Love never dies of a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never of natural death.
—Anaïs Nin
My client Sam, a small and vociferous man who runs the local deli and insists on bringing slices of extremely smelly salami into my office for all the staff, is carrying on again about how hard love is. “I am so sick of this,” he mutters. “It’s always the same. My last relationship wasn’t any different. You go through all the falling in love bit and you get married. And everything is hunky-dory. For about a week. And then what? It all starts to go wrong. My buddy Al says that that is just the way women are. Never satisfied. What man really understands women? One minute you are Mr. Wonderful, and the next, she is talking about divorce and who will get the house. And who knows what happened? You are the same guy. But suddenly it’s all ‘glass empty.’ I give up. Women are just too hard. And maybe we are just not meant to stay together forever anyway. My buddy says that it’s just nature. We are supposed to move on. Or she is just with the wrong man. Mr. Right has gone missing here.”
His wife, Marcy, reacts with a smile of such freezing contempt that I can feel the room icing up.
Sam is not done. He turns to me and slams the back of one hand down on the palm of the other. “Face it, psychologist lady, this love stuff just don’t work, and no one knows why it goes from all huggy-wuggy to dust in your mouth in a moment. Isn’t that a fact?”
I sit up in my chair. “Well, no, in fact, we now know so much about…” I begin, but then I realize he is way too hurt to hear me. I have seen this desperate bewilderment before.
* * *
Sam, or, rather, his buddy Al, has hit on all the old saws—and one new one—about why relationships fail. Sam should stop listening to his buddy. Al’s all wet.
Let’s examine Sam’s and Al’s assumptions one by one.
1. The Alien Argument. Men and women are just too different to ever get along, or, as John Gray so entertainingly put it, “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.”
Here’s what we really know about sex differences. Men and women, in actuality, are remarkably alike. Really significant differences appear in only four areas. Three are cognitive: verbal facility, mathematical skill, and visual-spatial ability. Women win the first hands down—they use more words and express themselves better than do men. Men do better when it comes to working with numbers and calculations and being able to mentally manipulate two- and three-dimensional figures, but these abilities appear largely linked to expectations. If you tell women that tests of these skills are “gender neutral,” they tend to perform as well as men.
Only one area of significant difference is psychological, and that is aggression. Men are quicker to anger and turn threatening or violent. In every other psychological aspect, the stereotypes fail. Adolescent girls are commonly held to be plagued with doubts about themselves, their attractiveness, and their talents, but boys have just as many self-esteem and self-confidence issues. Adult women are lauded as caring nurturers, but men are equally likely to be warmly supportive of offspring, family, and friends.
But surely women must be more empathetic, right? On a physiological level, there is no evidence for better mirror-neuron functioning in females. Psychologist William Ickes at the University of Texas conducts simple, real tests of empathy in which pairs of people sit and interact, then separately watch a tape of their exchange and report to the researcher what they felt or thought at particular moments. This tape is shown to the other person and stopped at these moments. The other person is invited to infer what his or her partner was feeling or thinking, and their guesses are checked for accuracy. Ickes concludes that men and women have the same basic ability. Differences only emerge when people are explicitly told that they are expected to act in a certain way because of their sex; then they try harder. Men who are told that women find nontraditional, empathetic males more desirable immediately improve their performance in this kind of task.
Of the four areas with sex differences, only two count in relationships: verbal facility and aggression. Women are more likely and better able to verbalize their feelings and needs than are men. They have more training: mothers talk to little girls in more elaborate ways about their emotions. And men, when they are anxious about their bond with a partner, are more likely to become physically antagonistic or to withdraw and evade. In day-to-day conflicts in love relationships, women tend to be more vocal demanders, while men tend to use silence to distance and defend. But even this difference tends to disappear when it is the man who wants a change in the relationship.
2. The Soul Mate Claim. This belief is perhaps the one most voiced by partners in distress. It has elements of the Alien Argument, but adds a personalized fillip. It goes something like this: “You’re wildly emotional/incredibly controlling; I should have seen it but I didn’t; you can’t be fixed; I need a different type of person. You are not the One.”
Online dating sites try to convince us that they will match us with our perfect partner, but we all know that our assumptions about what Mr. or Ms. Right looks like are irrelevant when it comes to who will capture our attention at a Saturday night party—let alone who will make us happy for life. Recent research finds that in face-to-face interactions, people are not particularly attracted to or romantically interested in folks who match their stated ideal-partner characteristics. Ideals and profiles are just lists of labels; in real encounters, factors like rapport and shared humor are more telling. In fact, I remember a stunningly handsome young man telling me on our first date, “I am not going to meet all your expectations”; I married him, of course.
Dating sites imply that the Perfect One is out there. One day someone is going to sue them for fraud. Personally, I like the propinquity theory about the way people choose their lover. Propinquity means nearness. The one who looks perfect is the one you are standing next to when your attachment system kicks in. She happens to smile at the precise moment when you clue in to how alone you feel.
Of course, there is some truth to the idea that most of us gravitate toward mates who are similar to us and share the same values and interests, reflecting our implicit understanding that it’s easier to get along with someone just like us. But despite the beliefs of our starry-eyed, romance-saturated society, there is no such thing as a perfect soul mate. Any partner we choose will hurt us at one time or another. No relationship, even the most ideal, has unwaveringly smooth sailing; there will always be squalls and storms that roil the waters. There will always be differences between lovers. How lovers allow their differences to affect the bond between them is the issue.
