Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Love affairs are just rational bargains,” lectured a famed psychologist thirty years ago at an international conference in Banff. “They’re negotiations about profit and cost. We all want to maximize our profit.” Sitting in the audience as a newly minted clinician-researcher, I shook my head. I had been working with distressed couples, and I knew they didn’t fit into this fashionable “exchange theory” of love. But I didn’t know why. Hours later I was sitting in a bar, arguing with a senior colleague. “What’s wrong with the idea? Love relationships are rational bargains,” he insisted. “No, they’re not,” I maintained. “Okay; if they’re not, what are they?” he shot back. I was blank for a moment, then blurted out excitedly, “They’re not bargains. They’re bonds. Emotional bonds. Just like the ones between mother and child. Just like John Bowlby said.”
Every revolution has its heroes, and in the relationship revolution, John Bowlby is the hero. Chances are, until Chapter 1, you’d never heard the name Bowlby, but his vision and work have already radically reshaped our relationships with our children and are now doing the same in our relationships with our romantic partners. Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, is the father of attachment theory, a developmental perspective on personality that puts our emotions and our interactions with loved ones front and center in terms of who we are and how we behave.
Over the past forty years, the attachment perspective has seeped into our culture and changed the way we rear our children. It is not so long ago that child-care experts were advocating distant, detached care, the point of which was to turn children into self-possessed, autonomous beings as quickly as possible. One of the fathers of modern behaviorism, John B. Watson, was adamant that mother love was a “dangerous instrument”; women’s sentimental natures were a defect that prevented them from pushing their children into independence. Showing warmth, by hugging and cuddling, for example, warped children and made them into weak, emotionally labile adults. If, on the other hand, children were left to cry themselves to sleep, they learned to control themselves and tolerate discomfort. Watson was about as wrong as he could be, although his basic idea—that responding to people’s emotional needs makes them more needy, immature, and hard to love—is still very popular when applied to adults.
The majority of us now explicitly recognize a child’s need for ongoing, reassuring physical and emotional connection with his or her parents. We acknowledge the power of parental responsiveness in shaping a child’s personality. There are some who still argue that loving care is fine, but the roots of personality are indelibly set by our genetic heritage. But this is not so. Study after study has shown that even when genetic heritage is totally stacked in a negative direction, it is our primary relationships that decide if genes come online and how they play out. Highly agitated monkeys, the future bad boys of their tribe, if cared for by especially nurturing foster moms, turn into respected leaders.
Add to genetic problems a stressful environment, and still the responsiveness of the parent makes a difference. Very irritable infants born into poverty often have difficulty controlling their moods, calming themselves, and signaling their needs to their mothers. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam gave mothers of such infants six hours of instruction in recognizing babies’ signals and prolonging soothing activities, such as holding and stroking. The improvement was startling. By twelve months of age, the infants matched normal babies in their ability to turn to their mothers for comfort when they were upset and to calm down when soothed by them. In another group, one in which the mothers were not counseled, only 28 percent of the children were rated as securely attached. Connection and care matter.
The revolution in child care came first from simple observation of responses and patterns of interaction between mother and child and then from experiments that set up and manipulated these patterns. (We will see later that the explosion of discoveries in adult bonding initially happened in the same way.) In the 1930s and 1940s, doctors noted that large numbers of orphaned children, who were fed and sheltered but deprived of touch and emotional support, were dying, often before the age of three. Psychoanalyst René Spitz coined the term “failure to thrive” to describe these children. Other health-care workers, meanwhile, were identifying youngsters who were physically healthy but alienated and unable to connect with others. Psychiatrist David Levy suggested they suffered from “emotional starvation.”
But it took John Bowlby to really grasp the enormous import of these facts. Born in 1907 to a British baronet and his wife, Bowlby, the fourth of six children, was reared in typical upper-class fashion. He and his siblings saw their parents sparingly. Scrubbed and dressed, they joined their mother for one hour each afternoon for tea; they saw their father, a surgeon, once a week on Sunday. The rest of their time was spent mainly with nursemaids, nannies, and governesses. Bowlby was especially fond of one nursemaid, Minnie, who had been his main caretaker. His mother dismissed her when he was four, a split he later described as being as painful as losing a mother. At the age of seven, he was sent to boarding school, an event so traumatic that years later he told his wife, Ursula, that he wouldn’t send a dog to English boarding school at that age.
