The Course of Love

Attachment Theory

With age, they both feel a new awareness of their own immaturity and, at the same time, a sense that it can hardly be unique to them. There are sure to be others out there who can understand them better than they understand themselves.

They’ve joked about therapy over the years. At first the jibes were at the discipline’s expense: therapy was the exclusive preserve of crazy people with too much time and money on their hands; all therapists were mad themselves; people in trouble should simply talk to their friends more; “seeing someone” about a problem was what people did in Manhattan, not Lothian. But with every large argument between them, these reassuring clichés have come to seem ever less convincing, and on the day when Rabih furiously knocks over a chair and breaks one of its arms in response to Kirsten’s query about a credit card bill, they both know at once, without saying a word, that they need to make an appointment.

It’s hard to track down a decent therapist, a good deal harder than locating, for instance, a competent hairdresser, a provider of a service with a perhaps less ambitious claim on humanity’s attention. Asking around for recommendations is tricky, because people are prone to interpret the request itself as a sign that the marriage is in trouble rather than taking it as an indication of its robustness and likely longevity. Like most things that stand properly to help with the course of love, counseling seems gravely unromantic.

They eventually find someone through an online search, a sole practitioner with an office in the center of town whose simple Web site refers to an expertise in “problems of the couple.” The phrase feels reassuring: their particular issues aren’t isolated phenomena, just part of what happens within a well-studied and universally troublesome unit.

The consulting room is three flights up in a gloomy late-nineteenth-century tenement block. But inside it’s warm and welcoming, full of books, papers, and landscape paintings. The therapist, Mrs. Fairbairn, sports a plain dark blue smock and a large helmet of tightly curled grey hair that frames a modest and sincere-seeming face. When she sits down in the consulting room, her feet are a significant distance off the floor. Rabih will later ungenerously reflect that the “hobbit” appears unlikely to have had much firsthand experience of the passions she claims to be an expert on.

Rabih notes a large box of tissues on a little table between him and Kirsten, and feels a surge of protest at its implications. He has no wish to accept the invitation to commit his complex griefs in public to a pile of tissues. As Mrs. Fairbairn takes down their phone numbers, he nearly interrupts the proceedings to announce that their coming here was actually a mistake, a rather melodramatic overreaction to a few arguments they have had, and that on second thoughts the relationship is perfectly fine and indeed at moments very good. He wants to bolt from the room back out into the normal world, to that café on the corner where he and Kirsten could have a tuna sandwich and a glass of elderflower cordial and carry on with the ordinary life from which they have so oddly excluded themselves of their own volition from a misplaced sense of inadequacy.

“Let me begin by explaining a few things,” says the therapist in a tightly enunciated, upper-class Edinburgh accent. “We have fifty minutes, which you will be able to keep track of on with the clock above the fireplace. You may be feeling a little apprehensive at this point. It would be unusual if you weren’t. You may think either that I know everything about you or that I cannot possibly know anything about you. Neither is exactly true. We are exploring things together. I should add a note of congratulation for your coming here. It requires a bit of bravery, I know. Simply by agreeing to be here, you have taken one of the biggest steps two people can take to try to remain together.”

Behind her is a shelf of key books for her profession: The Ego and Its Mechanisms of Defence, Home Is Where We Start From, Separation Anxiety, The Echo of Love in Couples’ Psychotherapy, and Self and Other in Object Relations Theory. She is herself halfway through writing a book, her first, called Secure and Anxious Attachment in Marital Relationships, which will be published by a small press in London.

“Tell me, what gave you the idea that you might want to come and see me?” she continues in a more intimate voice.

They met fourteen years ago, explains Kirsten. They have two children. They both lost a parent when they were young. Their lives are busy, fulfilling, and, at times, hellish. They have arguments of a kind she hates. Her husband is too often, in her eyes, no longer the man she fell in love with. He gets angry with her; he slams doors. He has called her a cunt.

Mrs. Fairbairn looks up from her note taking with an imperturbable expression which they will come to know well.

All of that is true, admits Rabih, but in Kirsten there is a coldness and occasional silent contempt that he despairs of and that seems designed to make him furious. She responds to worries, his or her own, by falling silent and freezing him out. Often, he questions whether she loves him at all.

