Emotional Attachment: Meaning, Problems, & Signs

It is natural to experience emotional attachments to people and things, but what does it mean to be too emotionally attached? Here’s what the science says.

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One of my favorite quotes comes from Prentice Hemphill, a therapist, political organizer, and writer: “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” Frequently in therapy, I find my clients have trouble with where they have placed their boundaries, or where others want the boundaries to be in their relationships. I feel for my clients in those moments, because I too have struggled with this question.

Together, we ask questions such as, How do I manage to open up enough to deepen the new relationship I am in? Why can’t I stand up for my own thoughts and feelings every time I talk to my mother? Why am I still fixated on making more money, even though I have enough to feel secure now?

Our boundaries land where they do for good reasons, and a lot of the puzzle of therapy is figuring out what those reasons are. Sometimes, we draw boundaries around ourselves that are far too rigid; this makes us feel safe, but it also leaves us lonely. Other times, we have learned to over-invest our feelings in relationships, such that we imagine our whole world would collapse if that special someone left us behind. In this article, I will focus more closely on this second kind of ineffective boundary. When we care about something so much that it no longer seems or feels healthy, we might be becoming overly emotionally attached.

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What Is Emotional Attachment? (A Definition)

Forming attachments—the emotional connections we have to people and animals, places and things—is one of the most natural things in the world. In fact, developmental psychologists such as John Bowlby would call the establishment and nurturing of attachments between people, especially between a child and their caregiver, one of the most important processes we go through as humans (Bowlby, 1969).

This starts when we attach to the people who are raising us. The nature of our relationship with our primary caregiver—whether it is consistent and warm; cold, unpredictable, and distant; or a combination of these traits—sets a template in our young minds for how important relationships work. This is essential information for forming an understanding of how the world works. If, when I was a baby, my mother came and took care of me each time I cried, then I learned over time that people in general will pay attention when I have needs. I carry this sense that people close to me are warm and responsive out into the world, and I expect new relationships to fit this model.

Just as importantly, I can carry that model in my mind even when my loved ones are not around. Remembering how my mother and father gave me consistent and positive attention can make it easier to settle into a party where I don’t know anybody, ask a stranger for directions, or even take an exam in school on my least favorite subject. If the people at the party are dull, or the exam doesn’t go well, I might not be fazed, because I have an innate sense of myself as a person who is liked by others and who generally gets the love and support I need.

In adulthood, all of us carry some version of this sense of self in our heads. It helps us to establish and maintain boundaries. When that sense of self is not as secure—when I do not trust that people like me or that I am generally a good person—I may end up shifting my boundaries around to try to achieve that sense of safety. This is where emotional attachment creeps in—emotional attachment of the sort people are referring to when they say, “He’s way too emotionally attached to that.”

Here's an example. I have a friend who falls in love with every person he tries to date. Regardless of the degree of compatibility and chemistry they experience, he seems to end up fantasizing about the life they will have together, and when those initial connections do not evolve into more committed relationships, he is often pretty upset. This friend of mine has a hard time being single; he craves connection and company. He has a hard time keeping a healthy boundary in these relationships, and he gets too emotionally attached because each person he dates offers the prospect of relief from that sense of loneliness.

Emotional Attachment vs. Love

There is a lot of overlap between attachment and love (Burkett & Young, 2012). Developing love for another person means developing an attachment to them: wanting to be around them, eagerly anticipating your next interaction, finding your time with them to be rewarding and pleasurable. When we love someone, it’s because we have an emotional bond with them.

So what’s the difference? Too much of an emotional attachment—an attachment without healthy boundaries—is more like dependency than love. We can become overly reliant on getting emotional needs met by an activity, a substance, or another person. This is emotional attachment in the Buddhist sense: wanting something to be more for you than it can or should be.

I felt this way about my career path at one point. I was so emotionally attached to completing my graduate studies in a certain way that I could scarcely imagine a future without unlocking this achievement. I had turned it into the only kind of career path that could give me meaning. I did not have healthy boundaries between my sense of who I was and my professional role.

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Opposite of Emotional Attachment

If we do not experience other people as warm, reliable, and safe, we may experience the opposite of emotional attachment, which is to avoid closeness and intimacy (Bowlby, 1969). People whose parents rarely met their emotional needs are likely to internalize the message over time that getting close to other people will lead to disappointment, not to needs being met. Rather than get emotionally attached, they become avoidant, seeking to meet their needs individually.

You have undoubtedly met people who behave this way, and you may be someone who acts this way yourself. Since our drive to emotionally attach to other people is hardwired, those among us who are more avoidant are continually in the position of wanting to be close to others—but not that close to them. Not too close, please.

Causes of Emotional Attachment

We get emotionally attached because we have positive experiences with people and things—but fear turns out to be an important ingredient in emotional attachment too. While developmental psychologists study attachment between people, industrial/organizational psychologists study how people develop emotional attachments to brands. In one series of studies, people’s experiences of fear when being introduced to a brand increased their emotional attachment to it (Dunn & Hoegg, 2014). To be more specific, when study participants had fears activated that the products they were learning about could resolve, their emotional attachment to the brands increased.

In other words, we can grow emotionally attached to things that might resolve our fears, meeting very real (or at least perceived to be real) needs. Attachment fears are at the heart of intense emotional attachment: chiefly, fear that we won’t be okay if we don’t get to be close to the right person, animal, or thing.

