Lachlan Brown
Most of us can’t remember much before the age of five or six. The years that shaped us most are the ones we have the least access to.
Early relationships can influence later habits, but no adult behaviour proves what someone’s childhood was like. Temperament, culture, later relationships and life events also matter, and people can build security in adulthood.
These are five habits I associate with feeling relatively safe in close relationships today, however that safety was learned.
1. They ask for help without agonising over it
Picture a mate sending a text: “Can you look over this contract? Take your time.” No apology, no three paragraphs of preamble about how he hates to bother you. Just the ask.
Plenty of other people would rather quietly drown than send that text. They’ll handle everything alone, badly, for months.
One possible explanation is that reliable care made asking feel safe. Other people learn the same ease later through supportive friendships, therapy, partnership or practice.
They tend to be generous the other way too. When help was never treated as a debt, it doesn’t feel like one in either direction.
2. When something goes wrong, they reach for the phone
Think about the last time real bad news hit you. The job falling through, the car written off, the relationship ending. What did you do in the first hour?
Some people go silent and surface weeks later, once everything is neatly resolved and there’s nothing left to comfort them about. Others call someone almost immediately. Not for solutions. Just to say it out loud to a person who cares.
That second instinct can grow when sharing bad news has been met with care rather than punishment. The learning may begin in childhood or in relationships formed much later.
3. Disagreement doesn’t feel dangerous to them
Some people can have an argument on Tuesday and a completely normal breakfast on Wednesday. No days of dread afterwards, no frantic over-apologising, no quiet certainty that the relationship is now ruined. The conflict happened, it ended, life went on. I used to marvel at people like this. It seemed almost careless, how little an argument cost them.
One experience that can help is living in relationships where people can be annoyed, repair the conflict and continue caring for one another. A stable adult relationship can teach that lesson too.
4. The no-reason phone call
Picture a woman who rings her family back home almost every day. There’s never an agenda. Twenty minutes about food, weather, a cousin’s new job, what her mum is planting. Then she hangs up and might do it again tomorrow.
To me, that’s what an easy bond with parents actually looks like. It looks boring. The relationship needs no occasion because it was never conditional on one.
Frequent contact can reflect warmth, habit, culture, duty or practical circumstances; it does not prove what childhood felt like. When the calls are genuinely wanted, they do show that the relationship feels easy enough to enter without an occasion now.
5. They let people be kind to them
A friend gets sick and someone turns up with soup.
Watch closely, because there are two completely different ways to receive that soup. One person apologises for the trouble, insists it wasn’t necessary, and mentally opens a tab they’ll be anxious about until it’s repaid. The other says thank you, you’re a good friend, and eats the soup.
Compliments work the same way. Deflected and argued with, or simply taken in.
People who can receive warmth without squirming may have learned that kindness does not always create a debt. That lesson can come from early care, but it can also be learned and relearned later.
If you found yourself in most of these, you may have had relationships that taught you closeness could be safe. This list cannot tell you when or where that learning happened.
And if you didn’t, these reflexes aren’t sealed at age five. People do pick them up in adulthood, slowly, mostly by spending time around others who already have them. It just takes longer the second time around.
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