From Dr. Joanna Fairbairn, Secure and Anxious Attachment in Marital Relationships: An Object Relations View (Karnac Books, London):

Attachment theory, developed by the psychologist John Bowlby and colleagues in England in the 1950s, traces the tensions and conflicts of relationships back to our earliest experience of parental care.

A third of the population of Western Europe and North America is estimated to have experienced some form of early parental disappointment (see C. B. Vassily, 2013), with the result that primitive defense mechanisms have been engaged in order to ward off fears of intolerable anxiety, and capacities for trust and intimacy have been disrupted. In his great work Separation Anxiety (1959), Bowlby argues that those who have been let down by the early family environment will generally develop two kinds of responses when they grow up and face difficulties or ambiguities in relationships: firstly, a tendency towards fearful, clinging and controlling behaviour—the pattern Bowlby calls “anxious attachment”—and secondly, an inclination towards a defensive retreating maneuver, which he calls “avoidant attachment.” The anxious person is prone to check up on their partner constantly, to have explosions of jealousy and to spend a lot of their life regretting that their relationships are not “closer.” The avoidant person for their part will speak of a need for “space,” will enjoy their own company, and will find requirements for sexual intimacy daunting at points.

Up to 70 percent of patients seeking couples’ therapy will exhibit either the anxious or the avoidant mode of behavior. Very frequently, couples will contain one avoidant partner and one anxious one, with each set of responses aggravating the other in a spiral of declining trust.

It is humbling to accept that they aren’t going to understand one another spontaneously. To be here means that they have given up intuiting what might be happening inside their so-called soul mate. The Romantic dreams are being surrendered, to be replaced over many months by minute examinations of some ostensibly minor moments of domestic life, though there are no such things as minor moments in Mrs. Fairbairn’s eyes: an unkind remark, a transient impatience, or a wounding brusqueness are the raw materials of her trade.

Mrs. Fairbairn is helping to defuse bombs. It might seem silly to spend fifty minutes (and £75) on how Rabih responded when Kirsten called upstairs to him for the second time to make his way down to lay the table, or Kirsten’s way of reacting to Esther’s disappointing geography results. But these are the breeding grounds for issues that, if left unchecked, could develop into the sort of catastrophes that society is more prepared to focus its attention on: domestic violence, family breakups, the interventions of social services, court orders . . . Everything begins with small humiliations and letdowns.

Today Rabih brings up an argument from the night before. It was about work and money: there is a danger his firm will have to freeze or reduce salaries in the near term, which could cause them to fall behind on mortgage payments. Kirsten appeared almost indifferent. Why, when faced with something so serious, does his wife always respond in such unreassuring ways? Couldn’t she have found something, anything, helpful to say? Did she even hear properly? Why does she so often answer him with a puzzling “Hmm” just when he most needs her support? That’s why he shouted at her, swore, then stalked off. It wasn’t ideal, but she was seriously letting him down.

A sign of an anxiously attached person is an intolerance of, and dramatic reaction to, ambiguous situations—like a silence, a delay, or a noncommittal remark. These are quickly interpreted in negative ways, as insults or malevolent attacks. For the anxiously attached, any minor slight, hasty word, or oversight can be experienced as an intense threat looming as a harbinger of the breakup of a relationship. More objective explanations slip out of reach. Inside, anxiously attached people often feel as if they were fighting for their lives—though they are typically unable to explain their fragility to those around them, who, understandably, may instead label them as cantankerous, irritable, or cruel.

What a silly thing to say, protests Kirsten. He’s exaggerating again, as he tends to do about so many things, from how hard it’s raining to how terrible some meal at a restaurant is—like that time they went to Portugal and all he could talk about for months afterwards was what a flea pit the hotel had been, as if that were the end of the world, even when the children thought it was fine.

Her response, she adds, certainly didn’t justify his sort of reaction. Was it worth storming out of the room for? What kind of adult has such a temper? She holds out an implicit invitation for Mrs. Fairbairn to endorse her as the reasonable one in the couple and, as a fellow woman, to join her in marveling at the folly and melodrama of men.

But Mrs. Fairbairn doesn’t like being pressed to take sides. This is part of her genius. She doesn’t care for anyone being “in the right.” She wants to sort out what each side is feeling and then make sure the other side hears it sympathetically.

“What do you feel about Kirsten at times like that, when she doesn’t say very much?” she asks Rabih.

It’s an absurd question, he thinks; last night’s irritation begins to revive in him.

“I feel exactly as you would expect: that she’s horrible.”