These experiences seem to have sensitized Bowlby to children’s relationships with parents and other significant adults. After Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied psychology, Bowlby worked at progressive residential schools with maladjusted and delinquent youngsters, many of whom early on had been neglected or separated from their parents. Bowlby went on to become a physician and then a psychoanalyst. He soon found himself in conflict with analytic orthodoxy, which, following Freud’s teachings, held that patients’ problems were almost invariably internal, traceable to their own unconscious fantasies and struggles. From his own experiences and reports by others, Bowlby was convinced that many patients’ difficulties were the opposite, in fact caused by their real relationships with other people. In 1938, as a novice clinician, he was assigned the case of a hyperactive three-year-old boy. His supervisor was the acclaimed analyst Melanie Klein. Bowlby wanted to explore the child’s relationship with his extremely anxious mother, but Klein considered only the boy’s fantasies about his mother important and forbade him to even speak with the woman. Bowlby was outraged.
Continuing to work with disturbed youngsters, Bowlby came to believe that disrupted relationships with parents or surrogate caregivers could cripple healthy emotional and social growth, producing alienated and angry individuals. In 1944, Bowlby published a seminal article, “Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves,” observing that “behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.” He expanded upon his findings in a groundbreaking study of European children who were evacuated from their homes or left orphaned by World War II. Undertaken at the request of the World Health Organization and published in 1951, the study concluded that separation from loved ones deprived youngsters of emotional sustenance and was as damaging to the psyche as lack of food is to the body.
The work brought both condemnation and praise. Bowlby focused on the mother-child bond; he carefully noted that “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment.” Feminists complained that Bowlby’s claim chained women to constant child tending and denied their need to go out into the world and have independent lives. Government officials, meanwhile, applauded. Many returning veterans were unemployed, their jobs having been filled by women during the war effort. Here was a reason to move women out and a way to move men back in.
Bowlby’s developing theory was controversial in another way. It marked a further break with accepted dictum. Freud had maintained that the link between mother and child is forged after birth and is a conditioned response. Baby loves Mom because she rewards him with food. But Bowlby, who was impressed by Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the work of contemporary ethologists, was convinced that the emotional tie is wired in before birth and automatic. Support for Bowlby’s thesis came from the dramatic experiments of his colleague and friend Harry Harlow, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, who was studying rhesus monkeys separated from their mothers at birth. Raised in isolation, the baby monkeys were so hungry for “contact comfort” that when presented with a choice between a wire “mother” who dispensed food and one made of soft rags that didn’t dispense any fare, they almost always clung to the spongy impersonator. As science writer Deborah Blum observes in her book on the work of Harry Harlow, food is sustenance, but a good hug is “life itself.”
In an attempt to prove his ideas, Bowlby collaborated with James Robertson, a young social worker, to make a documentary called A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital. The film tells the story of a young girl named Laura, who goes to the hospital for a minor operation and stays for eight days. The film is horrifying. (You can view portions on the Internet, and I guarantee you will be in tears.) Following the era’s prevailing professional wisdom—that coddling by mothers and other family members creates clinging, dependent children who grow into ineffectual adults—parents were not permitted to stay with their hospitalized offspring. Sick sons and daughters had to be dropped off at the door; parents were allowed to visit for one hour a week.
Separated from her mother and faced with a revolving cast of nurses and doctors, Laura is frightened, angry, hysterical, and, finally, totally desolate. When she is at last released from the hospital, she is emotionally shut down and completely withdrawn from her mother. The film caused a sensation in professional circles. The Royal Society of Medicine denounced it as a fraud, and the British Psychoanalytical Society dismissed it, with one analyst declaring that Laura’s grief and terror was induced not by separation from her mother but by unconscious angry fantasies concerning her mother’s new pregnancy. (It wasn’t until the late 1960s that British and American hospitals abandoned their rigid policies and allowed parents to stay with their children.)
Despite rejection by the establishment, Bowlby pioneered on, giving form to a theory of what he called attachment. (The story goes that when asked by his wife why he didn’t give it its rightful name, a theory of love, he replied, “What? I’d be laughed out of science.”) Bowlby was aided significantly in his work by psychologist Mary Ainsworth, a Canadian researcher who helped give shape to his ideas and test them.
Together, they identified four elements of attachment:
•We seek out, monitor, and try to maintain emotional and physical connection with our loved ones. Throughout life, we rely on them to be emotionally accessible, responsive, and engaged with us.
•We reach out for our loved ones particularly when we are uncertain, threatened, anxious, or upset. Contact with them gives us a sense of having a safe haven, where we will find comfort and emotional support; this sense of safety teaches us how to regulate our own emotions and how to connect with and trust others.
•We miss our loved ones and become extremely upset when they are physically or emotionally remote; this separation anxiety can become intense and incapacitating. Isolation is inherently traumatizing for human beings.