3. Nature’s Song Says Move Along. Advanced by evolutionary biologists and taken up by the popular press, this is the newest explanation for why relationships fail. Love is a childish fairy tale. Evolution has programmed us to have short liaisons that last only until we’re assured that our offspring have a strong chance to survive on their own. Then men, in particular, are meant to move on and spread their genes around so as to better ensure survival of the human race.
The trouble with this one is that it looks at a personal process—what happens to Dick and Jane—through the lens of ultimate causation, that is, in terms of an overarching universal principle about why a process exists in the first place. When a man flirts at a party, I don’t believe that he, even on an unconscious level, is thinking about passing on his genes to the next generation. He may, though, be thinking about taking off his jeans for the lovely lady he’s laughing with.
All three of these positions are defeatist and demoralizing. There’s no room here for accommodation, for improvement, for success. They’re all doomsday scenarios.
Psychologists have also come up with theories about why relationships go off track. When I began training to work with couples, the most popular idea was that we all simply repeat with our lover the struggles we experienced in childhood with our most powerful parent. We project that parent’s image onto our lover, went the theory, and act out old conflicts, actually manipulating our lover into acting out our scenarios and affirming our worst expectations. In a sense, our lover’s actual responses are deemed irrelevant; our own personal neurotic need to repeat past patterns is seen as the key factor. This theory ignores the power of present interactions. Gradually, though, it gave way to clearer, simpler explanations of relationship derailment. Feminist scholars, for instance, have said that inequality is the downfall of relationships and that power struggles over tasks like sharing the housework are key.
As the systematic observation of couple interactions became more common, therapists became obsessed with two ideas: that conflict destroys love relationships and that distressed couples lack the skills to resolve such disputes. But as psychologist John Gottman, who has viewed many pairs in his famous Love Lab at the University of Washington, has pointed out, all couples fight, and happy couples really don’t use the skills that are highlighted in traditional couple therapy. Among these are calling time-outs when fights get hot and taking turns speaking and repeating what the other just said (known as active listening). So how important can these skills be?
Before we gained love sense, it was hard to offer an incisive explanation for how love fails. Theories that concentrate on bad behavior in conflicts and lack of communication skills are focusing on the symptoms of couple distress rather than the root cause: the overwhelming fear of being emotionally abandoned, set adrift in the sea of life without safe harbor. It is that fear of emotional disengagement that precipitates the demands, criticism, arguments, and silences that mark troubled pairs. What we’ve missed for so long is that discord is almost always an unconscious protest against floating loose and an attempt to call, and even force, a partner back into emotional connection.
It’s useful to look at the dissolution of love relationships in two ways: as a gradual erosion or unraveling of a bond over the course of many fights and silences or as an abrupt shattering of a link as the result of a traumatic injury or betrayal. Whether it is a slow wearing down of hope and affection or a sudden cataclysm that demolishes trust and commitment, it prompts a primal panic and the playing out of a survival script.
John Bowlby’s original understanding of relationship distress was framed around one word: deprivation. Looking at unhappy partners through the new lens of attachment, we see not only what is obviously corrosive in a relationship—that is, the turning against each other in conflict—but also what is missing. When love begins to erode, what is missing is attunement and the emotional responsiveness that goes with it. As responsiveness declines, partners become more vulnerable, and their need for emotional connection becomes more urgent.
The potential for conflict increases as partners are filled with unruly emotions that they do not understand, and find themselves out of sync with each other. Angry protests at the loss of connection escalate. The repair of specific hurts becomes more and more challenging. A slow unwinding of the tie begins. Lack of comfort and closeness feeds distrust and disagreement, and each failed attempt at reconnection and repair breeds more distance. As any sense of safe haven is lost, the old cliché that we build walls when we need bridges comes true.
When emotional starvation becomes the norm, and negative patterns of outraged criticism and obstinate defensiveness take over, our perspective changes. Our lover slowly begins to feel like an enemy; our most familiar friend turns into a stranger. Trust dies, and grief begins in earnest.
Annette, a lawyer in her early thirties, tells her husband, Bill, “I guess, when I look at it, all this didn’t really start with the fights, did it? They were just the fallout. I just never grasped what was happening. I was so into building my career and kind of growing up, becoming successful and being a mom to our son. I guess now, as I try to hear you through all my frustration, I know that I did push us to the side. I was so caught up in things to do. Running faster and faster. I just didn’t want to hear that you felt left behind or unimportant. I didn’t listen, and when you got mad, I dismissed it as part of some midlife crisis of yours. I didn’t want to fight. I thought the best thing was to kind of calm you down and trust that next morning it would be all right. I thought the fights were the problem…if they just stopped, then…But then there was this wall, and you were gone somehow. Now you’ve stopped turning to me. I guess maybe this is what they call falling out of love. Is it?”
Bill turns to her and says quietly, “I just gave up, Annette. You weren’t there. I gave up. I couldn’t stand the empty spaces between us anymore. I couldn’t stand there, feeling naked, and ask—and have you tell me one more time to wait till you were less busy.” Her face crumples.
Research confirms that erosion of a bond begins with the absence of emotional support. Psychologists Lauri Pasch and Thomas Bradbury of the University of California asked partners to solicit advice from one another about something they would like to change about themselves. They found that unsupportive behavior—minimizing the scope of the problem, discouraging the expression of feelings, offering offhand or unhelpful advice, insisting that their partner follow recommendations—was especially predictive of relationship distress. This result stood out, even when the effect of a partner’s anger and contempt during fights was taken into account. Pasch and Bradbury conclude that the quality of positive support—reassurance that a partner is loved and esteemed and is capable of taking control of his or her life—is the most crucial factor in the health of any relationship.