“Horrible? Just because I don’t say precisely what you want to hear, I’m horrible?” interjects Kirsten.

“A minute, please, Kirsten,” cautions Mrs. Fairbairn. “I want to explore for a little longer what Rabih experiences at such moments. What is it like for you when you think Kirsten has let you down?”

Rabih applies no further rational brake, letting his unconscious speak for once: “Scared. Abandoned. Helpless.”

There is silence now, as there often is after one of them says something significant.

“I feel I’m alone. That I don’t matter. That she doesn’t give a damn about me.”

He stops. There are—rather unexpectedly, perhaps—tears welling up in his eyes.

“It sounds difficult,” says Mrs. Fairbairn in a neutral and yet engaged way.

“He doesn’t sound scared to me,” Kirsten observes. “A man who screams and swears at his wife hardly seems a prime candidate to be thought of as a poor scared lambie.”

But Mrs. Fairbairn has the problem caught firmly in her therapeutic tweezers, and she isn’t going to let it go. It is a pattern: over some matter where he needs reassurance, Rabih experiences Kirsten as withdrawn and cold. He gets scared, loses his temper, and then finds Kirsten even more withdrawn. The fear and the anger increase, as does the distance. Kirsten sees him as arrogant and a bully. Her history has taught her that men have a proclivity for overbearing behavior—and that it is a woman’s role to resist it through strength and formality. Forgiveness at this point is not in the cards. But inside Rabih there is no strength at all; he is simply flailing, at his wits’ end, weak and humiliated by signs of her apparent indifference. It is therefore unfortunate, bordering on the tragic, that his way of responding to his vulnerabilities takes a form that masks them entirely and seems guaranteed to alienate the person he wants so badly to be comforted by.

But now, once a week, on a Wednesday at midday, there is a chance to interrupt the vicious circle. With Mrs. Fairbairn protecting Kirsten from Rabih’s annoyance, and Rabih from Kirsten’s aloofness, both spouses are invited to peer beneath the hurtful surfaces of their opponents, to see the bathetic frightened child within.

“Kirsten, do you think shouting, and sometimes swearing, are the actions of a man who feels strong?” Mrs. Fairbairn ventures in one of her few more directive moments, when she feels an insight is within the reach of her clients.

She knows how to step very lightly. The books on the shelf may have rather heavy-footed titles, but in the flow of a session the diminutive therapist moves like a ballerina.

The difficult dynamic between the couple extends to sex. When Kirsten is tired or distracted, Rabih quickly, far too quickly, falls into despondency. His mind holds fast to a powerful narrative about his own repulsiveness. This sense of self-disgust, which long predated Kirsten, has as one of its central features an inability to be explained to others, even though it ushers in a stance of bitterness with those who evoke it. An unconsummated evening will thus generally end up as the disguised spur to sarcastic or wounding remarks made by Rabih the next day—which will then fuel greater (and equally unspoken) efforts on Kirsten’s part to step back. After a few days of being shut out, Rabih will get fed up and accuse Kirsten of being cold and weird, to which she will reply that she suspects he must really enjoy upsetting her, since he does it so often. She retreats to a sad but oddly comforting and familiar place inside her head where she hides when others let her down (as they tend to do) and takes comfort in books and music. She is an expert in self-protection and defense; she has been in training for much of her life.

An avoidant attachment style is marked by a strong desire to avoid conflict and to reduce exposure to the other when emotional needs have not been met. The avoidant person quickly presumes that others are keen to attack them and that they cannot be reasoned with. One just has to escape, pull up the drawbridge, and go cold. Regrettably, the avoidant party cannot normally explain their fearful and defensive pattern to their partner, so that the reasons behind their distant and absent behavior remain clouded and are easy to mistake for being uncaring and unengaged—when in fact the opposite is true: the avoidant party cares very deeply indeed, it is just that loving has come to feel far too risky.

While never forcing conclusions, Mrs. Fairbairn nonetheless holds up a figurative mirror so that Kirsten can start to see the impact she has on others. She helps her become aware of her tendency to flee and to respond to stress through silence, and encourages her to consider how these strategies might affect those who depend upon her. Much like Rabih, Kirsten has a habit of expressing her disappointments in such a way that they are guaranteed not to draw sympathy from those whose love she needs most urgently.