•We depend on our loved ones to support us emotionally and be a secure base as we venture into the world and learn and explore. The more we sense that we are effectively connected, the more autonomous and separate we can be.
The above four elements are considered to be the norm and universal, occurring in relationships across cultures. The basic concept is that forming a deep mutual bond with another is the first imperative of the human species. As Bowlby saw it, life at its best is essentially a series of excursions from the safety of a secure relationship out into the uncertainty of the greater world.
Bowlby’s theory was missing empirical evidence, however. Mary Ainsworth came to the rescue. She devised a simple and ingenious experiment that is regarded as one of the most important and influential in all of psychology. It is as crucial to our understanding of love and relationships as Newton’s experiment showing that pebbles and heavy rocks fall at the same speed is to our understanding of gravity and the physical world. In truth, if not for Ainsworth’s experiment, Bowlby’s idea might still be just supposition.
The experiment is called the Strange Situation, and you can see variations of it on the Internet. A mother and her toddler are in an unfamiliar room. A few minutes later, a researcher enters and the mother exits, leaving the youngster alone or with the researcher. Three minutes later, the mother comes back. Most children are initially upset at their mother’s departure; they cry, throw toys, or rock back and forth. But three distinct patterns of behavior emerge when mother and child are reunited—and these patterns are dictated by the type of emotional connection that has developed between the two.
Children who are resilient, calm themselves quickly, easily reconnect with their moms, and resume exploratory play usually have warm and responsive mothers. Youngsters who stay upset and nervous and turn hostile, demanding, and clingy when their moms return tend to have mothers who are emotionally inconsistent, blowing sometimes hot, sometimes cold. A third group of children, who evince no pleasure, distress, or anger and remain distant and detached from their mothers, are apt to have moms who are cold and dismissive. Bowlby and Ainsworth labeled the children’s strategies for dealing with emotions in relationships, or attachment styles, secure, anxious, and avoidant, respectively.
Bowlby lived to see his attachment theory become the cornerstone of child rearing in the Western world. (Indeed, the term attachment parenting has become so accepted and widespread that it has been affixed to an intense form of parenting recommended by pediatrician William Sears. Though it is based on Bowlby’s tenets, it goes far beyond anything he advocated. In attachment parenting, children often sleep in the parental bed, breastfeed for several years, and are, generally, in almost constant contact with their mom or dad.)
Today, no one doubts that youngsters have an absolute need for close emotional and physical contact with loved ones. That perspective has become part of the air we breathe, but only when we think of childhood. Many of us still believe that adolescence ends such dependence. Bowlby did not. He maintained that the need to be close to a few precious others, to attach, persists through life and is the force that shapes our adult love relationships. As he wrote: “All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figure(s).”
Bowlby based his claims in part on his observation of World War II widows, who, he found, showed the same behavior patterns as homeless orphans. He was also well aware that the isolated monkeys in Harlow’s experiments who lived to maturity were emotional wrecks, lapsing into self-mutilation, rage, or apathy and failing to relate to other monkeys and to mate. But again and again, his ideas were rebuffed. Bowlby died in 1991, before he could assemble evidence that his attachment perspective was indeed relevant to adults and adult love relationships.
Phil Shaver and Cindy Hazan, social psychologists then at the University of Denver, took up the torch a few years later. They were initially interested in how people handled grief and loneliness, and they began to read Bowlby’s research, looking for clues about why loneliness was so devastating. Bowlby’s work so impressed them that they decided to put together a quiz about love and relationships that appeared in the Rocky Mountain News. The survey, although unscientific, indicated that the same attachment characteristics and behavior patterns that occur between mothers and children also occur between adults. When lovers felt secure, they could reach out and connect, easily helping each other find their emotional balance; but when they felt insecure, they became either anxious, angry, and demanding or withdrawn and distant. Shaver and Hazan launched more formal studies, and their work inspired others to test Bowlby’s predictions.
In the two decades since Bowlby’s death, hundreds of studies have been published bearing out his assertions. They confirm that our need to attach continues beyond childhood and also establish that romantic love is an attachment bond. At every age, human beings habitually seek and maintain physical and emotional closeness with at least one particular irreplaceable other. We especially seek out this person when we feel stressed, unsure, or anxious. We are just hardwired this way.
