a self-scored version like this one, so treat these bands as a compass heading, not a verdict.

Plot the two numbers together and you get a region rather than a label:

• Lower anxiety, lower avoidance: the secure region. You can lean on a partner and tolerate closeness without much dread of abandonment.
• Higher anxiety, lower avoidance: the preoccupied or anxious region. Closeness feels good, but the fear of losing it stays loud.
• Lower anxiety, higher avoidance: the dismissing or avoidant region. You value self-reliance and find intense closeness uncomfortable.
• Higher anxiety, higher avoidance: the fearful region. You want closeness and distrust it at the same time, which is its own particular strain.

Notice what this scoring does not do. It does not announce a personality. It hands you two coordinates and a map, and the map is a starting point for reflection. If a visual helps, the adult attachment style chart lays out these same four regions as a grid you can locate yourself on.

How to read your result honestly

The single most important thing to understand about your two numbers is that they are estimates, not measurements of a fixed thing. Fraley and Shaver (2000), reviewing where adult attachment research had arrived and where it was still uncertain, were careful that self-report attachment scores carry real measurement error and are best read as approximate positions rather than precise readouts. A score of 4.6 and a score of 4.9 are not meaningfully different. Do not build a story on the second decimal place.

They also stressed that attachment has a relationship-specific layer. Fraley and Shaver (2000) noted that a person can hold a broad, general attachment orientation and still relate quite differently within a particular bond, because a given partner’s behavior shapes how safe or on-guard you feel with them. This is why the same questionnaire can read differently depending on who you had in mind while answering. You are not being inconsistent. You are picking up that attachment is partly about you and partly about the specific “us” you are inside of. If your anxiety score ran high, it is worth getting specific about the moments that set it off, which is exactly what the piece on anxious attachment triggers is for.

So hold your result loosely, on purpose. A single self-report on a single afternoon, filtered through your current mood and whichever relationship was on your mind, is a snapshot from one angle. It is genuinely informative, and it is also humble by nature. The honest reading of a high avoidance score is not “I am avoidant” but “on the questions I answered today, about the relationship I was picturing, I leaned toward keeping distance, and that is worth being curious about.” The attachment styles pillar goes deeper on how these positions can shift over time and with different partners, which is the opposite of the fixed-trait story a quiz label implies.

From a score to an actual conversation

A number on a page changes nothing by itself. What makes it useful is turning it into a conversation rather than a verdict you deliver to your partner. The four-region map you scored against is not new: Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) proposed a four-category model of adult attachment built from two underlying dimensions, essentially how positively you view yourself and how positively you view others, which produce the secure, preoccupied, dismissing, and fearful patterns. Their framing is a gift here because it reframes a “type” as a stance toward yourself and toward closeness, and stances can be talked about.

So bring your result as a question, not a diagnosis of anyone. “I noticed I score pretty high on the anxious side, and I think that is why a slow reply hits me harder than it should” is an invitation. “You are clearly avoidant, that is your problem” is a wall. The point of scoring yourself is to get language for a pattern you can now name gently and out loud. It often helps to also know how each of you most naturally gives and receives care, since a reassuring gesture only lands if it arrives in a form your partner can actually take in. The Love Language Quiz is one quick way to surface that, and there is a fuller look at how the two frameworks interact in attachment style and love languages.

There is also a clear line where a questionnaire ends. If your scores, and more importantly your lived experience, point to distress that keeps swamping your relationships, a self-report is not the tool for that job. Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) developed their model in the context of clinical and research interviews, not a print-and-score exercise, precisely because a fuller picture takes more than a checklist. A questionnaire can start the reflection. A trained therapist is where the deeper work happens.

What to try this week

Take the questionnaire once, the ordinary way, thinking of your current or most recent relationship, and note your two numbers. Then do one more pass with a twist: answer it again while picturing a different past relationship, ideally one that felt notably different from the first. Use the same items, the same scoring.

Watch what moves. Most people find at least one of their two numbers shifts, sometimes a lot. That shift is the whole lesson in miniature. It shows you, in your own handwriting, that your score is not a fixed trait stamped on you but a position that partly depends on who you are with and how safe that bond felt. If your numbers barely budged, that is informative too. It suggests a pattern you carry in fairly consistently, which is useful to know before you name it with a partner.

If this stirs up more than a tidy insight, that is worth taking seriously rather than pushing past. A gentle Twogle Check-In can give the reflection a low-stakes container, and if a pattern keeps making your relationships hurt, a few sessions with a therapist is a reasonable next step, not a sign that anything has failed.

Score yourself honestly, hold the result loosely, and let it start a conversation rather than settle one.

Read deeper

• The attachment styles pillar
• Adult attachment style chart
• Attachment theory in adult relationships
• Anxious attachment triggers
• Attachment style and love languages
• Take the Twogle Love Language Quiz

Sources

• Brennan, K. A., Clark, C. L., & Shaver, P. R. (1998). Self-report measurement of adult attachment: An integrative overview. In J. A. Simpson & W. S. Rholes (Eds.), Attachment Theory and Close Relationships (pp. 46–76). Guilford Press.
• Fraley, R. C., & Shaver, P. R. (2000). Adult romantic attachment: Theoretical developments, emerging controversies, and unanswered questions. Review of General Psychology, 4(2), 132–154. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.4.2.132
• Bartholomew, K., & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(2), 226–244. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.61.2.226