Examples of Emotional Attachment

Emotional attachments can be triggered by the desire to belong in groups as well as to feel close to individuals (Paxton & Moody, 2003). Since group membership has been essential to survival throughout our evolutionary history, the intense emotional attachments many of us experienced in early adolescence to our friend groups, for example, are quite understandable.

Emotional Attachment Problems

One place plenty of people run into emotional attachment problems is in transitioning in and out of romantic relationships (Spielmann et al., 2013). Emotional attachment can keep us in relationships that we might be better off leaving because we have let ourselves become too emotionally reliant on the relationship. Once we have made it out of one relationship, emotional attachment to our ex-partners can keep us from fully investing in a new partner. Anybody who has struggled to stop checking an ex’s social media accounts is having a hard time setting the boundaries that would protect them from maintaining this sort of unhealthy emotional attachment.

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Emotional Attachment Signs

One clear sign of emotional attachment, as we have already seen, is having unresolved and persisting feelings about somebody you used to date. These unresolved feelings can make it difficult to move on from a relationship or to stay friends in a healthy way (Griffith et al., 2017). When we persist in wanting more closeness and more connection to somebody with whom that’s no longer healthy or possible, we are likely overly emotionally attached.

I have a friend who shows some of the signs of being overly emotionally attached in his current relationship. He chooses to stay with his partner even though they rarely have fun together, fight often, and seem to be mismatched. In talking about the relationship, he is aware that it is not going well, but he remains intensely motivated to try to get his partner to understand his point of view and accept him for who he is. In part because he does not get much validation and positive support from other people, he holds out hope that eventually his partner will give him those things.

If you would like to hear more about the signs of emotional attachment, I recommend watching the following video:

Video: 6 Signs You're Emotionally Attached to Someone

Emotional Attachment to Objects

We can get overly emotionally attached to objects as well as to people. In fact, the process appears to be pretty similar (Huang et al., 2021). The same way we invest a lot of our sense of self in people, experiencing positive and negative emotions with them along the way, we can become attached to toys, television shows, cars, and so on.

Thinking back to my middle school days, when cell phones were still relatively new, I distinctly remember watching a classmate become visibly distressed when her friend snatched her phone away from her. Her friend had no mischievous plans in mind; it was the simple fact of not being able to access her text messages and social media that made my classmate immediately anxious.

So it’s no surprise that psychological research confirms that people who spend lots of time on their phones and use them for many of their social connections demonstrate high levels of emotional attachment to their phones (Holte & Richard Ferraro, 2021). At its more extreme end, this kind of pathological attachment manifests as hoarding behavior; people who collect and hold on to objects with no practical value have often invested too much of their sense of self in their collections.

Emotional Attachment in Relationships

The power of emotional attachment in relationships is often leveraged to motivate people to do things. For example, online influencers build followings based on being relatable, and this relatability drives the emotional attachments people form to them (Ladhari et al., 2020). Marketers know that this powerful force means loyal followers will want to buy whatever their beloved influencers are wearing, using, and eating.

Quotes on Emotional Attachment

“One of the reasons it is so difficult to break a connection to something or someone you have imprinted on is that after you imprint, it seeds into your mind and goes from working memory to stored, hard-wired memory from which it is much more difficult to sever that attachment.” — Mark Goulston
“Attachment is your biggest strength and your biggest weakness. Though it gives you the power to love someone more than yourself, it becomes difficult to live when you lose something you are attached to. Even when we have lost, we should go beyond that and get truly attached to someone. Loving someone truly is the most beautiful feeling.” — Shahid Kapoor
“Pray to God that your attachment to such transitory things as wealth, name, and creature comforts may become less and less every day.” — Ramakrishna
“He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.” — Chanakya

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Articles Related to Emotional Attachment

Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Emotional Attachment

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Emotional Attachment

Keep in mind that developing emotional attachments is a natural and essential part of being human. As the quotes above suggest, emotional attachment is what gets us into relationships and keeps them going. You can think of it as relational glue, keeping us connected but sometimes making it hard to separate when we need to. When you recognize an intense emotional attachment in your life, I encourage you to consider the ways that other attachments you have could help meet those same needs but with healthier boundaries.

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References

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
Burkett, J. P., & Young, L. J. (2012). The behavioral, anatomical and pharmacological parallels between social attachment, love and addiction. Psychopharmacology, 224, 1–26.
Dunn, L., & Hoegg, J. (2014). The impact of fear on emotional brand attachment. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(1), 152–168.
Griffith, R. L., Gillath, O., Zhao, X., & Martinez, R. (2017). Staying friends with ex‐romantic partners: Predictors, reasons, and outcomes. Personal Relationships, 24(3), 550–584.
Holte, A. J., & Richard Ferraro, F. (2021). Tethered to texting: Reliance on texting and emotional attachment to cell phones. Current Psychology, 40(1), 1–8.
Huang, L., Picart, J., & Gillan, D. (2020). Toward a generalized model of human emotional attachment. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 22(2), 178–199.
Ladhari, R., Massa, E., & Skandrani, H. (2020). YouTube vloggers’ popularity and influence: The roles of homophily, emotional attachment, and expertise. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 54, 102027.
Paxton, P., & Moody, J. (2003). Structure and sentiment: Explaining emotional attachment to group. Social Psychology Quarterly, 66(1), 34–47.
Spielmann, S. S., Joel, S., MacDonald, G., & Kogan, A. (2013). Ex appeal: Current relationship quality and emotional attachment to ex-partners. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(2), 175–180.

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