This kind of result parallels the work of Ted Huston and his team, who questioned 168 couples at four different points in their marriages: at eight weeks, two years, three years, and fourteen years. Researchers went to each pair’s home, asked them to fill out questionnaires, and interviewed the partners separately; nine follow-up telephone interviews were conducted over the next three weeks. Questions focused on positive and negative behaviors, such as how often a partner expressed affection or criticism. They analyzed this deluge of data, looking to see whether any particular behavior early in marriage is associated with its later stability. They found that the chief predictive factor in partners who split was not how often they fought as newlyweds but how much affection and emotional responsiveness they had shown each other. Couples who broke apart had been less demonstrative and responsive as just-marrieds than those who stayed together.
Huston concluded that it is not negativity per se that undermines partners’ love for each other. Fights can be tolerated, provided there is support and affection in a relationship. Decreases in positive connection create “disillusionment” and precipitate distress. The absence of positive, intimate, supportive exchanges has been compared to a virus that takes down the body relational. Conflict is the inflammation that results from this virus; it is an attempt to solve the problem of lack of emotional responsiveness from a partner. In a troubled love relationship, problem solving and practical assistance alone will not be curative.
If erosion begins with loss of connection, the second stage is the escalation of conflict, especially negative patterns, such as demand-withdraw, that actively destroy any sense of emotional safety partners have with each other. I call this demand-withdraw two-step the Protest Polka; it is an objection to the separation and disconnection between partners. As both partners lose their emotional balance and attachment panic takes over, reactive rage and defensive numbing become more extreme and more compelling.
In their first appointment with me, George yells at Barbara, “I am a damned psychologist. I am supposed to understand this stuff, and I can’t believe how angry I am. In my head, I rage at you as I am driving to work. I hear the sarcasm in my voice, and sometimes I wonder who I am turning into. I watch every minute for you to turn away from me. The more I push you to be with me, the more untouchable you become. But I can’t stop doing it. I am married to the Ice Queen herself. You don’t care about anyone but yourself. I want a wife, not a business partner.”
Barbara crosses her long legs slowly, tilts her head, and calmly replies, “Then it would be good to try being polite and treat me like a wife. I do not see the point in all this shouting. And so you are right; I often prefer to leave and be elsewhere.”
Lost in a dance they do not understand, their dance takes on a life of its own. George does not see how his anger makes Barbara fear that she is being rejected, and she does not hear the frantic call for connection underlying his irascibility. If they cannot find a way to step out of their polka and risk reaching for each other in another way, their bond cannot be repaired, and the end stage—disillusionment, despair, and detachment—will set in.
It helps if we understand the forces that are at work in these conflicts, in these struggles for love. Then we have a chance of grasping the impact we have on each other. It helps if we understand the power of the two toxins in a love relationship—criticism and stonewalling—and how they destroy emotional balance and inflame insecurity.
“There is no such thing as constructive criticism,” says John Gottman. “All criticism is painful.” He is correct. We never like to hear that there is something “wrong” with us, or that something needs changing, especially if this message is coming from the loved one we most depend on. Psychologist Jill Hooley’s work at Harvard measures the impact of critical, hostile comments made by loved ones and shows just how venomous disparagement by those we rely on can be. This censure may even trigger relapse of mental illness, such as depression.
Hooley’s team looked at two groups of women—those who had previously been depressed but had recovered and had been stable for at least five months and those who had never been depressed. These women were put in an fMRI machine and exposed to two recorded scornful speeches made by their own mother about issues that had been raised in their relationship in the past. To me, this sounds like Chinese water torture. I was shocked it got past the ethics committee. The criticism sounded something like this: “Your clothes are old and poorly fitting…Your newer things are extreme in style in a way that isn’t flattering to you. You need some advice on style.” But the researchers also made sure that the women heard two speeches from their mom that contained praise, such as “Stephanie, you have always had such a wonderful smile…This is one of the things I have always loved about you, and I think others do, too.” So maybe it wasn’t quite so bad.
A panel of judges rated the quality of the moms’ praise and criticism and agreed that there was no difference in the savagery of the criticism or the intensity of the praise that the two groups of daughters heard. But after listening to the critical speech, the women who had previously been depressed rated themselves more generally upset and described themselves in very negative terms, using such words as “irritable” and “ashamed.” They also showed a smaller increase in positive mood after hearing praise as well.
But the question remained: Exactly how does criticism from an attachment figure affect neural responses in a way that prompts feelings and behaviors associated with depression? A powerful little sorting department in the brain called the DLPFC (for dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) is known to regulate the impact of external cues on the limbic system, the emotional brain. Depressed people consistently show decreased activity in the DLPFC; successful antidepressants boost activity. When the previously depressed women heard their mother’s criticism, their DLPFC simply failed to activate, a finding that Hooley calls “striking.” These women’s brains were unable to switch into soothing and calming in the face of disparaging comments.
In earlier research, Hooley has found that patients hospitalized for depression have a two to three times greater risk of relapsing when they live with highly judgmental relatives instead of more approving ones. Hooley calls criticism from a loved one “low-grade punches to the brain.” She also has found that censure by family members can be stressful enough to trigger relapse in people struggling not only from depression but also from schizophrenia and eating disorders. Criticism from loved ones rings the survival alarm bell in our brain; it sets off the deep-seated fear that we will be rejected and abandoned. It makes sense that such scorn makes it infinitely harder to hold on to our mental equilibrium and emotional balance.