The fact that this perspective on adult love was, at first, summarily rejected by many psychologists and mental health professionals is not surprising. For one thing, it challenges a cherished belief about ourselves as adults; specifically, that we are self-sufficient entities. (We are bombarded daily with media messages—“Love yourself!” “You’re worth it!”—and instructions on how to soothe ourselves.) Bowlby’s belief also goes against an increasingly popular conception of love relationships: that they are essentially companionships with sex added. But those of us who flourish, even when living alone, invariably have a rich internal world populated by images of loving attachment figures. To be human is to need others, and this is no flaw or weakness. And being friends, even with physical intimacy, is different from being lovers. The bond with a friend is not as tight. No matter how close, friends cannot offer the degree of caring, commitment, trust, and safety that true lovers do. They are not our irreplaceable others.
In a recent experiment, psychologist Mario Mikulincer of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel, asked students to name people they love and people they are simply acquainted with. Then he gave them a task on a computer. They had to look at a list of letters, tap one key if a string of letters could be formed into a word or a name, and tap another key if the letters could not. At times during the task, threatening words, such as separation, death, and failure, flashed on screen, but only for milliseconds (much too fast for conscious processing). What Mikulincer found was that after the subliminal threats, students sorted the scrambled letters of the names of their loved ones much faster than the names of acquaintances and friends.
In psychology, reaction time in recognizing words is a commonly used measure of the accessibility of a person’s thoughts. The quicker the reaction time, the higher the accessibility. This study shows that if we’re primed with any kind of threat, we automatically and swiftly pull up the names of our loved ones—they are our safe haven. This experiment reminds me of everyday situations. My husband’s first thought when he got the date for a medical test was whether I would be home that day and free to accompany him. I know that when I’m on a plane landing in a storm, I automatically call up the image of the slow smile my husband will give me at the gate. In the next chapter, you’ll hear about an fMRI study in my lab in which women who expected to get a small electric shock experienced much less fear simply by holding their husband’s hand.
Bowlby and Ainsworth said children bond to their loved ones in three ways, and this is true of adults as well. A person’s basic attachment style is formed in childhood. Secure, the optimal style, develops naturally when we grow up knowing that we can count on our main caregiver to be accessible and responsive to us. We learn to reach for closeness when we need it, trusting that we will be offered comfort and caring much of the time. This loving contact is a touchstone, helping us to calm ourselves and find our emotional balance. We feel comfortable with closeness and needing others and aren’t consumed by worry that we will be betrayed or abandoned. Our behavior says, in essence, “I know I need you and you need me. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s great. So let’s reach out to each other and get close.”
Some of us, however, had early caregivers who were unpredictably or inconsistently responsive, neglectful, or even abusive. As a result, we tend to develop one of two so-called insecure strategies—anxious or avoidant—that automatically turn on when we (or our partners) need connection. If we have an anxious style, our emotions are ramped up; we are inclined to worry that we will be abandoned, and so we habitually seek closeness and ask for proof that we are loved. It’s as if we are saying, “Are you there? Are you? Show me. I can’t be sure. Show me again.”
If we have an avoidant style, on the other hand, we tend to tamp down our emotions so as to protect ourselves from being vulnerable to, or dependent on, others. We shut down our attachment longings and try to evade real connection. We are apt to see other people as a source of danger, not safety or comfort. Our attitude seems to be “I don’t need you to be there for me. I’m fine whatever you do.”
Although we have a main attachment style, we can—and do—step into alternative strategies at specific times and with specific people. In my own interactions with my husband of twenty-five years, I am secure most of the time, but if we have been at odds for a while, I can slip into a more anxious style, demanding that he respond and soothe my disquiet. When he does, then I go back to my primary, secure strategy.
Just for fun, I’ve picked three of my English relatives to illustrate the three basic styles. My father, Arthur, had a secure style. He listened when I, his only child, announced I was going to Canada, told me how much he would miss me, and then asked me what I needed. He gave me the encouragement I was longing for, and also told me that I could always come back home to him if things didn’t work out. He also wrote me regular, loving letters. He freely offered support to others as well. A naval engineer on destroyers in World War II, he opened his arms, literally, to other veterans, holding them in the back room of our family’s pub while they cried over lost friends and devastated lives. My father knew, too, how to seek support for himself. He asked his best buddy to accompany him to the hospital when he went in for an operation on his back.
My lanky Auntie Chloe, who looked exactly like Popeye’s love, Olive Oyl, had a highly anxious style. She thought my small, portly Uncle Cyril, with his Elvis Presley pompadour, was fatally attractive to other women and that even his potbelly added to his sexual allure. He went away on business often, and when she talked about this, Auntie Chloe would tear up and openly wonder if he were having what she called “lascivious liaisons.” His habitual silence when he was home did nothing to reassure her. She would hang on to his arm at family gatherings as if he were about to vaporize. Even back then, I thought that she might have been less clingy if he had been a little more open and talkative. After all, he was hard to know, and I never felt any real sense of safety with him, either.
