Are you anxious or avoidant? The trendy science behind dating

Imagine yourself on a first date. There’s a red and white gingham tablecloth, a flickering candle and one really long piece of spaghetti, like in Lady and the Tramp. What do you ask the handsome stranger sitting opposite you to figure out if they are the right person for you? Is it: “What do you do for work?” How about: “What are your favourite films?” Or do you start with: “So, tell me, did you ever feel rejected or frightened by your parents as a child?”

Six years ago, in a pre-coronavirus land far far away, the neuroscientist Amir Levine and the psychologist Rachel SF Heller published Attached, a fascinating book on attachment theory that explained in simple yet convincing terms how we should conduct our relationships to make them last. Essentially, they said that it has to do with our parents, whose commitment to their roles as carers will make us avoidant, anxious or secure in our attachments to other people later in life.

Suddenly, the idea of attachment was everywhere. Despite having been around for many decades, the idea of attachment was suddenly everywhere. Readers responded in their droves, desperate to determine how they could restore romance or find love. The book sold millions of copies. And then its inevitable successors arrived: Anxiously Attached by Jessica Baum, Securely Attached by Eli Harwood, and Attachment Theory: A Guide to Strengthening the Relationships in Your Life by Thais Gibson, to name just a few. On TikTok, #attachmentstyle racked up more than a billion views.

The appeal of attachment theory is that it seems like common sense. If your parents got the balance wrong when it came to caring for you — either suffocating you with affection or being a little too cold — you will react in one of two ways: either you’ll develop an anxious attachment style, which means you crave attention and worry about others’ capacity to reciprocate your feelings, or you’ll have an avoidant attachment style, which means you equate intimacy with weakness and try not to show your emotions. And if your parents cared for you just right, you’ll have a secure attachment style, which is basically what it says on the tin.

What’s worse, so the theory goes, is that as adults we are often drawn to people who are completely the opposite of what our attachment style requires. Anxious individuals, for instance, can find themselves addicted to the chase of trying to make an avoidant person commit to them — even though the process of continual rejection can be deeply hurtful. Levine and Heller say that in most circumstances the anxious person is better off finding a partner with a secure attachment style who can make them feel safe and loved.

In the most recent book on the topic, Please Find Attached, the former lawyer and poet Laura Mucha (yes, I was confused by her bio too) tries to unsimplify the simple — inspired, she says, by chats with those who have done “a quick online quiz” and then wrongly acted on their results by “blaming or ditching their partner”. Allocating people into misunderstood attachment categories leads to “dubious judgments”, she insists, and better understanding where the theory comes from and what it means is the most sensible way to proceed.

Much like its Levine and Heller counterpart, Mucha’s book is rooted in the history of attachment theory. Towards the middle of the 20th century, she explains, psychoanalysis “failed to acknowledge how important family experiences were in shaping children’s minds”. Cue the revolutionary British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who noticed during studies of children in hospital (who at the time weren’t allowed visits from their parents) that certain young patients became clingy or angry when eventually reunited with their families. You can see one upsetting example of his research in the film A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital. As individuals we seek bonds with those who will be both accessible and responsive in times of fear and difficulty, Bowlby hypothesised. Decades later his theory would be extended to grown-ups: that those who don’t have the privilege of such secure bonds early in life are likely to struggle forming healthy romantic relationships as adults.

What makes Mucha’s book unique is that alongside her commentary she provides seven extensive case studies. Ray, “the boy who was sent away”, develops an avoidant attachment style because as a child his parents sent him from Scotland to Bangladesh to live with his grandmother for three years. Lily, “the girl who was wrapped in love”, is categorised as secure, having been helped with her homework and taught to have adult conversations from an early age. “The boy with the stiff upper lip”, “the girl wrapped in cotton wool” and “the boy who was raised by wolves” are also among those receiving thorough analysis.

• What is your ‘attachment style’? Gen Z’s new obsession

Each case study has a thoughtful illustration and curiously includes lines of white space “roughly equivalent to the amount of silence” the interviewee left between responses, but they fail in their task of making the book stand out from countless similar offerings. Everyone can benefit from a helping of therapy, but to trawl through the transcripts of Mucha’s attachment interviews is like sitting in on someone else’s session: interesting at first but tedious after the second hour of painstaking self-reflection. Other books, like Julia Samuel’s Every Family Has a Story: How We Inherit Love and Loss and Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now do the same thing much better.

Translating popular buzzwords back into unnecessarily capitalised scientific jargon turns out to be about as interesting as you’d expect. Mucha does pose some interesting questions — can you describe your relationship with your mother using only five adjectives? Which of your childhood memories backs up each one? — but beyond prompting some healthy self-interrogation, the book offers little practical advice. Almost 400 pages can be summed up in one fact: “Even as adults, we can still feel just like the little children who’ve been separated from their Important People.”

Mucha complains about the over-simplification of online quizzes, but her own method isn’t much more reliable. The expert therapists responsible for deciphering long-winded and complicated interviews to determine a person’s attachment style frequently suggest different classifications, disagreeing as much as 20 per cent of the time. In one of Mucha’s case studies, three highly trained professionals reach entirely different conclusions. I can’t be the only one who thinks we shouldn’t be making decisions to stick or twist in our relationships on such shaky grounds.

Please Find Attached: How Attachment Theory Explains Our Relationships by Laura Mucha (Bloomsbury Sigma £18.99 pp384). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members

This post was originally published on here