No doubt, Mom is a powerful emotional figure in most people’s lives. So are our romantic partners. In my couple therapy sessions over the years, I’ve noticed that partners usually have no clue as to the real impact of their negative judgments. When I first broach the idea that attacks overwhelm the partner on the receiving end with so much hurt and panic that he or she cannot deal with the disapproval and so withdraws and retreats, my clients often look at me incredulously.
“But mature adults should be able to deal with criticism. It’s really just feedback,” Carrie tells me.
“But this is you giving feedback that he is disappointing you, and you are your partner’s main source of safe connection,” I tell her. She still doesn’t get it. I try again: “Even when things are going well with my own husband, if I hear disapproval and criticism in his voice, it’s like a fire alarm. Anyone else’s comments are more like a bicycle bell ringing. My brain tells me that keeping the approval of the one I rely on for a basic sense of belonging and safety is an urgent matter.”
“You mean just because it’s me and I have this special secure-making place in his life, my upset and blaming just freaks him out? It’s alarming to him?” asks Carrie. I see her husband, Walt, nodding emphatically.
Criticism virtually guarantees that our partner will be caught up in fear and unable to hear our message and will become defensive and try to withdraw. Walt chimes in, “I just try to bat away your comments, but then you feel dismissed and you shout louder.” Then he turns to me. “But if we work on strengthening our bond, then we will get to the place where we both feel so secure with each other that we can say anything and it won’t ever sound like a fire alarm and we won’t get all defensive, right?”
Wrong. When we love, we are always sensitive and vulnerable. But it is true that the more secure we are, the less we will get caught in negative patterns, such as demand-withdraw, that feed insecurity. Securely connected partners are also quicker to regain their emotional balance and bounce back from hurt and conflict than avoidant and anxious partners are. They are better at recognizing the impact they have on their lover and acknowledging that they have caused hurt. And they are better at repairing rifts, as you will see in the next chapter.
We all use withdrawal at times when we are hurt or offended, or simply unsure and worried about saying the wrong thing. It is like a pause in the duet we do with our partner; it can allow us to gather our thoughts, find our balance. But withdrawal is toxic when it becomes the customary response to a partner’s perceived blaming. And just as they do with criticism, my clients fail to recognize the impact this reactive distancing has.
“I don’t understand why she is so angry with me,” says Walt. “It can’t be just because I go quiet. I space out because I can’t deal with the hurt. I should man up and just shrug it off, but I can’t. I get overwhelmed. Why can’t she just wait till I recover a bit?” He then admits that, in fact, he never wants to resume the discussions because the emotions he feels are just too difficult for him to handle. I try to explain that a relationship is a dance. If there is a stumble, you pause to get your balance and then resume moving. But if you wait too long, your partner gets the feeling you don’t want to continue the dance. She gets alarmed and angry and starts to protest. Conflict ensues.
But there is another level of withdrawal that is absolutely deadly in love relationships. This is when a partner turns to stone—still, silent, and completely inaccessible. This is a total negation of the bond. There is no engagement. It is one of the rules of attachment that any response is better than none. I must have heard the cry “I fight to get a reaction, any reaction” a thousand times. When we stonewall, the most extreme version of dismissal and nonresponsiveness, we mostly do so in order to cut off our emotions; we freeze and retreat into numbness. But when one dancer completely leaves the floor, the dance is no more. This catapults the remaining dancer into the terror of insignificance and abandonment.
The old adage “If you can’t say something nice, it’s best to say nothing at all,” which was taught in manners class in my English school, is about the worst possible advice for a love relationship. The operative word here is nothing, and that is precisely what we leave a partner with when we routinely turn away, shut him or her out, and stop responding.
Stonewalling by a partner triggers an emotional meltdown that usually shows up as white-hot rage or intense grief. If we are not looking through an attachment lens, this extreme emotion looks bizarre; after all, the cue is almost a non-event. The other partner simply gave no response. Can simply doing nothing have such an impact? Looking at the prototypical attachment relationship can help us understand.
Psychologist Ed Tronick of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, demonstrated the effect of stonewalling many years ago in a series of landmark experiments with mothers and infants. The mother sits facing her baby, talking and playing with him. Then, on a signal from a researcher, she becomes silent and unmoving, and her face becomes flat and vacant. The infant typically picks up on her emotional absence very fast and starts trying to reengage her, opening his eyes wide and pointing and reaching. When the mother does not reconnect, the baby goes into high gear, shrieking for attention. When this makes no difference, he turns away from his mother, withdrawing from her. After a couple of minutes, he dissolves into frantic, panicked wailing. This wailing is difficult to watch; the infant’s desperation is tangible. The researcher then signals the end of the experiment, and the mother then smiles and comforts her infant, who soon regains his equilibrium and returns to engaging with her happily. (You can find clips of the Still Face experiment on the Internet.)
I see the exact same sequence of events occur when an adult couple sits in my office. At some point, one partner shuts down and literally becomes still. Just like the infant in the experiment, the other partner will try to engage the still one, become insistent and aggressive, make attempts to turn away, but then, faced with no response and no relief from feeling abandoned, will finally dissolve into despair. In this most primordial of threat situations, our reactions and our responses are the same whether we are seven months old or fifty-seven years old. John Gottman and other researchers point out that male partners are more likely to stonewall than females. This may be because men are more easily flooded, less able to deal with strong attachment emotions, and slower to recover from stress. Some note, too, that men are more likely to be avoidant in style, and stonewalling is perhaps the ultimate avoidance strategy, short of leaving the relationship.