Tall, gruff Uncle Harold was extremely avoidant. When I went to stay at his home and burst into tears because my teddy bear had become filthy from the mud pies I fed him and then had come apart when I scrubbed him with toilet cleaner, Harold told me, “Cut that soppy stuff,” and sent me to my room. He was unapproachable, especially by little girls, and usually spent his days in the garden and often slept on the pull-out bed in the shed. When I was present, he never touched Vina, his friendly, jolly wife of thirty years. Still, he nursed her when she became ill, and three months after she died, he committed suicide. “He couldn’t be close, but he just couldn’t live without her,” my granny told me.
Attachment styles line up neatly with the basic way we see ourselves and others. These “mental models” shape the way we regulate our emotions, and they guide our expectations in love relationships, assigning meaning to our partner’s actions and becoming “If this, then that” templates for how to interact. Secure people see themselves as generally competent and worthy of love, and they see others as trustworthy and reliable. They tend to view their relationships as workable and are open to learning about love and loving. In contrast, anxious people tend to idealize others but have strong doubts as to their own value and their basic acceptability as partners. As a result, they obsessively seek approval and the reassurance that they are indeed lovable and not about to be rejected. Avoidant folks, meanwhile, view themselves as worthy of love—at least that is their conscious stance. Any self-doubt tends to be suppressed. They have a negative view of others as inherently unreliable and untrustworthy. Even in their stories and dreams, anxious people portray themselves as apprehensive and unloved, while avoidants see themselves as distant and unfeeling.
Psychologist Jeff Simpson is doing watershed studies in this area. Jeff, who looks like an all-American, crew-cut quarterback, speaks with me from his lab at the University of Minnesota. As a kid he loved watching people interact, especially at the medical clinics, where he went regularly to get his allergy shots. He remembers being fascinated by the fact that, when they looked scared or sad, some folks wanted to talk, some wanted to be touched and hugged, and some wanted to be left alone. He recalls, too, as a college kid, being on special assignment in Oxford, England to study the behavior of farm cats. He got hooked on finding patterns in interactions. So it seemed natural that he decided to become a social psychologist.
But once in graduate school, in the early 1990s, he was disappointed. He discovered that most psychologists weren’t studying face-to-face interactions; rather, they were asking adults to fill in questionnaires that collated opinions and attitudes that rumbled around in their brains. A very few researchers were trying to look at how people under stress actually behave in relation to others, but they couldn’t explain what they were seeing. Jeff had hit a dead end. Steve Rholes, a fellow graduate student, came to the rescue. He pointed out that John Bowlby had a theory, supported by studies with babies, that might also apply to adults and explain why some reach out for support when they are upset and others turn away. Over coffee, they decided to set up an experiment to see what people in dating relationships would do when placed in an upsetting situation. Ta-da! The first observational study of attachment behavior in adults was born.
Jeff and Steve asked heterosexual couples to fill out questionnaires and rate statements such as “I find it relatively easy to get close to others” in order to assess the partners’ attachment styles. The researchers then told the couples that the female partner would soon be placed in a nearby room to engage in an unspecified activity that creates anxiety in most people. They showed the couples the room, dark and full of ominous-looking equipment, and left them waiting outside. A video camera secretly recorded the couples over the next five minutes. Researchers analyzed the tapes, looking for support-seeking and support-giving behavior.
“I knew we were going to get really interesting results when we watched the video of one of the first couples,” Jeff tells me. “This woman had been jovially chatting with her partner before she was told about the ‘activity,’ but after, when her partner, looking concerned, asked if she was okay and reached out to her, she said, ‘Leave me alone,’ and moved away. Then he said, ‘Can I help?’ and she exploded. She turned and hit out at him, pushed her chair away, and grabbed a magazine. When we went back and looked at her attachment style test, she scored as extremely avoidant. We had found a way to link a person’s attachment style, arising from their history with others, to their present expectations and their way of dealing with their emotions. And all this predicted specifically how they behaved in their love relationships when faced with a stressful situation. It was obvious to us that these kinds of links played a big part in defining the nature of specific love relationships.”
Other studies by Jeff’s team have also confirmed that, just as Bowlby predicted, secure and anxiously attached people tend to reach for those they love for comfort while avoidant people tend to withdraw. But then they discovered a wrinkle. That finding is true only when the threat comes from outside the relationship, as in the study above. When it comes from inside, the responses are different. Both secure and avoidant people can stay on topic and keep their emotions in check while discussing internal conflicts—say, the fact that one partner wants more sex than the other—although secure folks are still better at constructing solutions and acting warmly toward their partner. But in the face of internal conflict, anxious partners do not reach out; they go completely off the rails. They catastrophize, bring in irrelevant issues, and become angry and confrontational, even when their partner refrains from being reciprocally hostile. Anxious partners are generally uneasy about their lover’s commitment to begin with and thus are primed to view anything he or she says or does more negatively. Haunted by the specter of abandonment, they try to control their lover.
