Again, these are tendencies, not types. All of us make love in all the above styles – with emotion, for reassurance, as self-gratification, to let out frustration – in fact my guess is that if you mixed all four together what you’d get would be sex labelled ‘normal’. But a noticeable preponderance of one type or the other can act as a Rorschach test, revealing who a potential partner is and what a potential partnership with them might be like.
Tom and Jerry
What do attachment tendencies suggest for partner choice? Similarity can work. When both of us are anxious or attacking we’ll understand each other and thrive on our mutual need for security or strong engagement. When we’re both avoidant – that is, if we ever manage to get together in the first place – we may feel constant gratitude for the reciprocal freedom.
Dissimilarity can play well too. If we compensate for each other, some anxious dependency may strengthen the bond; a small amount of avoidant independence may stabilize interactions; a little attacking engagement may mean issues get put on the table and dealt with in healthy short order. (A good exercise, at this point, is not only to remember your own past relationships but also look at the ones you see around you, as acted out by friends, family or colleagues. Playing ‘spot the attachment tendency’ is not only good practice for understanding partners-to-be but also good fun.)
But do be wary of extremes. If we meet a partner who pushes for commitment on the first date, one who’s never had any relationships longer than a few weeks, or one who picks a fight within minutes of meeting, beware. We are facing respectively an off-the-scale anxious, off-the-scale avoidant and off-the-scale attacking personality. Unless we’re totally convinced we can handle it, we shouldn’t even try.
The more subtle, and often less easily spottable, combination from hell is when partners of different tendencies date but can’t accommodate. Initial attraction may be strong – contrast makes for interest – and when we’re safely in love there may be no trigger for attachment wobbles. But fast forward a little: inject any kind of stress or insecurity and the dynamic will make both sides crazy. Anxious plus avoidant means one of us clings, the other pulls away. Avoidant plus attacking means one of us runs, the other pushes to engage. Attacking plus anxious means one fights, the other fears. The result can be a Tom and Jerry cartoon-type chase, with A emotionally pursuing B round the room of the relationship. If you’ve ten years of commitment behind you by the time this sort of thing creeps in, it’s absolutely worth taking time, energy and counselling to resolve it. But if it’s happening a mere ten days or weeks into a new relationship, run for your life.
The ideal
The ideal here – and it is an ideal – is that mostly we are secure with each other and that at least one of us is secure most of the time. Yes, there’ll be bouts of wobble – but in terms of choosing a partner, what to look for is someone largely honest and direct, who communicates clearly and is not into game-playing. Someone who is aware of emotion, not afraid of intimacy and is open to the possibility of commitment. In other words, human, but largely sorted.
But there’s a problem. What I’ve just described can easily be experienced not as ideal but as boring. Remove the emotional roller-coaster tendencies of anxiety, avoidance and attack, and what’s left can feel all too calm. It’s easy to get confused and think that because someone isn’t any kind of a problem, they are no kind of a partner. I have had clients who in the same breath as describing their relationship as ‘the most secure I’ve had’, express doubts that it is ‘the real thing’; clients who, while reporting contentment, worry that what they’re experiencing is too effortless to be true love.
In fact, secure is good, contented is something to be glad about, and the occasional tempest is exhilarating but constant storms are exhausting. If in the past we have experienced a feeling of secure contentment with a partner but didn’t choose them, that was our loss. And if in the future we experience that kind of security in a relationship, then – assuming all other boxes are ticked – we should offer up heartfelt thanks and hang on for dear life.
7. Being in Love
Anthony Carthew: ‘And [you are], I suppose, in love?’
Lady Diana Spencer: ‘Of course!’
Charles, Prince of Wales: ‘Whatever “in love” means.’
(ITN INTERVIEW ON THE ENGAGEMENT OF CHARLES AND DIANA, 1981)
I am a huge believer not only in the possibility but also the wisdom of falling in love. It’s a magical, sparkly feeling. The world seems bright and shiny, the future seems glorious, everything seems possible. Yes, being in love can sometimes be hard – as the classic French ballad has it, ‘the pleasure of love lasts a moment, the pain of love lasts a lifetime.’ But the excitement, the arousal and the adoration are surely irresistible. Everyone should be love-struck at least once in their life.
Two examples. In Charles Dickens’s novel, the eponymous David Copperfield first meets Dora Spenlow when he visits her father’s house. ‘All was over . . . I was gone, headlong.’ There follows a delightful description of the ecstasy that comes with having ‘fulfilled my destiny . . . in an abyss of love.’
And in case we think that fiction always exaggerates reality, let us also recall footballer David Beckham’s equal wonderment at first seeing Victoria on a Spice Girls video: ‘I thought “she is . . . perfection”.’ Their later face-to-face meeting, at a charity football match, happily led to David’s infatuation being fully returned and an almost instant relationship, engagement and marriage.
Fixation
But what does being ‘in love’ have to do with effective relationship choice? In some ways, not a lot. In evolutionary terms, this rush of wonderful emotion was originally designed not to help us choose a compatible match, but to help us stand by a partner with whom we were making babies. Lust was there to get us rolling in the hay, being ‘in love’ was there to make us willing to push the pram alongside the one we’d originally sneaked off to the barn with. The ‘in love’ flurry of the hormones known as ‘monoamines’ exists to focus us on partnership through those early years when offspring need us to stay close, to the exclusion of all else. So much so that research at the University of Pisa has found key similarities between the monoamine levels of new partners and those who suffer obsessive–compulsive disorder. When we fall for someone we become literally fixated on them – as David Copperfield describes it, ‘a captive and a slave’.
There’s a less evolutionary, more psychological and – in this age of family planning – less offspring-focussed set of reasons why ‘in love’ is so compelling. It’s that when we fall in love, we’re following an emotional dream of being the centre of the world. While very small, unless our childhood was damaged, those around us did their best to keep us absolutely safe, warm, cared for, loved. We leave that behind as we grow to adulthood, but we’ll always be looking for it again, always be wanting to recreate the security and the validation that was ours in the early years. ‘In love’ holds out the promise that our beloved will make us the centre of their world, and for ever. No wonder it’s an obsessive compulsion.
We build on that compulsion. When in love, we’re likely to spend huge amounts of time together – proximity, you may remember, strengthens attraction. We stay close, connecting through sex but also through matched body language, emotional revelation and deep eye contact. The effectiveness of those last two elements was fascinatingly demonstrated by psychologist Arthur Aron, who got previously unintroduced subjects falling head over heels with each other simply by having them ask each other a series of thirty-six self-disclosure questions, then gazing into one another’s eyes for a mere four minutes. This approach was later used in an experiment to raise the ‘take-up factor’ for speed daters – and indeed those daters who asked more personal questions and gave more revealing answers got more picks from the evening.