A partner’s distress is magnified by the paradox of having his or her lover physically present but emotionally absent. The incongruity undermines any hope that effective action can be taken to reconnect. “I was never as lonely when I lived alone as I am living with Davida,” Barry tells me. “I can’t bear it. She is in the house, and it looks like I have a wife. We are a couple. But there is no connection. It is crazy-making. Disorienting. There is nothing I can do to get her to let me in. I am beyond frantic here.” Chronic stonewalling, the refusal to engage, renders the other person helpless. The ultimate irony is that in trying to protect themselves, stonewallers imprison themselves. Virginia Woolf, in her book A Room of One’s Own, put it perfectly: “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in.” There is no solution here to either partner’s sense of isolation. There is no bond to count on.
As the cycle of hostile criticism and stonewalling occurs more frequently, it becomes ingrained and defines the relationship. These episodes are so aversive and destructive that any positive moments and behaviors that occur are discounted and marginalized. And as a couple’s behavior narrows, so do the partners’ views of each other. They shrink in each other’s eyes; the full panoply of their personalities shrivels down to a few noxious traits. She’s a carping bitch; he’s a withholding boor. In such a darkening environment, partners question every action or comment the other person makes. Psychologists refer to this as a process of escalating negative appraisal, where every response is seen in the worst possible light. Both partners become hypervigilant for any hint of slurs and slights, abandonment and rejection. They cannot give each other the benefit of the doubt, even for a moment.
This is what happens in my office when Zack looks up at a new picture on my wall while Helen is talking; she reads it as a sign of his “indifference and terminal arrogance” rather than simple curiosity about his surroundings. Helen snaps at Zack; he interprets this as a deliberate attempt to demolish him and prove his “incompetence” instead of considering that she might have had a bad day and is simply tired and discouraged. The way we perceive our partner and the meaning we attribute to his or her actions depends on our sense of emotional connection.
For many couples, disengagement is a gradual process, sparked by a series of minor incidents and hurts that slowly swirls into a downward spiral. Another analogy is that of a pebble that lodges in a house’s foundation, causing a tiny chink that over time widens until the edifice crumbles. For others, though, disconnection occurs abruptly, triggered by a single event—what we call a relationship injury or trauma. Then it’s as if a bomb drops on the house, blasting out walls and shattering the foundation.
These events are cataclysmic, smashing a partner’s sense of safety and leaving only pain and despair. Everything the injured partner assumed about the other—their relationship, their world—is overturned. Psychologist Judith Herman of Harvard Medical School calls injuries inflicted by attachment figures “violations of human connection.” As with other traumas, a feeling of helplessness results. What is worse here is that the injury is caused by the very person who is the safe haven. This paradox leaves people confused and lost. They stumble around, unable to grasp what has happened or respond effectively.
Infidelity is the most obvious wound. “I cannot ‘just get over’ this,” insists Ethan, addressing Lois, his wife of thirty years. “You ask me to put your affair aside, but every time you are late home, I wonder if you have found a new ‘friend.’ I can’t seem to turn off the feeling that it could all happen again. I was blindsided last time; I never saw it coming. And I don’t know how to get the love back. Even when it seems safe between us and you are trying to be loving, some part of me warns, ‘Don’t risk it. Don’t ever let yourself be hurt like that again.’”
“I don’t know how to heal this, either,” says Lois dejectedly. “You’re never going to forgive me no matter what I say or do.” She turns away.
Ethan and Lois try to talk about her betrayal, but each time they do they focus on the wrong things and go down emotional dead ends. Ethan grills Lois for every detail of the affair, imagining that this will somehow give him back a sense of control. Questions such as “Where did you meet the last time you made love?” and “What did you do in bed?” can go on forever, and the hurt only grows. The partner who inflicted the injury often tries to dismiss its significance; this is always a mistake. Lois tells her husband, “Well, you had talked about how maybe we had grown in different directions, so I wasn’t clear our relationship even mattered that much to you anymore.” Ethan explodes. “Well, after all our years together, you could have damn well asked me, couldn’t you!”
Couples like Lois and Ethan often are completely confused about how the affair happened, how destructive it has been, and how to deal with it. In fact, most people are not sure it is even possible to heal from affairs. It makes a real difference, however, if a couple has some understanding of love and the nature of the attachment bond they have violated.
First, unless a straying partner is extremely avoidant in terms of attachment (remember that avoidants are more open to one-night stands in general), most affairs are not primarily about sex; they are about the hunger for connection and not knowing how to satisfy this hunger with one’s partner. Most times, an affair is an indication of a more profound problem. If you are dancing close and in tune with your partner, there is no place for a third dancer to enter. Often, the bond has begun to erode or failed to firm into a secure connection; frequently there have been preceding cycles of criticizing and distancing. But the partners have been unsure what that meant, let alone what to do about it. So they have been accepting the relationship as it is and accommodating to the lack of connection. Then suddenly the “My partner has turned to someone else and is having an affair” bomb detonates, and the relationship becomes obviously and overwhelmingly distressed.