Such face-to-face studies marked a huge shift in our understanding of love relationships. Before that, a lot of our “knowledge” came through stories, tales, and poems, or the age-old way, through gossip and platitudes (these are still popular sources of “wisdom” about love, only now they are carried on the Internet). Jeff tells me, “I wanted to show people that psychology now can help us understand not just what is between our ears but also what is between one person and another. We can study Jack and Jill as they interact and lay out the structure of adult human bonds.”
The way we attach as adult lovers tends to reflect the way we attached as children to our primary caregivers. Jeff’s group has looked at data collected in the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation. The project, begun in the 1970s and led by psychologist Alan Sroufe, has been following more than 200 people as they have developed from birth into adulthood. Jeff’s team has discovered a consistent thread running through people’s relationships with their mothers, their first adult romantic partner, and their later lovers. The more securely attached to their mother the subjects were as children, the more secure were their attachments to others at later stages of development. And, notes Jeff, the strength of their tie to their mom at age one predicted how good they were at dealing with their emotions and resolving conflicts with their adult partners at age twenty-one.
Love is also, inevitably, about loss. Deborah Davis at the University of Nevada, Reno, has spearheaded research that demonstrates that attachment patterns have an impact even when couples are splitting up. Through the Internet, she asked 5,000 people to respond to questions about their attachment style and their behavior during breakups. Davis’s study grew out of her personal experience; her marriage was breaking up, and her spouse was seesawing between expressions of adoration and rage. She started thinking about Bowlby’s descriptions of attachment distress in children—angry protest, clinging and seeking, and depression and despair—and decided to look at whether adults’ behavior during a romantic turmoil could be predicted.
She expected more anxiously attached people to be more frantic and to try to pull their partner back by making demands and threats. And that’s what she found. Compared to basically secure individuals, anxiously attached partners described becoming more obsessed and angry and committing more hostile, threatening acts, like destroying property. They also described feeling more longing and having more sexual desire for the partner who was leaving. This fits with the attachment perspective—that anxious partners often show “rejection sensitivity,” both expecting dismissal and reacting to it with increased aggression. Other researchers have found that perceived rejection triggers violence, especially in more anxiously attached male partners.
Avoidants cope by doing things to lessen contact with the rejecting partner, such as moving out of the area where they were together. They hunker down and turn inward, relying on themselves in these situations. They don’t talk to friends but try to distract themselves, pulling away from reminders of the relationship and suppressing their distress. More avoidant folks also tend to steer clear of new relationships for a while, whereas some anxious partners try to jump into new relationships immediately. Both highly anxious and avoidant people do have one similarity: they often resort to alcohol and drugs as a way of coping with romantic turmoil, more so than do people who are basically secure.
When I consider all this, I find myself recalling an old lover breaking into my flat many years ago and leaving nasty messages everywhere about how terrible I was and how I would forever regret sending him away. Months later I would open a book, and a barbed missive from him would float to the floor to wound me yet again. There are only so many ways to deal with the helplessness and hopelessness we feel when we lose the person we have bonded to.
The irony here is that when we are able to have a more secure bond with a partner, we not only love better, we deal with the loss of love better. My clients tell me sometimes that they are afraid to love because of the risk of devastation if a loved one leaves, but in fact secure connection is linked to faster emotional recovery from the loss of a partner as well as to less sadness and anger. When we attain a secure loving bond with another, we can, in a sense, keep that felt sense of connection with us even after that person has, for whatever reason, exited from our lives. My more secure friends seem to talk about old lovers without rancor and with a positive sense of what they gave and received in those relationships.
In sum, we can see attachment theory and science as offering us an architecture of romantic love. Think of yourself as a house. On the first floor and reaching into the foundation are your basic needs for comfort, reassurance, connection, closeness, and care as well as your basic emotions, including joy, fear, sadness, and anger. These are wired in by thousands of years of evolution. On the second floor are your ways of coping with these needs and emotions, opening to and trusting them, cutting them off or defending against them, or becoming obsessed and being taken over by them. On the third floor are your attitudes and ways of thinking about relationships—what you can expect from others and what you are entitled to. At the tip-top is the piece your partner and other loved ones see—your actual behavior.
