How many of us have known or know someone who has a tortuous relationship in which the best way to define that relationship is “neither with you nor without you”? Perhaps even the reader of these lines knows perfectly well (because he/she has suffered or is suffering it in his/her own flesh) what I am referring to. “I can’t stand him/her, he/she doesn’t change, he/she doesn’t take me into account at all, but I can’t help it if a call from him/her is all I need to leave everything and end up in his/her arms”, is that love? At a social level, there is a tendency to confuse an irremediable feeling of inner emptiness when I am not close to the loved one and it is even negatively valued if that does not happen.
Tradition instills in us that authentic love, irremediably, must be infected with addiction. Nothing could be further from the truth, as we have seen so far, a healthy love is a love characteristic of a relationship of equality, of horizontality, where the two people complement each other, give and receive and there is mutual respect because there is a tendency towards a commitment or a common project. The opposite is what is called affective attachment or addiction to the other.
The role that affective attachment is playing in couple relationships today is so relevant that almost half of the psychological consultations are due to problems caused by or related to pathological interpersonal dependence.
Characteristics of affective attachment
According to W. Riso, let us see the main characteristics of this dependence or affective attachment:
1. The addiction of attachment: “If I miss you, I’ll kill myself”; “he/she is the most important person in my life; without him/her, life has no meaning”. When attachment is present, surrender is a form of fear-driven surrender in order to preserve the relationship no matter what. Under the guise of romantic love, the attached person begins to suffer a slow depersonalization, as if he/she were an annex of the loved one, a simple appendage.
2. Differences between love and attachment: attachment is the crutch of fear, a painkiller with contraindications. The pleasure of loving and being loved is to enjoy it, to feel it and to savor it, if the well-being received becomes indispensable, the urgency to see him/her does not leave you in peace and your mind is worn out thinking about him/her: welcome to the world of addicts and affectionate people. Desire moves the world and dependence slows it down.
3. Detachment is not indifference: love and attachment should not always go hand in hand. Attachment corrupts. Detachment is not lovelessness, but a healthy way of relating, whose premises are independence, non-possessiveness and non-addiction. The non-attached person is able to control his or her fears of abandonment, does not consider that he or she should destroy his or her own identity in the name of love, but neither does he or she promote selfishness and dishonesty. To be detached is not to run off in search of an affective substitute.
4. Attachment wears out and makes us sick: the affective addict is not impeccable when it comes to optimizing and using his or her energy. In every attachment relationship, there are usually two types of subjects:
- The active dependents: those who make an impressive deployment of resources to retain their source of attachment. Active-dependent individuals can become jealous and hypervigilant, have fits of anger, develop obsessive patterns of behavior, physically assault and in particularly dangerous cases, attempt against the life of the other or their own (how many news we often hear about gender violence or macho violence). To a greater extent these attached subjects tend to be men.
- Passive dependents: they tend to be submissive, docile and extremely obedient in order to try to be pleasant, avoid abandonment and the anger of the active dependents. It is more characteristic of women.
How to deal with affective attachment?
How and in what way can attachment be treated? In attachment, the entanglement is total and there is no potion to end it. A person should not wait to fall out of love to end a relationship and it is not possible to get out of love by force of will and reason. It is through self-control that one can get rid of affective attachment and to do so one must keep in mind that behind all attachment there is fear, and even more so behind some kind of incapacity.