Second, in terms of dealing with infidelity, it is the level and extent of the deception involved that seems to matter, rather than the nature of the sex acts themselves. It is the implications for attachment and trust that count. Christine tells her partner, “I can’t do this. I hear you’re sorry, and I even understand how it all happened. We have drifted apart over the years, and I did sideline you when you would get upset and try to talk about our relationship. I just didn’t see it going anywhere. But the fact that you took this person to the cottage where you courted me and where we spent our honeymoon somehow makes it impossible for me to open up to you again. That you went there, among all the memories of us—the ghosts of us—and made love with someone else in our special place, and then lied to me about it for months and months, even when I asked you directly and showed how my doubts were driving me crazy. I can’t get over that. I can forgive, perhaps, in time, but I cannot be with you, depend on you, without trust between us. And I don’t think I can get that back.”
Everyone knows that an affair can cripple a relationship. But other events may be just as momentous and damaging because they contravene our wired-in expectations that loved ones will be our shelter at moments of threat or distress. If we do not understand the incredible power of attachment and its impact on us, we can inadvertently hurt our partner deeply simply by not understanding what kind of response is required. All such disastrous events are marked by moments of intense need and vulnerability, when a loved one is called upon to provide responsive care and does not come through. In these incidents, the answer to the key attachment questions—“Are you there for me when I need you?” and “Will you put me first?”—is a resounding no.
In my clinical practice and research studies, I hear many tales of traumatic abandonment. The young wife, miscarrying and hysterical, whose husband froze up, unable to bring himself to touch or comfort her, and who called her brother to come and help. The immigrant who, missing her family, pleaded with her husband to pay for her sick mother to visit, and he told her to grow up and stop pining for what is past. The man who, after eye surgery, began to panic because his eye was hurting and entreated his wife to drive him to the hospital in the middle of the night, and she instead urged him to calm down. These failures of empathy and responsiveness create wounds that cannot be put aside or papered over. As with a break in a bone, they must be mended, or permanent disfigurement follows.
In my office Ken loses his temper and yells at his wife, Molly: “One hour after I lost my job, you were on the phone to your dad, persuading him to give me some position in his office. You never asked me how I felt or if I wanted that. You never talked to me or gave me any kind of comfort or reassurance. You just fixed the ‘problem’; you assumed that I would take anything he offered me. You assumed I couldn’t cope with this.”
“This happened five years ago, and I am sick of hearing about it,” Molly yells back. “You are just being immature about this. Most people would have seen what I did as supporting you.” When we do not understand our own or our partner’s pain, our attempts to address it often make it worse. Ken and Molly step into their usual angry protest–cool withdrawal pattern. The injury is then compounded. At the end of the conversation, Ken feels more alone and even less able to count on his wife.
Paul and Francine are locked on what happened the night her mother died, three months ago. “So I didn’t instantly drive you to the hospital when you asked. You had been there all day, and the doctor said she was stable and you should go home and rest. You’d done enough for her. And then she got worse in the night, and you only got there just before she died. That is the crime. All the other things I have done over the years don’t count.” Francine weeps and tells him, “I begged you. But my feelings didn’t matter. And you refused to help, even to take care of our son so I could find a way to go. Nothing I said made any difference. You didn’t care that I needed to be there.” A little later, she dries her eyes and tells him, “You make it all sound so reasonable, but you let me down, and I will never again ask you or show you that I need your caring. I dealt with all that pain on my own. But you tell me that this is not a problem. You still aren’t listening.” She gets up and leaves the room. Until it is healed, this wound will block her ability to turn to and depend on her partner.
Most people recognize these wounds on an instinctual, gut level when they are describing them, even if they have never heard of the new science of love, and many do not believe that they can be healed. But indeed they can, even when they occur in relationships that are already tottering; of course, the more secure the relationship, the more easily the wounds are healed. A decade ago, when my research team at the University of Ottawa first identified these kinds of events as attachment traumas, we realized that we didn’t know much about how to actually help a person forgive and be open to the injuring partner again. The wisdom on forgiveness mostly came from philosophical texts, religious works, and moral tracts, which urged people to rise above anger and the desire for revenge. None offered a map for traveling from rage and grief to emotional resolution and renewed trust. So we set about charting the territory and developing a systematic method to promote healing. The Attachment Injury Resolution Model (AIRM) has proved itself effective in helping couples forgive and learn to trust again. (I’ll describe this in detail in the next chapter under Healing Traumatic Injuries.)
Let’s look at one couple, Bonnie and Stan, and chart their steps to dead-end disconnection. First they slip into disconnection and deprivation and move on into recurring separation distress. Then, in a frantic attempt to reconnect, they go into the demand-and-withdraw dance; as one partner complains, the other stonewalls. Finally, hopelessness takes over, and they freeze up in despair, any vestiges of empathy and secure connection gone. I sometimes think of this as the three Es: erosion, escalation, and emptiness.
Bonnie and Stan started out with a storybook courtship. She was an award-winning teacher, he an ultrasuccessful lawyer. They met on the beach in San Francisco, and four months later, Stan proposed to Bonnie by the Golden Gate Bridge. They felt that they had found their home in each other, and their intimacy and lovemaking were more than either had ever dared to hope for. Already in their midthirties, they decided to have children right away. Bonnie quickly became pregnant, but her joy was tempered by a flare-up of a back problem, the result of an earlier skiing accident. The birth was difficult, and suddenly Bonnie was at home with a small baby and chronic back pain. Stan got promoted at this time and was soon working late every evening and most weekends. He knew Bonnie wanted to move to a new city, and for that they needed lots of money.
This is a classic setup for a relationship to go off track, for hopes to be dashed, and for connection to collapse into distance and despair. But what are the key moments when, if we could freeze them in time, we could see the bond between Bonnie and Stan beginning to weaken? I hear these moments as the partners tell their story and interact in my office.