This is fine as a metaphor, as far as it goes. But a relationship is, we’ve finally recognized, a dynamic interaction. Once another person comes into the picture, I prefer the metaphor of the dance to capture the reality of a love relationship. How your lover sways and bends and responds to your cues affects all the elements that make up your experience of love and loving, just as you influence his or hers.
Some attachment styles aren’t very compatible. For example, relationships between two avoidant people don’t “take,” for obvious reasons; both partners are determined to reject emotional involvement. Two highly anxious people don’t pair up very well, either; they are too labile and absorbed by their own worries. A very common pairing has one anxious and one avoidant partner. This combination, though problematic, can work; the avoidant partner will be responsive at times, and this reassures the anxious partner at least for a while. Partnerships in which one person is secure and the other is somewhat anxious or avoidant also can be positive; the secure partner offers soothing reassurance to the anxious and an undemanding attitude to the avoidant. Matches between two secures tend to be the most satisfying and stable, since both partners are able to be emotionally available and responsive.
One of the most fascinating discoveries of the past few years is that while attachment styles tend to be stable, they are not immutable. Your personal style can modify your partner’s, and your partner’s can modify your own. For example, an anxious woman who pairs with a secure man who is consistently open and responsive can learn new steps in the dance of love. Romantic love can change us. With the right partner, we can become more open and more secure. Falling in love can give us the chance to revise our childhood model.
Marcie grew up with a philandering father. As a result, she has shut out potential lovers because she “knows” that they can’t be counted on. She has shut down her own longing for connection. But then she finds herself being courted by Jim, an open, loving man. He slowly shows her how to take the risk of trusting; she slowly drops her avoidant strategy and moves into a more secure attachment style. For Marcie, her love relationship with Jim is not just a source of happiness but also a regenerating force that transforms her world and herself.
Some of us are lucky enough to have been given by our parents a model of what secure love and loving looks like. It is then easier to reproduce it. But some of us, like Marcie, have to trust our instincts and learn all this from scratch with our adult lovers.
Either way, all relationships fall into conflict or distress at some point, and the bond between partners begins to unravel. Given how little we have understood about love and bonding, it is amazing to me how many of us end up creating positive relationships and just how long and hard we fight to try to repair relationships that are floundering.
Knowing how attachment works means that we are not in foreign territory when we find ourselves estranged from or enraged by the person we were convinced was the One and we now see as a Stranger, even the Enemy. We can understand that what we’re dealing with is the panic and pain of separation distress, and that we experience it in the same way children do. Feeling rejected and abandoned, we reach out, pursue, and cling with the same anger and despair. Bowlby reminds us that in love relationships, “presence and absence are relative terms.” He points out that a loved one can be physically present but emotionally absent. Both as children and adults, we need a readily accessible and responsive loved one to feel secure in our bond. This point is captured in a common exchange between lovers: “I am here, aren’t I? Don’t I do things for you?” “Then why do I feel so alone?”
Separation distress usually proceeds through four steps: The first is anger and protest. Little four-year-old Sarah demands, “Don’t go away, Mommy. You come here!” Grown up thirty-two-year-old Sarah attacks her husband, saying, “Do you really have to go see your mother, Peter, just when I am so overwhelmed with the kids? You’re always working. You never talk to me. You’re just selfish. Sometimes I think that you don’t need me at all!” In adult relationships, the overt anger can make it hard for a partner to hear the very real underlying anguish. What the partner hears is the criticism and hostility; the reaction is often to turn away in self-protection.
The next step is clinging and seeking. Little Sarah might say, “I want you to pick me up. I don’t want to play. I want to stay here in your lap.” The adult Sarah tells her husband, “I have asked you to come home early a thousand times. But right now, right now, you are not even listening to me. You say you love me, but you never hold me. I want you to hold me.” And then she cries. If he responds coldly—“Well, you have a funny way of asking. You are always angry with me. Who can listen to that all the time?”—her misery deepens.
The third step is marked by depression and despair. Adult Sarah at this point may flip into a rage and threaten to leave her husband in an attempt to get him to respond to her, or she may withdraw into a sense of helplessness, the main symptom of depression. In either case, people at this stage, like Sarah, are beginning to let go of their longing for connection and move into grieving.
The final step is detachment. In this stage a person, whether child or adult, accepts that the relationship is not going to fulfill his or her longings, stops investing in it, and decides just to let it die. In thirty years of practice, I have never seen anyone come back from detachment.
We must not underestimate the naked force of separation distress. It is wired into our brains by thousands of years of evolution. Loss of contact with a protective attachment figure once meant certain death. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp of Washington State University has shown that mammals have special pathways in their brains dedicated to registering the “primal panic” that results from the loss, even if only momentary, of an attachment figure. This panic is precipitated by any threat of rejection or abandonment (I’ll talk more about this in the next chapter).
