Attachment Styles and Being Dependently Independent

The ties that bind us can also set us free

In today’s mix:

• Attachment styles (kind of)

• The dependency paradox, or lean on me

• The burden of being unknown

Attachment styles are, at best, reductive labels

In 1951, the WHO published a report called Maternal Care and Mental Health, concerned with the effects of maternal separation and deprivation on young children. A key contributor to the report was English psychologist John Bowlby. He continued working on the topic and began an extensive collaboration with American-Canadian developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth.

Ainsworth developed the ‘strange situation’ procedure to study how infants respond to stress. In short: Mom and infant are in a room with toys. Then, the (unknown) experimenter comes in and Mom leaves. Mom returns and the stranger leaves. Then, Mom leaves again, and the infant is alone for three minutes. Stranger returns first. And eventually, Mom joins too, reuniting with her child.

Ainsworth and Bowlby categorized the infants based on their responses to the strange situation: anxious, avoidant, or secure (later, a fourth category - disorganized - was added).

You’ve probably heard about these categories in another context. Attachment styles have been transplanted from infant behavior onto romantic relationships, not in the least thanks to the 2010 book Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.

• Anxious relationship style: you crave closeness, but are insecure in voicing your needs. You worry that your partner is not into you as much as you are in them and require constant validation of their love.

• Avoidant: you also want intimacy, but you’ll never admit it because you fear that it will cost you your independence. As a result, you keep people at arm’s length, are flaky when it comes to meeting, and are unwilling to commit.

• Secure: you confidently express your needs and cater to your partner’s. You commit to the relationship, communicate openly, and are sensitive to your partner’s moods and desires.

As an example of the social mediatization of psychology, this relationship bible has become quite popular on Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms where plenty of people try to ‘diagnose’ their or their (prospective) partner’s attachment style.

But, as Vicky Spratt points out in this Refinery29 essay and Allie Volpe in Vox, this is too simple¹. Not only are Ainsworth’s and Bowlby’s original infant experiments under scrutiny (where was Dad in all this, for example), but attachment styles are malleable, context-dependent, and change depending on who you ‘attach’ to.

Trying to cram everyone into one of three boxes - with a single box, secure, considered the ideal - is overly reductive². Every attachment style is a suite of behaviors that exist on a spectrum. Understanding and assessing your (and perhaps your partner’s) behaviors can benefit from a label that helps with interpretation, but conflating the label with what it labels is what philosophers like to call a category mistake. (Or, in the context of the previous post, mistaking the map for the territory.)

Reading Attached left me slightly annoyed,³ but that doesn’t mean I didn’t find ideas in the book I want to poke a little bit. Meet the dependency paradox.

The dependency paradox: why independence is not what we think it is

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

— George Bernard Shaw

People in Western(ized) countries live in a society that prizes independence. Being independent is seen as one of the great achievements and it’s often considered prime partner real estate. Stand on your own, make sure you don’t need anyone, and handle your own sh*t.

Sounds like - here it comes - an avoidant strategy to me.

The dependency paradox is that people who are best at being independent and striving for autonomous goals are people who can depend on a supportive partner. That’s not me indulging in wordplay; it’s the outcome of a 2007, six-month-long clinical trial. Having a supportive partner as a secure base is helpful for inspiring people to pursue independent goals. Preempting the expected objection, the study’s author, psychologist Brooke Feeney, writes:

The critical reader might be thinking the following: If being an independently and autonomously functioning individual requires the individual to have at his or her disposal a relationship partner who is accepting of his or her dependency needs, then that is not true independence. However, the position being advanced here (based on attachment theory) is that relationships are critical in the lives of human beings and that everyone needs to be able to depend on specific others in certain circumstances to be optimally functioning individuals—and the degree to which this need is accepted by a significant relationship partner reduces the frequency of this need.

Part of me bristles. I’ve always had an independent streak and the very thought of being a burden to anyone (even only potentially) makes me uncomfortable. I also know that I am wrong about this and I am rethinking some of my assumptions. Having someone to lean on does not automatically imply you’re a burden. Caring for the people who matter to me doesn’t feel like a burden, so why do I assume that others who (potentially) care for me inevitably conceive it as a burden?

In the blues song ‘Get To Me,’ Foy Vance sings:

You once were the chains holding on to me
I said baby cut me loose, set me free
I got what I asked for now
That much is true
Only now I realize those chains held me close to you

Having someone to lean on and care for is not the burden, being unknown is.

Caricature of George Bernard Shaw by Max Beerbohm, captioned "The strenuous literary life: George Bernard Shaw at work"

Being (un)known

To keep the musical theme going a little longer; I’ve recently (re)discovered Irish⁴ songwriter Hozier, which is odd. It’s not my typical flavor of music. But I found that there’s more to his music than only his 2013 monster hit ‘Take Me To Church’.

In a track called ‘Unknown/Nth’, the chorus goes:

It ain't the being alone
It ain't the empty home, baby
You know I'm good on my own

You know, it's more the being unknown
So much of the living, love, is the being unknown

He’s on to something.

I am fairly self-sufficient. I’ve done the solo travel thing. I’ve done the live in another country by yourself thing. I’ve done (am doing?) the I am lone wolf, hear me howl thing. I’m good at it. But I no longer think it’s always good to be good at it.

You can be good at being alone, but that doesn’t mean it’s good to be alone (of course, there are exceptions). As Hozier observes lyrically, it’s a burden to feel unknown⁵. This is not merely a metaphor. A recent study finds that ‘feeling known’ is a significant predictor of relationship satisfaction for both romantic and familial relationships.

… the primacy of feeling known for satisfaction appears robust regardless of participants' gender, age, and the length of time they had been in the relationship.

Sartre famously said that ‘hell is the others’, but he neglected to mention that we also see(k) ourselves in the reflection of the others’ eyes. We want to shield ourselves against their judgment, yet we want to be seen and known.

The bridge of ‘Unknown/Nth’ goes:

Do you know, I could break beneath the weight
Of the goodness, love, I still carry for you

That I'd walk so far just to take
The injury of finally knowing you

So… hi, I’m Gunnar, nice to meet you. What should I know about you?

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1. The same is true for the so-called love languages, which are basically a marketing stunt by a Baptist pastor. Sorry to burst the bubble…

2. Not to mention that this attachment style framework is almost exclusively aimed at heteronormative, monogamous relationships set against a Western background.

3. Sometimes I read books that annoy me — I need to feel my brain groan and creak on occasion. Understanding why a certain book or topic annoys me is usually an interesting lesson for/about myself.

4. George Bernard Shaw and Foy Vance are Irish as well. Curious. Must be something in the water (or Guinness) over there.

5. A while ago, I wrote about the science of how lonely brains go into social overdrive — another paradox for you.