Towards the tail-end of my 20s, I fell in love with a man who (for legal reasons) we’ll simply refer to as J. J had been a good friend since journalism school. Think dark eyes and public school vowels, like south London’s less hacked off answer to Hugh Grant. He told me which football team to support (Spurs, which didn’t age well); I told him which novels to read on holiday. He took me for pizza after I’d had a bad day; I took him for pints after his. He told me to ‘treat men mean to keep ‘em keen’; I told him to just bloody communicate. By the time we discussed becoming ‘something more’ seven years into our friendship, it seemed too When Harry Met Sally to be true.
Surprise, surprise – it was. Some storylines are better left to Nora Ephron; some friendships are better left as friends. This is The Spectator, not the New York Times, so I’ll spare you the tumultuous details. But, in short, we weren’t compatible. End of short-lived love story.
But, lo! Not according to my social media algorithm! One post-break-up Instagram scroll later and a brigade of angels appeared before me: video after video of self-proclaimed ‘attachment coaches’. They were Americans, usually, voices softened from talking therapy, who promised to ‘heal my anxious attachment’, ‘communicate through avoidance’ and help me find everlasting love as a ‘strong, secure woman’. Reader, I could marry him. So long as I followed, shared and commented for my FREE attachment masterclass.
‘How ridiculous,’ I scoffed at first. But after hours of scrolling through this guff, I, like Carrie Bradshaw, couldn’t help but wonder: could it be that J and I were secretly compatible? Had we simply misunderstood our ‘attachment styles’?
If you’re not as attached to attachment theory as I (apparently) now am, the concept is simple: there are three attachment types as laid out by psychologists Amir Levine and Rachel Heller in their 2010 bible Attached. There’s the gold-standard ‘secure’, describing those who are communicative, comfortable with intimacy and able to leave relationships that don’t ‘align with’ their needs. There’s ‘anxious’ (a label often slapped on women), who are terrified of abandonment and require reassurance that they’re loved. Then there’s ‘avoidance’ (often slapped on men), who are terrified of losing their independence and thus withdraw when partners feel too close. Several psychologists claim there’s a fourth style, ‘disorganised’, a mix of the worst ones above. If you want a few examples: Romeo was probably disorganised, Cathy and Heathcliff were avoidant nightmares… Where for art thou attachment coaches to help them reach their happy endings?
Attachment theory itself isn’t some TikTok phenomenon. It was pioneered by British psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s to explore how children’s interactions with their caregivers shape relationships in later life. And yet, since the bestselling success of Attached, it’s morphed from psychology to psychobabble – particularly when it comes to romance.
In the pixelated world of attachment coaches, we’re not inconsiderate, jealous or unlovable; we’re avoidant, anxious or disregulated
Spend enough time with these attachment coaches and every failed relationship becomes a nervous-system spectacle. I’ve been with ‘textbook avoidants’, who ‘triggered’ my anxiety when I texted them ten times in a row after a bottle (or three) of Rioja. Actually, they just didn’t like me that much; I was too drunk and insecure to accept. I also once had a boyfriend who asked me to move with him to Australia then dumped me five days before the flight. Attachment coaches might call him ‘disorganised’ (perhaps he’d been too close to his mother? Was he abandoned in the Tesco sweets aisle as a toddler?) Still, my diagnosis would be simpler: I’d just call him a dick.
Now, this is not to say that people don’t have a complicated relationship with, well, relationships. Children who’ve grown up with an abusive or absent parent may of course feel that pain in adult life. And yet it is generally not these people whom attachment coaches are targeting. Rather, it’s the Smug Self-Reflecting: those who (as Julie Burchill highlighted) like to pepper their conversation with therapy-speak or excuse their bad behaviour as a side-effect of neurodiversity. Mummy issues got themselves a new social media filter – if they’re really even mummy issues at all.
In the pixelated world of attachment coaches, we’re not inconsiderate, jealous or unlovable; we’re avoidant, anxious or disregulated. We can repackage rejection as emotional bandwidth and purge ourselves of sin with the holy water of emotional intelligence. The irony of course is that in striving for this self-awareness, we find anything but. It’s easier for our egos to blame ‘attachment styles’ than accept the basic, brutal truth: some people do not love us – at least not in the way we want.
And yet, beneath the pseudoscience, there’s a perfectly sensible message. In an increasingly ‘self-optimised’ world in which sex is a swipe away and marriage a dwindling prospect, perhaps we’ve forgotten that ‘love’ is also a verb. It’s not simply a noun that magically strikes you; it requires compromise and bloody hard work. Perhaps, then, there’s something worthwhile in what these self-declared coaches preach: namely that (attraction or not) a little compassion for others’ circumstances can still go a long way. What a shame we need an attachment masterclass to remember that once again.
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