In a positive relationship, one in which partners have some level of mutual secure connection, this sequence of events can be halted early on. If Sarah and Peter are just going through a rough patch, the protests of step 1 will work. Sarah might say, “Peter, I know I am being very critical of you these days. I don’t mean to be. I know you’re under a lot of pressure at work. But I am pretty lonely. And I feel scared about us. Where is our closeness? Don’t you miss it? I do. I need you to turn to me, even if it’s just for a moment or two each day, so that I know I matter to you. Is that possible, please?” To send this kind of protest message, Sarah has to first tamp down her anger, and then clearly state her fears and needs. If Peter hears her and responds with comfort and support, then they can quickly heal their rift. It’s just a nick in the bond between them.
Other relationships, however, need professional help. EFT’s program of relationship repair builds on the science of attachment. We help couples grasp the survival significance of a love relationship. We help them see all the moves that are triggering their dance of disconnection. We slow down the steps that are taking them into separation and pushing them into panic, and we help them come together to halt this destructive sequence (you’ll read more about this in Chapter 7).
But to repair a bond and shape a safe-haven relationship, we have to do more than simply stop creating distance. We have to do what securely attached dyads do naturally: we have to learn to turn toward each other and reveal our fears and longings. This is, admittedly, hard to do, particularly if we are ashamed or don’t have the words to express our needs. Words order emotions and thoughts, make them more tangible and workable. EFT helps couples over these hurdles.
One of the finest moments for me is when partners finally disclose their worries and desires and engage with each other tenderly and compassionately. This Hold Me Tight conversation (discussed in Chapter 8) is a transformative experience, for couples and for me. We’ve recently completed a study of 32 couples and have found that EFT not only helps couples become more satisfied but also can change the bond between partners, making them more securely attached to each other. This is the first time ever that couple therapy has been proven to have this effect.
In my sessions with couples, I see love coming to life. I see it blossoming! These couples have found their way back to the emotional closeness and responsiveness that are the essence of a secure bond. They’ve regained or perhaps found a new sense of safety and trust with each other. Together they can go on to master the everyday problems of living and enjoy their future as safe-haven lovers.
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Attachment theory and the subsequent twenty years of studies on adult bonding are the foundation of the revolutionary new science of love relationships. But significant insights and contributions have come from many other areas as well, including philosophy, biology, ethology, neuroscience, and social-science disciplines, like clinical psychology (you’ll learn about them throughout these pages). They offer different notes and harmonies, but together they are creating a new symphony. In his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, biologist Edward O. Wilson notes that when he realized “the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws,” he experienced “The Enchantment.” To finally lay out the laws of love and loving brings an enchantment all of its own. And this new science casts a greater spell than any of our earlier visions of romantic love ever have.
Think back to the time when you were growing up. Who was the main person you would go to for comfort? Who offered you a secure base from which you could go out and explore? What was the most important thing this person gave you, taught you? If you did not have this kind of relationship, how did you cope as you grew up? Do you have this kind of relationship now, as an adult?
Adult attachment researchers have identified three basic attachment styles, or habitual strategies. Which statement below best describes you?
1. Secure: I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me. I don’t worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me.
2. Anxious: I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn’t really love me or won’t want to stay with me. I want to get very close to my partner, and this sometimes scares people away.
3. Avoidant: I am uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. Often others want me to be more intimate, but I am nervous when anyone gets too close.
How do you think your own attachment style—your “how to” protocol for engaging with loved ones—affects your love life?
Adult bonds are more reciprocal than parent-child bonds. Think of one thing your partner does that makes you feel precious and loved.
How do you reciprocate—that is, what do you do to make him or her feel the same way?
Do you know specifically what makes your partner feel precious and loved?
If not, can you ask?
When you face a recurring event that makes you anxious, such as getting on a plane, giving a speech, or being evaluated by your boss, which loved one from your past pops up in your mind?
Do you see this person’s image, hear his or her voice, remember some soothing words? Can you use this memory to calm yourself and regain your emotional equilibrium?
See if you can write down the message this person conveys and how it helps you change the way you view the situation.
For example, Amelia gets nervous when she goes to the dentist. As a child, she once passed out in the dentist’s chair, and since then she has dreaded her teeth-cleaning appointments. But, she says, “I remember my dad always telling me how strong I am and how, even when bad things happen, I will come through, I can cope. I see his face, and his smile tells me how much he believes in me. Then it’s okay; I can tolerate the visit.”