A Comparison of People’s Attachments to Romantic Partners and Pet Cats

ABSTRACT

The purposes of our study were to investigate the suitability of human attachment concepts (anxiety and avoidance) in describing attachment to cats and to directly compare people’s attachment to their romantic partner with that to a pet cat. We used the 12-item Experiences in Close Relationships Scale-Short form (ECR-S) and the same measure adapted for cats. Items in the two measures had identical wording; only the attachment figure differed (e.g., “I feel close to my romantic partner” and “I feel close to my cat”). Items referred to a specific attachment figure (e.g., “my cat,” not “cats”). We received 453 valid responses to our online survey from participants in a romantic relationship who also had one cat. Factor analysis of the adapted ECR-S (for cats) did not result in the same factors as the ECR-S for humans. However, the six components of attachment anxiety (fear of interpersonal rejection or abandonment, excessive need for approval from others, and distress when one’s partner is unavailable or unresponsive) and avoidance (fear of dependence and interpersonal intimacy, excessive need for self-reliance, and reluctance to self-disclose) were structurally similar for both relationships. Although participants sought some degree of emotional support from their cats, they did not necessarily need reassurance from their cat or feel distress when their cat was unavailable to them the way they might about a romantic partner. The ECR needs further testing and external validation to be adapted for the human–cat relationship. Future research could investigate why the responses from cat owners do not result in the same attachment factors for cats as for romantic relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment
• companion animals
• human–animal interaction
• interpersonal relationships
• pets

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which helped improve this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Support for this project was awarded to GMR by the Faculty Support Grant from the California State University East Bay Division of Academic Affairs.