20. Avoidant? Nah. I'm a Capricorn.

Hi friends,

Welcome to the twentieth dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive.

To get in the right headspace for today’s newsletter, I’ve been reading love letters written by iconic leaders and swooning at the sweet, tender romance of it all. 

Like when Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to his wife Josephine, “Since I left you, I have been constantly depressed. My happiness is to be near you. Incessantly I live over in my memory your caresses, your tears, your affectionate solicitude.”

Or when prolific artist Frida Kahlo wrote to her equally prolific husband Diego Rivera, “My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mirror of the night. the violent flash of lightning. the dampness of the earth…All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours…It’s not love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found in your hands.”

My goodness. 

The intimacy. The passion. The absolute and total surrenderance. 

At our best, us humans know how to love. We dedicate songs, poems, and if we can afford it, stars and moons, to our beloved. 

And at our worst? Lorena Bobbit.

In our book for May, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love, authors Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller write, “We’ve been raised to believe that every person can fall deeply in love (this might well be true) and that when this happens, they will be transformed into a different person (this part is not true!). Regardless of what they were like before, when people find ‘the one,’ they supposedly become adoring, faithful, supporting partners–free of qualms about the relationship. It’s tempting to forget that, in fact, people have very different capacities for intimacy. And when one person’s need for closeness is met with another person’s need for independence and distance, a lot of unhappiness ensues.” (Heller and Levine, pg. 270 - Kindle)  

According to attachment theory, we are beholden to the evolutionary and genetic impetus to single out a few specific individuals (i.e. a caregiver, spouse, children, etc.) and become attached to them. This attachment allows for a biological enmeshment where our partner regulates our blood pressure, our heart rate, our breathing, and the levels of hormones in our blood. 

Heller and Dr. Levine write, “Adult attachment designates three main ‘attachment styles,’ or manners in which people perceive and respond to intimacy in romantic relationships, which parallel those found in children: Secure, Anxious, and Avoidant. Secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving; anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships, and tend to worry about their partner’s ability to love them back; avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.

In addition, people with each of these attachment styles differ in: 

• their view of intimacy and togetherness 

• the way they deal with conflict 

• their attitude toward sex 

• their ability to communicate their wishes and needs 

• their expectations from their partner and the relationship 

All people in our society, whether they have just started dating someone or have been married for forty years, fall into one of these categories, or, more rarely, into a combination of the latter two (anxious and avoidant). Just over 50 percent are secure, around 20 percent are anxious, 25 percent are avoidant, and the remaining 3 to 5 percent fall into the fourth, less common category (combination anxious and avoidant).” (Heller and Levine, pg. 8-9 - Kindle)

Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver developed a love quiz to ascertain volunteers’ feelings and attitudes about relationships. The three statements correspond to the three attachment styles and read as follows: 

1. 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 often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me. (Measure of the secure attachment style) 

2. I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being. (Measure of the avoidant attachment style) 

3. 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 merge completely with another person and this desire sometimes scares people away. (Measure of the anxious attachment style) (Heller and Levine, pg. 23-24 - Kindle)

The obvious underlying key here is the degree to which an individual seeks intimacy and closeness.

Heller and Dr. Levine continue, “Studies show that belief in self-reliance is very closely linked with a low degree of comfort with intimacy and closeness. Although avoidant individuals were found to have a great deal of confidence about not needing anyone else, their belief came with a price tag: They scored lowest on every measure of closeness in personal relationships. They were less willing to engage in self-disclosure, less comfortable with intimacy, and also less likely to seek help from others.”

Interestingly enough, “Two researchers in the field of adult attachment, Paula Pietromonaco, of the University of Massachusetts, and Katherine Carnelley, of the University of Southampton in the UK, found that avoidant individuals actually prefer anxiously attached people. Another study, by Jeffry Simpson of the University of Minnesota, showed that anxious women are more likely to date avoidant men… Pietromonaco and Carnelley believe that these attachment styles actually complement each other in a way. Each reaffirms the other’s beliefs about themselves and about relationships. The avoidants’ defensive self-perception that they are strong and independent is confirmed, as is the belief that others want to pull them into more closeness than they are comfortable with. The anxious types find that their perception of wanting more intimacy than their partner can provide is confirmed, as is their anticipation of ultimately being let down by significant others. So, in a way, each style is drawn to reenact a familiar script over and over again.” (Heller and Levine, pg. 91 - Kindle)

For example, if you have an anxious attachment style, you possess a unique ability to sense when your relationship is threatened. Even a slight hint that something may be wrong will activate your attachment system, and once it’s activated, you are unable to calm down until you get a clear indication from your partner that they are truly there for you and that the relationship is safe. If you don’t receive this clear indication, you are more likely to showcase protest behavior– calling or texting incessantly, threatening to leave, trying to make your partner jealous, etc. For an avoidant on the receiving end, once they feel their partner is coming on stronger than they’d like, instead of reassuring them, they create even more distance, creating a cyclical feedback loop.

Heller and Dr. Levine ask, “Why do we find it so hard to get along despite loving each other?...The attachment system is the mechanism in our brain responsible for tracking and monitoring the safety and availability of our attachment figures…Attachment principles teach us that most people are only as needy as their unmet needs. When their emotional needs are met, and the earlier the better, they usually turn their attention outward. This is sometimes referred to in attachment literature as the ‘dependency paradox’: The more effectively dependent people are on one another, the more independent and daring they become.” (Heller and Levine, pg. 21 - Kindle)

Heller and Dr. Levine go on to describe the difference between being in an avoidant-anxious relationship versus a secure one. In the “inner circle” of someone secure:

1. Your well-being comes second to none.

2. You are confided in first.

3. Your opinions matter most.

4. You feel admired and protected.

5. Your need for closeness is rewarded with even more closeness.

They write, “Many people in anxious-avoidant relationships think that the ‘royal inner circle’ doesn’t really exist, and that all people have the same inner-circle experience. They assume that other people are simply not being honest about what goes on behind closed doors. But we’re here to tell you that it does exist and it’s not even a rare occurrence. After all, secure people make up over 50 percent of the population and their inner circle is treated like royalty.” (Heller and Levine, pg. 207 - Kindle)

So, what are the skills (learned and inherent) of this royalty inducing 50%?

We’ll dig in next week.

With gratitude,