Music and Romance: Our Favorite Songs Reveal How We Act in Relationships

Did you know your favorite songs could reveal your attachment style? People tend to listen to songs that might spell our relationship phase.

What does having a particular artist on repeat tell us about how to — or how not to — navigate our romantic lives, friendships, and family ties? Whether it’s Adele or The Weekend on your go-to playlist, the lyrics can say a lot about you, and it’s all related to attachment styles, or how people typically think, feel and act in relationships.

The Role Music Plays in People’s Lives

Since humans started making music tens of thousands of years ago, songs across cultures have always focused on relationships — getting into one, maintaining one, or breaking up. So, people listen to music that mirrors their experiences in relationships.

In a new study published in the journal Personal Relationships, researchers found that people’s attachment styles correspond with the lyrics of their favorite songs. In other words, we tend to return to the tunes that spell out what we’re going through in a relationship, for better or for worse.

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‘The lyrics of one’s favorite songs could point to their attachment style such as secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized in a relationship.’

The lyrics of your favorite songs about relationships may help validate your thoughts and feelings but may also reveal things about your experiences of relationships that you might not have realized — something that you’re going through repeatedly, that you keep coming up against.

Favorite Songs’ Lyrics May Reflect Attachment Style

First, a refresher on attachment styles, which can roughly be considered as four categories, says Alaei. Anxiously attached people worry about being rejected and seek a lot of reassurance about their relationships.

On the other hand, avoidantly attached people respond to their negative expectations of relationships by closing off emotions and intimacy in favor of independence. People with a mixed attachment style have confused expectations, fluctuating between clingy and cold. Lastly, secure people have optimistic outlooks on relationships, are open communicators, and trust their partners.

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Researchers asked about 570 people to tell us their favorite songs and then coded the nearly 7,000 songs for the attachment style that their lyrics expressed. In turn, we consistently found that avoidantly attached people prefer music with avoidant lyrics.

They expected to see a clear relationship between anxiously attached people and anxious songs because they are the most emotional, but surprisingly, this was the most tenuous result.

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This strong avoidant connection is reflected not only on an individual level but on a societal one as well. In a second study, the researchers coded over 800 Billboard number-one hits from 1946 to 2015 for their attachment themes and found that lyrics have become more avoidant and less secure over time.

Popular music lyrics are running parallel to sociological trends of social disconnection — people valuing independence over-reliance on others, and feeling more isolated.

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If someone is an anxiously attached person, will listen to ‘Someone Like You’ on repeat cause more harm than good? This all starts with self-awareness of your attachment style.

As an anxious person, you should recognize that you’re vulnerable to a negative feedback loop, and your emotions snowballing. Music can be a very powerful exacerbator of that because it can stimulate deep emotions and memories, ultimately reinforcing your worries.

Listen to the song a few times to help you process what you’re going through and express your thoughts and feelings. You can decide whether listening to songs that reflect your experiences at you is either helping you or reinforcing destructive behaviors for yourself. At some point, you may find it more productive to listen to music that provides a sense of security.

Source-Eurekalert