ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of social connections. Attachment theory provides a compelling framework for understanding how pandemic conditions have affected people and their most important relationships. The pandemic has created chronic uncertainties and stressors, which are precisely the conditions that trigger attachment insecurity. Chronically activated insecurities, in turn, strain important close relationships. However, pandemic conditions have also provided opportunities to foster greater security. This chapter provides an up-to-date review of research on how early pandemic conditions affected individuals and relationships and then discusses the undoing of insecurity through two processes: (1) when a person feels insecure, relationship partners can adopt effective strategies to manage the person’s insecure feelings, and (2) lasting decreases in insecurity occur when new experiences contradict the mental representations that underlie insecurity. This chapter emphasizes how relationships provide an important context in which people may flourish or languish under conditions of great uncertainty.
