The internet has cracked it. Specifically, TikTok. By it I mean: whether or not someone really loves you. Whether they will eventually hurt you. Whether they mean to hurt you if they do. Whether it would be better if you had actually never met in the first place. These are questions as old as time immemorial but the internet has the answer to them all and the answer is the same every time: attachment theory.
Formulated and investigated by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, and later by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth in the 50s and 60s, the tenets of attachment theory are fairly straightforward. It theorises that young children need to develop healthy relationships with at least one of their parents or primary caregivers in order to ensure normal social and emotional development towards adulthood. Having a good relationship with your parents then, essentially, will lead to secure attachment (normal adult relationships). Laterally, children who experience trauma, neglect and/or abuse are likely to develop insecure attachment styles, according to the theory. These can manifest as either avoidant attachment (emotionally unavailable people who fear intimacy and commitment) or insecure attachment (a constant fear of abandonment and need for validation).
On TikTok, the great incubator of psychological pathology, an undue emphasis on attachment styles love and romance (and friendship, and family) has many users in a chokehold. The hashtag #attachmentstyle has over half a billion cumulative views. But it’s not just TikTok. Endless articles about attachment style posit that it can be used to explain the ‘red flags’ in everything from why you fall in love to how you text people and even why you have sex. There are articles attributing our susceptibility to headaches and chronic pain to our attachment styles. Despite being published over 20 years ago, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find — and Keep — Love, has shot up Amazon’s best-seller list. One article, about whether you have an attachment problem or simply a partner who engages in “sucky behaviour”, concludes: “After all, life’s too short to be dating assholes.” Eureka! So simple!
Disregarding the over-simplicity, the temptation to pathologise all our relationships is quite obviously dangerous. “The notion that all human relationships can be understood through one framework is not only simplistic, then, but psychologically questionable. It also encourages adults to abdicate from the responsibility of controlling their own emotional lives,” says one recent article from Refinery29, a rare criticism of the attachment style content sweeping the internet. “And isn’t trying to control a situation by pathologising a person’s behaviour because you don’t like it the opposite of love?”
Another problem is even more obvious: John Bowlby’s research was never meant to live inside the algorithm. His work investigated, essentially, the emotional impact on children whose mothers entered and left a room. But with the internet, our mothers (and as adults, our partners) never have to leave the room. We can track each other at all times, we can be constantly in contact if we want (and if we want different levels of contact, we can dismiss our different needs as problems with attachment compatibility). John Bowlby never had to deal with “delivered eight hours ago” or “last seen 4 minutes ago”, nor did he have Find My iPhone. His research didn’t evaluate Snapchat streaks. A blessed era, you could argue. A simpler time. My point is that its teachings are probably no longer applicable in 2022.
“Bowlby didn’t suggest these for adults,” says Dr Ruth Harpur, who works mainly with survivors of narcissistic abuse (another internet buzzword that’s been completely misunderstood, she says). “We have to see Bowlby in context; he was working at a time of hardcore behaviouralism, when emotions were viewed as irrelevant, to be ignored and controlled.” Bowlby saw attachment styles as, if not innate, then certainly permanent. His research was pioneering at a time when the dominant theory in psychology and child development was simply that we needed food and water and warmth to live. The discovery that we might need our mothers to be nice to us too felt, at the time, groundbreaking. Now it doesn’t work the same way. “It’s been misunderstood,” Dr Harpur. “I think attachment theory does have good aspects that can be applied to romantic relationships. But when you apply it as categorical, you miss the point.”
It’s easy to see why we’re too attached (no pun intended) to these theories though. By pathologising all our relationships we give things more meaning than they would otherwise have, and more importantly, we can – and do – use them to absolve ourselves of responsibility when and if things go wrong. Relationships are intrinsically messy, confusing and often embarrassing, but if you can utilise attachment theory, you can explain away your mistakes, brush off embarrassment at your behaviour. It’s not that you’re in the wrong, it’s not that you’ve been ghosted, it’s not that you’ve fucked anything up, TikTok says, it’s just that you have different attachment styles!
“‘Ghosting,’ ‘unfollowing,’ and ‘blocking’ are indicative of the avoidant attachment style in particular,” Jemma Strain, a psychologist and editor at The Attachment Project, tells me. “One of the definable characteristics of avoidant attachment style is a preference to steer clear of disclosing personal information and emotional closeness – which the online world caters to almost perfectly,” She says that avoidant attachers may message frequently at first, but if an exchange crosses their strict internal boundaries (often after a big emotional disclosure or breakthrough), they may feel overwhelmed and withdraw from the relationship by disappearing. Anxious attachers, on the other hand, often over-share and text too much.
Because they can be attributed to quote unquote bad behaviour in this way, attachment theory has become even more bastardised as a way to identify villains (avoidant attachments) and victims (anxious attachments), which obviously, in the messy landscape of personal relationships, is unhelpful and problematic. “The person who’s anxiously attached, oh well they’re the poor victim,” says Dr Harpur. “Being with someone more avoidant is likely who you’re attracted to, but that’s not gonna be a good relationship for you. But the idea that someone who’s avoidant is the villain, that’s just not true. People with avoidant attachments are anxious too, they’re not pathological narcissists. They’re afraid too: of being consumed by the relationship, of losing their individuality, their autonomy and freedom”
Both the experts I speak to point to the isolating effects of lockdown, too, and the overhang on our relationships, as increasing our obsession with attachment style psychology. In short, the pandemic made us more introspective, more insular and self-obsessed. It made our social circles smaller, and it made us rely more and more on the internet to tell us what to do and who to love and how to live our lives. “We now put a strong emphasis in our culture on your romantic relationship,” says Dr Harpur. “There’s a sense that this person you’re with has got to be all things to you at all times – your best friend, your lover, the person you confide in, the person who comforts and champions you, provides you with excitement, and you have to do it for life. That has never been the reality for humans, but we’re becoming culturally more isolated. The pandemic has definitely added to that.”
“And the thing is — once we become aware of something, we tend to start seeing it everywhere,” Strain adds. From that perspective, there are two optimistic potential endings to our current attachment style obsessions. Firstly, there’s the evidence, as Dr Harpur presents, that attachment styles can change gradually over time and are dependent on the people we’re with at any given moment. Much like you can force your FYP algorithm to stop showing those Princess Anne fancams please, you can train yourself to be less avoidant or anxious or whatever.
But again, much like with your royal-infested FYP page, there is a simpler antidote for driving yourself to distraction with internet psychology that seems to appear everywhere you look, one that’s become a meme within itself: log-off, go outside, touch grass, gain some perspective. But perhaps it’s fairer to say that we shouldn’t look for excuses for bad behaviour (or simply a lack of interest) from another person by using the template of ‘attachment theory’ to comfort ourselves. Nor should we rely on it to self-analyse and pathologise to the point of obsession. The most toxic attachment we have is probably one Bowlby could never have predicted; namely, the one between ourselves and our phones.