• The loosening begins with small moments of missed connection and a growing sense of deprivation.
“Stan was never home during my pregnancy,” says Bonnie. “It was like I was doing it alone.” There may also be a galvanizing instant of disconnection and abandonment, often at a pivotal moment of need, that goes unrecognized and unaddressed. The answer to the central questions in any love relationship—“Are you there for me?” and “Will you be accessible and responsive to me?”—becomes “Maybe.”
• Little black weeds of doubt and distrust sprout.
For Bonnie, they shot up when her baby was just eight months old and having a little difficulty digesting solid food. In pain from her back problem and sleep-deprived, she was now also worried about the baby. And she had no one to help out. Her sister, who had often come to her aid, had moved away, and Stan had just received a call from his mother saying that he needed to come home immediately because his father was falling into forgetfulness with dementia and she could not deal with it. Bonnie stood in the hall outside their bedroom as Stan packed his suitcase, and she pleaded with him to wait at least a few days. She told him she was completely overwhelmed and that he could not just leave her. But he did, and she vividly remembers the set of his jaw and the shape of his back as he walked away from her.
• Moments of hurt and misattunement solidify into negative patterns.
When Bonnie tries to talk about this incident, Stan is evasive. Now there are weeds growing everywhere in the relationship, stifling moments of shared pleasure and joy. “You refused to talk about this after you got home,” complains Bonnie, turning to Stan. “It was like it was all no big deal for you. I told you how concerned I was about the baby, and you said she was fine. I told you how weary I was getting because of my painful back, and I’d ask you for a hug, but all you would do is give me long lectures about how my going to that energy doctor was stupid and a waste of money. When I said it was helping, you just laughed at me. But if your mother called and talked about your dad’s health, you would be all kindness and talk with her forever. Your parents come first with you, then our kid, and then me—if you feel like it!” She goes on, sadly: “And if we talked about it, you just got defensive. The more we tried to fix it, the more upset I felt. I got more careful, more wary.”
“No,” says Stan. “You got angry, and suddenly no matter what I did, it was wrong.” He ticks off the items on her list. “That doctor is a charlatan. I was working harder than I ever have so that we could make the move you wanted, and you were just throwing away the money. I was tired, too. I could have done with some hugs myself. You just don’t appreciate the things I do. All you do is get irritated. I painted the baby’s room when you were visiting your mother. Just to surprise you. Bought new pictures, got new fixtures, the ones you wanted—but did I get any recognition? No! Criticism is what I got.” He stares at the floor and says, “I can’t do anything right for her anymore, so I do less and less.”
This couple’s version of the Protest Polka, the demand-withdraw dance, now runs in an endless loop all by itself. The relationship is on automatic. The dial is on danger. They talk about trying to do some of the activities that brought them together, like going for a bike ride or to a concert, but they acknowledge that the tension between them seems to derail any pleasure they might have. They mention, too, that they seldom make love anymore. No surprise. Who wants to make love when you are teetering on the edge of an emotional abyss? Just as when a torn muscle fails to mend and constricts movement, so an injured relationship that isn’t healed stiffens and becomes less elastic, spontaneous, and playful.
• Even as a couple moves farther and farther apart, partners still make small bids for reconnection, but these now go unnoticed or are rebuffed.
After a comment about her unhappiness, Bonnie makes a joke about how she can sound overly harsh sometimes. It is a subtle, even unconscious, attempt to change the tone of their interactions, the music between them. But Stan misses it. He isn’t aware that she is reaching out to him. He is in protective mode and keeping his head down.
The pair’s wariness makes them reject even obvious overtures to reconnect. “I do care about your back,” Stan assures Bonnie. “I get scared and worried about you going to see that phony doctor. I want you to be healthy and happy.” She looks at him sideways as he invites her to a new dance, but decides to play it safe. “Really?” she says. “I guess that is why you always go on about the money, then.” He wilts in the face of her sarcasm and refusal to accept his concern. He tries again in a tired voice: “You basically don’t believe I care for you, do you? You tell me I only care about my parents.”
She stares at him. Every muscle in her face tells him he is right. Even when one person risks and reaches, the other does not see it or trust it or reciprocate. Bonnie told Stan at breakfast one day, “You don’t kiss me anymore before you leave for work.” Surprised, Stan replied, “Oh, well, right now my mouth is full of garlic sausage.” Bonnie jibed as she left the room, “Right. We have our priorities right in this house.” She feels she took a risk and got turned down. He feels slammed.
• The couple’s downward spiral gains momentum. Partners begin describing transgressions and each other in absolute terms.
Stan finds himself muttering in the car on his way to work. “She always does that. Assumes the worst and doesn’t give me a chance to explain. That is just who she is—angry and mean.” He forgets that only a few months earlier, he would have been inclined to say, “Her back was hurting her this morning. She wasn’t trying to be mean. She’ll be different when I get home.”
Partners create a story of the relationship that fits their own personal unhappiness and centers around the faults of the other. The spouse first becomes a stranger who does not understand, then an enemy who inflicts hurt, and ultimately a devil who has engineered the Fall from Connection. This transformation of a partner from friend to fiend is helped along by memories of past negative attachment figures who suddenly spring to mind. Bonnie sees her volatile, alcoholic father in Stan and defines him as cold and uncaring, while he sees a resemblance between Bonnie and his first girlfriend, who once humiliated him by listing his deficits as a lover in front of his friends.