Rabih never brings up his night with Lauren directly. He sees that the priority is to understand why it happened rather than to confess that it did, in a way that might unleash the sort of insecurities that would forever destroy trust between Kirsten and himself. He wonders, between sessions with Mrs. Fairbairn, what could have rendered him so apparently blithe and indifferent about hurting his wife and sees that there could really only have been one explanation: that he must have felt so hurt by things in the relationship that he had reached a point of not caring too much that he might severely wound Kirsten. He slept with Lauren not out of desire but out of anger, the sort of anger that doesn’t admit to its own existence, a sullen, repressed, proud fury. Explaining to Kirsten, in a way she can understand, that he has felt let down will be central to saving his marriage.

At the heart of their struggles, there is an issue of trust, a virtue which comes easily to neither of them. They are wounded creatures who had to cope with undue disappointments as children and have consequently grown into powerfully defended adults, awkward about all emotional undress. They are experts in attack strategy and fortress construction; what they are rather less good at, like fighters adjusting badly to civilian life after an armistice, is tolerating the anxieties that come with letting down their guard and admitting to their own fragilities and sorrows.

Rabih anxiously attacks; Kirsten avoidantly withdraws. They are two people who need one another badly and yet are simultaneously terrified of letting on just how much they do so. Neither stays with an injury long enough truly to acknowledge or feel it, or to explain it to the person who inflicted it. It takes reserves of confidence they don’t possess to keep faith with the one who has offended them. They would need to trust the other sufficiently to make it clear that they aren’t really “angry” or “cold” but are instead, and always, something far more basic, touching, and deserving of affection: hurt. They cannot offer each other that most romantically necessary of gifts: a guide to their own vulnerabilities.

A questionnaire originally devised by Hazan and Shaver (1987) has been widely used to measure attachment styles. To ascertain what type they might be, respondents are asked to report which of the following three statements they can most closely relate to:

1. “I want emotionally close relationships, but I find that other people are often disappointing or mean without good reason. I worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to others. I don’t mind spending time on my own.” (avoidant attachment)

2. “I want to be emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that they are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I worry that others don’t value me as much as I value them. It can make me feel very upset and annoyed.” (anxious attachment)

3. “It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others. I feel comfortable depending on others and having them depend on me. I don’t worry about being alone or not being accepted by others.” (secure attachment)

The labels themselves certainly lack glamour. It’s rather a blow to the ego to be forced to conceive of oneself, not as some kind of infinitely nuanced character whom a novelist might struggle to capture in eight hundred pages, but rather as a generic type who could easily fit within the parameters of a few paragraphs in a psychoanalytic textbook. The terms avoidant and anxious are hardly typical in a love story, but if Romantic is taken to mean “helpful to the progress of love,” then they turn out to be among the most romantic words Kirsten and Rabih will ever stumble upon, for they enable them to grasp patterns that have been destructively at work between them every day of their married lives.

They come to appreciate the strange and special psychotherapeutic diplomatic back channel which has made a new mode of discourse possible for them, a sanctuary where weekly they can confess to being furious or sad under the benevolent watch of a referee who is guaranteed to contain the other’s reaction long enough to secure a necessary degree of understanding and perhaps empathy. Thousands of years of halting steps towards civilization have at last led to a forum where two people can painstakingly discuss how hurtful one of them has been to the other about laying a table or saying something at a party or arranging a holiday, with neither side being permitted simply to get up, storm out, or swear. Therapy is, Kirsten and Rabih conclude, in some ways the greatest invention of the age.

The conversations they have in Mrs. Fairbairn’s presence start to color how they talk to one another at home. They begin to internalize the therapist’s benign, judicious voice. “What would Joanna [a name they never use in her presence] say?” becomes a ritual, playful question between them—much as Catholics might once have tried to imagine Jesus’s response to a trial of life.

“If you carry on getting annoyed with me, I’m going to end up avoidant,” Kirsten might warn in response to a stand-off with Rabih.

They still joke about therapy, just no longer at its expense.

It is a pity, therefore, that the insights on offer in the consulting room are so negligible in the wider culture. Their conversations feel like a small laboratory of maturity in a world besotted by the idea of love as an instinct and a feeling beyond examination. That Mrs. Fairbairn’s room is tucked up some tenement stairs seems symbolic of the marginalized nature of her occupation. She is the champion of a truth that Rabih and Kirsten are now intimate with, but which they know is woefully prone to get lost in the surrounding noise: that love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.