The Course of Love

by Alain de Botton

usually accompanied by an air of playful, vicarious excitement. The couple then typically

that there is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.

We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we’ve all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can’t properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing and what sort of behaviour the person before us is rightfully owed. We can be a little tricky to be around.

When our minds are involved in transference, we lose the ability to give people and things the benefit of the doubt; we swiftly and anxiously move towards the worst conclusions that the past once mandated. Unfortunately, to admit that we may be drawing on the confusions of the past to force an interpretation on to what’s happening now seems humbling and not a little humiliating: surely we know the difference between our partner and a disappointing parent, between a husband’s short delay and a father’s permanent abandonment, between some dirty laundry and a civil war? The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of transference is to prioritize sympathy and understanding over irritation and judgement. Two people can come to see that sudden bursts of anxiety or hostility may not always be directly caused by them – and so should not always be met with fury or wounded pride. Bristling and condemnation can give way to compassion.

We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

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 defence 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: first, a tendency towards fearful, clinging and controlling behaviour – the pattern Bowlby calls ‘anxious attachment’ – and second, an inclination towards a defensive retreating manoeuvre, 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 lives regretting that their relationships are not ‘closer’. The avoidant person for their part will speak of a need for ‘space’, they’ll enjoy their own company and will find requirements for sexual intimacy daunting at points. Up to 70 per cent of patients seeking couples’ therapy will exhibit either the anxious or the avoidant mode of behaviour...

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A sign of an anxiously attached person is an intolerance of, and dramatic reaction to, ambiguous situations – like a silence, a delay or a non-committal 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 break-up 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.

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 behaviour 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.