Home Was Never the House

Attachment theory wasn’t written for nomads

A few mornings ago, I took my coffee out into the backyard of the house we’re currently renting in British Columbia. The yard isn’t ours. The house isn’t ours. We’ll be in it for another few weeks, maybe a little less. It was a bright April morning, and the yard opens into acres of green fields — a thick hedge running along one side, a line of old mossy trees along the other, and a narrow creek threaded through the back with log bridges stretching across it. I sat in a wicker chair, cupped my big white CANADA mug in both hands, and let the view do its work.

It felt recognizably like home.

I’ve been noticing this more often lately — the way a place I don’t own, on land I’ve never seen before, can feel like home by the time I’ve had my second coffee there. And because I’m a psychologist who thinks about these things for a living, I’ve been wondering what exactly is going on when it does.

Attachment theory, the most durable framework we have for how humans form and maintain close bonds, doesn’t quite have a ready answer.

What the theory says, and what it assumes

John Bowlby, who developed attachment theory in the mid-twentieth century, described what he called a secure base. In the original picture, a child uses their primary caregiver as a launchpad: venturing out into the world to explore, returning for reassurance when distressed, and gradually building up an internal working model of relationships that tells them whether the world is, overall, a safe place.

Later researchers extended the framework. Ainsworth’s Strange Situation gave us the attachment styles — secure, anxious, avoidant — that are now part of pop psychology vocabulary. Hazan and Shaver, in 1987, argued persuasively that romantic partnerships in adulthood function the same way an infant-caregiver bond does: your partner becomes the secure base from which you venture and to which you return.

But if you read the early attachment literature carefully, there’s a quiet assumption running underneath all of it. The caregiver lives in a house. The romantic partner lives in a house. “Returning to the secure base” generally means returning to a physical place where the attachment figure can be found. Even the Strange Situation experiment was, quite literally, about a child in a room.

So what is the secure base for someone whose room keeps changing?

My first home was a stack of books

I should probably say upfront that I was badly prepared for the hypothesis that home means a specific address.

I grew up moving every year or two. My dad was in chiropractic college, and his training took us from Georgia to Tennessee to Iowa. When he graduated, we came back to California, but even there, we moved between houses often enough that I’ve lost count. By the time I reached high school, I’d been in more schools than I could easily name. I was never anywhere long enough to form the kind of friendships that children in stable neighborhoods fall into by default.

There were six of us kids. My parents were busy. The house was usually noisy.

My solution, without having any language for it at the time, was books. I read Nancy Drew until I ran out, then moved on to Agatha Christie. I’d curl up in whatever corner was quiet and go somewhere — not a literal somewhere, but a somewhere that felt, recognizably, mine. The location of my body was irrelevant. The location of my attention was a specific small English village, a stately home, a train rolling through the Alps. I was at home there. The fact that the reader’s body was in a bedroom in Vacaville, or San Leandro, or Orem, didn’t much matter.

Research on children who grow up in high-mobility families — military kids, third-culture kids, families who move for work — tends to find that they develop a particular skill set. They get better at building portable forms of belonging: routines, interests, internal rituals, and relationships maintained across distance. The secure base gets moved off the land and into the person, or into a practice, or into whatever can travel.

In Bowlby’s terms, what those kids are doing is leaning harder on the internal working model — the internalized representation of safe attachment — and less on its external scaffolding. The external scaffolding is nice when you have it. But it is not the attachment itself.

Olivia

For most of my adult life, my most durable secure base had four legs.

Olivia was a schnauzer. She was with me for twelve years — quiet, mellow, elderly for the last of them, not a shedder — and wherever she was, I was at home. She had a bed in every room of my house, and she followed me from one to the next with the kind of steady, loyal attention dogs do better than most humans. My sense of home, for that whole span of my life, was not the address on my mail. It was where Olivia was sleeping.

When she died, it was sudden, and it was a shock. The house felt empty in a way I had not realized a house could feel. I had to drive back from Utah to Canada shortly after, and then a couple of months later, I made a trip back to the house alone. I remember the strangeness of that walk through rooms that still had beds in them for a dog who wasn’t there anymore.

There’s a respectable body of research at this point on pets as attachment figures. The short version: companion animals can occupy the full functional role of an attachment figure, complete with safe-haven and secure-base behaviors. The bereavement that follows their death is, in attachment terms, the bereavement that follows the loss of any primary attachment figure. It is not “just” a dog. It is a whole load-bearing relationship.

I don’t remember feeling unmoored for long. But I do remember, in the gap, being newly aware of how much structural work Olivia had been doing.

Olivia sleeping in the corner of my office

Steve and Pearl

The center of my life now is my husband Steve and our Dalmatian Pearl. It is a much busier home base than Olivia was. Pearl is four, a working dog, active and vocal, and she sheds all over everything we own. Steve snores. The mornings are louder. The energy in our household now is closer to a weather system than to the warm sleeping presence Olivia used to be.

But it’s home. It’s my secure base. I feel loved and appreciated inside it, which is — if you read Ainsworth’s follow-up work carefully — roughly what the securely attached actually report. Not comfortable, exactly. Safe. Known. Held.

The address doesn’t matter. This is the part I keep coming back to. In the last two years, Steve, Pearl, and I have lived in a cabin, a rental apartment in Abbotsford, a house with a creek out back, and we’ll be in Kelowna in two more weeks. The house keeps changing. The secure base doesn’t.

Pearl monitoring the yard for birds

What the theory has to update

If you’re living anything resembling a rootless life — van life, a string of Airbnbs, a military rotation, a cross-border move, a stretch of sublets — and you’ve wondered whether the psychological literature has anything useful to say about you, the answer is: quite a lot, actually. You may just have to rotate the framework about forty-five degrees.

The attachment need is real. The secure base is real. The internal working model is real. But the suggestion that those functions are anchored to a physical dwelling was always more of an incidental setting than a theoretical requirement. The theory was written for a world in which families generally stayed in one house. Many of us don’t live in that world, and increasing numbers of us have chosen not to.

A secure base can be a person. It can be a pet. It can be a stack of books you keep re-reading, a morning routine you carry into every new kitchen, a laptop in a corner by a window, a cup of coffee in a wicker chair you’ve never sat in before. What matters is that it does the internal job: a place to venture out from, a place to return to when the world gets loud, a signal to your nervous system that you are known and safe and not alone.

The backyard

I finished my coffee the other morning, sitting in that wicker chair, watching the light move across the green fields. Pearl was in the house behind me, probably shedding on something. Steve was in the next room. A book was on the chair next to me.

The house was not mine. The yard was not mine. The creek with the log bridges was borrowed.

All of the components of my secure base were either with me, or inside me, or within calling distance. That’s what made it home. That’s what has made home every place I’ve managed to land in the last two years, and most places before that.

I carry it in. I don’t particularly need the address.

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