As both people become more guarded and share less, their respective “how we got into this mess” story expands. Their conversations are full of mutual attack, vindictive blaming, and stonewalling retreat. Anguish escalates, and safety dwindles further. They are so busy hitting back the other’s hostile comments that they completely lose touch with the impact they have on each other and the relationship. Empathy, the ability to stand in each other’s shoes, has vanished.
• A sense of helplessness takes over. First one partner and then the other closes off and turns away to other activities and relationships where there is a feeling of competence and control.
Stan no longer bothers to defend himself when Bonnie complains. He simply turns his back and walks away. He has a built a wall around himself that she cannot get through. At first, this agitated and frightened her. She tried breaking through by escalating her complaints and criticisms, but when that didn’t work, she became resigned. Bonnie began spending ever-increasing time at her mother’s home, while Stan built a studio where he can do some woodworking. They were discussing getting a divorce when they first came to see me.
* * *
Unlocking the key elements in the drama of relationship distress—the moments of disconnection, cycles of distorted signals, and sudden injuries that destroy our emotional lives and our families—is one of the big breakthroughs of the new science of love. This understanding marks the first step in our learning how to shape love. What you understand you can maintain, repair, and even enhance. We have come a long way in comprehending why and how we fight with and wall off the people we love most in the world. We now grasp why we move to protect ourselves from our most cherished ones as if they are our mortal enemies, and how this protection becomes a prison.
For Sam, the husband whose outpourings began this chapter, relationships were a mysterious force over which he had no control. In my office four months later, he gives another speech—a different one. Sitting back in his chair, he begins in a soft voice, “I’m feeling much better about us.” He pauses to smile. “And about me! Seems like I can manage this closeness stuff after all. We still fight sometimes, but I don’t feel like I am standing on the edge of a cliff anymore. I didn’t know how to listen to her, so I just tried to push her into loving me. Feels like we have learned so much. We know how to hold on to each other now.” Then he looks at me with what looks like grudging respect. “Maybe you guys know something after all, psychologist lady,” he says.
I admit I cannot resist the urge to feel a little smug at this point. But we need to find out more about how Sam and his partner not only helped each other move out of distance and conflict but also learned to create a new loving responsiveness that made a haven out of a relationship that had become a hell. We need to look at what we know about renewing bonds.
1. Sit quietly for a moment with a pen and paper in front of you. Then think about a typical day in your relationship. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is not critical at all, 5 is moderately critical, and 10 is highly critical, answer the following questions:
How critical and disapproving is your partner of you? How critical and disapproving are you of your partner?
Write your answers down on the piece of paper. Don’t worry too much about accuracy. You may decide on a particular day that your partner is very disapproving of you and give him or her a 10. This does not mean that your lover is a creep and you should drop the relationship. It could just be a bad day. What’s important in this experiment is discerning the impact you and your partner have on each other.
Share your answers with your partner. Try to do this in the spirit of learning how you both experience your dance. See what you can discover. Of course, you can use this exercise as a chance to be critical if you wish, or you can use it as an opportunity to explore the effect of criticism on your bond.
2. Now sit quietly and reflect on any moments in the day when you feel the most trust for and safe connection with your partner. It might be when she calls your name as she comes in the door from work. It might be when you kiss goodnight. See if you can guess when your partner might feel this way, and then ask if you are on target. If such moments are hard to find in your current relationship, or if you are not with a partner, see if you can recall such moments in a past romantic relationship, or even with a parent.
What is the message you get from your partner’s response in these moments?
Do you and your partner have ways of turning down the heat during a fight and making it more likely you will end up connected?
Are there ways your partner could help you calm down and regain your emotional balance when you are both reeling and not hearing each other?
Angela tells her husband, “What helps a lot when I am getting scared is when you just turn and say, ‘We can work it out, honey,’ and touch my arm. Then even if we go back to fighting, somehow it’s better.”
Below are three scenarios of disconnection and attempted repair. See which one most reminds you of your usual responses and strategies when you and your partner (or a past partner or another attachment figure) are out of sync and stepping on each other’s toes.
1. Ed knows that he and Lily are not doing well. He especially notices that Lily is not touching him or making eye contact. He decides to ignore it and let sleeping dogs lie so that he won’t spark a conflict. He hopes that things will just get better with time. He thinks that talking about it will probably make it worse.
2. Joel realizes that he and Alison have not made love in weeks. This alarms him, and he worries that she doesn’t desire him anymore. He brings up the subject and points out that they should make love tonight. He also says he wants them to make love three times a week from now on. He can’t resist adding that he thinks she should be more flirtatious with him, even though she is a cold kind of person.
3. Rick wants Ina to tell him that his worries about the row they had last week are unfounded. He decides to tell her that he is really concerned that she is still angry with him and is unsure about how she really feels about him. He shares this and asks her to be open with him and, if she can, reassure him that everything is now okay between them.
See if you can imagine, and describe in a sentence, the likely impact of each strategy on the other partner. What would he or she do? Turn toward, away from, or against the speaker? How might the conversation evolve from there?
You could describe the strategies as withdraw and avoid, approach and demand, and approach and share. Write a likely ending for each scenario.
Think of one positive love relationship you have now or have had in the past. How did you try to repair moments of disconnection and change the emotional climate of the relationship?
Successful couples tend to openly acknowledge moments of distance and their impact. They share their emotions and make clear statements about feeling hurt or regretting that they caused hurt. They frequently use humor and also touch while talking.
When your partner tried to repair and reconnect after a time of distance, hurt, or conflict, did you accept these attempts? Or did you reject them?