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.
Maturity