In a survey of 603 men in Shanghai, doubt about the future, not past romances, explained attachment gaps

A survey of 603 men aged 20 to 29 in Shanghai found that gay men reported more attachment anxiety and more attachment avoidance than heterosexual men, and that one measure explained the gap: how stable each man judged his relationship to be. Waseda University in Tokyo publicized the results on October 9, 2026, after the paper appeared in the journal BMC Psychology on September 16, 2026.

Two groups of 300, one question that mattered

The authors are Fan Yang, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda, and Zichen Zhai of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at Nagoya University. They collected questionnaire data from 303 gay men and 300 heterosexual men, all living in Shanghai.

Each man completed a nine-item questionnaire that measures two things. Attachment anxiety is the worry about being abandoned or being unsure about a partner's feelings. Attachment avoidance is discomfort with emotional closeness or with relying on a partner. The men also described their romantic history and, if they had one, rated how stable their relationships felt, on a scale from "very unstable" to "very stable". That rating was asked of the 510 participants who had been in at least one relationship.

The first result is the one most studies of this kind would predict. Gay men scored higher than heterosexual men on both anxiety and avoidance, and the difference held after the researchers accounted for economic and occupational status.

The second result is the one that gives the paper its title.

Same histories, different sense of a future

On paper, the two groups looked alike. They reported similar numbers of romantic relationships and similar lengths for their shortest relationships, so the idea that one group simply had more breakups behind it found little support.

What differed was the rating of stability. Gay men judged their relationships as less stable than heterosexual men did, and that rating statistically accounted for the group differences in both anxiety and avoidance. Relationship history did not.

The title of the paper says as much: perceived relationship stability, rather than relationship history, matters. Yang put it in one sentence: “The feeling that ‘this relationship has a future’ may be an important part of romantic security.”

The wording is careful, and it should be read that way. "Statistically accounted for" describes how the numbers line up in a questionnaire. It does not show that doubt about the future produces anxiety, or the reverse. A man who is anxious by temperament may also rate every relationship as shakier, and the survey cannot separate the two.

What attachment theory already said

The vocabulary comes from a long line of work. In a 2016 paper in Behavioral Medicine, Stephanie Cook of New York University and colleagues retraced it: Bowlby proposed that repeated interactions with a primary caregiver teach an infant whether needs will be met, and Hazan and Shaver later carried the same constructs over to intimate relationships between adults. In that tradition, adults who score low on both anxiety and avoidance are considered securely attached.

Cook's paper is a theoretical model, not a data set, and its starting point is a gap. In the authors' words, “Most studies of adult attachment fail to report sexual orientation status or report results based on samples of all White, heterosexual adults.” The model they propose joins attachment to minority stress, the strain of stigma that gay and bisexual men may carry into every close bond. Social stigma, they write, may be linked to a decreased capacity to form and maintain secure attachment relationships with parents, peers and romantic partners.

The two dimensions have a familiar texture in that paper. People who lean avoidant, Cook and colleagues write, tend to evade intimacy and to be uncomfortable with interdependence. People who lean anxious are concerned about their partner's commitment to the relationship and may cling to an attachment figure to reinforce the bond. Those who are more secure can create and sustain healthy emotional bonds with others.

The minority stress half of the model comes from earlier work by Meyer, which the paper summarizes. Stress, in that account, starts with objective external events and conditions, then turns into the expectation of stressful events and the vigilance that expectation demands, which can lead to concealing one's orientation. A man who is always braced for a hostile reaction has less room to settle into a bond, and the model asks how that bracing shapes attachment over a lifetime.

Read next to that model, the Shanghai result has a plain logic. If a relationship is unlikely to be accepted by family or society, the person inside it may find it harder to count on it lasting. The Waseda release says as much: for people with diverse sexual identities, expectations about the future "may be shaped not only by their relationship but also by the wider social environment".

A law that writes "friend" where "spouse" would go

The release does not describe China's legal setting, and the survey did not measure it. Still, the setting is part of what a Shanghai respondent lives in.

China decriminalized homosexual acts in 1997, but its laws do not recognize same-sex marriage. Since October 1, 2017, any adult with full capacity can name a guardian by written agreement, a mechanism that was designed for older people and that some same-sex couples now use to protect each other in a medical emergency. An analysis in The Conversation notes a telling detail: in most notarial documents, the couple's relationship was stated as “friend” rather than “spouse”.

A partnership recorded as a friendship on paper is one possible reading of what "low perceived stability" can mean in daily life. The Waseda authors do not make this link themselves, and nothing in the release tests it.

What one question can carry

The study has limits that sit close to its headline. The data come from one city, from men aged 20 to 29, and from a questionnaire; the release labels the work an observational study. Women, older adults and people outside Shanghai are not in it, and neither are bisexual men.

Stability itself is a self-rating. Nothing in the release shows whether a man who calls his relationship unstable is describing a partner's wavering, a family's disapproval, or his own habit of expecting the worst.

We could not open the BMC Psychology paper itself, so the figures and quotations here come from the Waseda University release as carried by EurekAlert! and Phys.org. The authors declare no competing interests, according to that release.

Yang draws a practical conclusion from the result: “Support may need to consider not only communication between partners, but also concerns about whether the relationship can be accepted, supported, and maintained over time.” The sentence moves the work of security out of the couple's conversation and into the world around it.

Time, in another survey

A different dataset, from a different country, points in a compatible direction. The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University released the 15th edition of its Singles in America survey on September 14, 2026, with about 5,000 U.S. single adults aged 18 and older. Nearly half of singles (49%) said they had fallen for someone they did not initially find attractive, up from 30% in 2010. Willingness to go on a second date when the first was not exciting rose from 35% in 2021 to 41% in 2026.

The top reasons the Kinsey researchers list are great conversations, shared interests and becoming best friends. “Knowing what matters to you doesn't mean knowing exactly who you'll fall for,” said Justin Garcia, the institute's executive director and a co-lead of the study.

The same release adds that self-improvement, such as becoming more emotionally mature or setting life goals, gained importance as a reason over the same period. Willingness to fall in love with someone holding different religious views rose from 43% in 2019 to 57% in 2026. The pattern the Kinsey team describes is a single adult who arrives with a checklist and then revises it after a few good conversations.

These are surveys of different people asking different questions. The Kinsey figures describe how attraction arrives; the Shanghai figures describe how safe a bond feels once it exists. Set side by side, they share one ingredient that no app feature and no grand gesture supplies: months of evidence that the other person stays.

What the Waseda paper adds is that the evidence has to be believed, and that the surrounding world can make that harder. The release names no follow-up study or next publication date.

Sources

• Feeling confident about a relationship's future may be linked to romantic attachment, EurekAlert!, Waseda University release, September 16, 2026 paper
• The Integrated Attachment and Sexual Minority Stress Model, Cook et al., Behavioral Medicine, 2016