planet go boom

a measured defense of the avoidantly attached

I am a lesbian and have been out as such for 15 years. I have watched many a dyke social trend ebb and flow. I came of dating age in the early days of the hegemony of enthusiastic freely given verbal consent and have, blessedly, watched this trend fade. I was there for mainstreaming of polyamory—ethical nonmonogamy, as it is now called—and have seen many a young they-them be ripped to shreds by it. I have been conversational in the language of astrology since long before Co-Star.

It’s true what the say; some of us really do want to read the litany of our childhood traumas on a 72-hour first date in which we cry in bed together. Not all of us are so extreme. But just about all of us do crave emotional depth to our relationships, and we want it early. We want commitment early. We do not want a slow burn.

Just about all of us. But not quite all.

The past 8 years or so have seen the mass-marketing of something called attachment theory. Attachment theory to fidelity is a psychological framework developed by British psychoanalysts a long time ago. It says that how your parents cared for you influences how you are able to relate to others. (Of course, a lot of psychology—the entire field of object relations, for example—holds this idea as a central premise, and different sects use different language for it. More on this later)

Dykes LOVE attachment theory. Nowadays, a first date might involve sharing your self-assessed attachment styles (John Bowlby turns in his grave each time a girl does this) in order to determine compatibility, or just to talk shit about your ex. That’s because there are some attachment styles that catch a lot of flack. Let me fill you in. In the OG framework, there are four attachment styles: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant (disorganized). If you’re secure, your parents were aight, so you are normal. If you’re anxious-preoccupied, your parents were pretty inconsistent, so you are now anxious and preoccupied about getting your needs met, afraid of separation, etc. If you’re dismissive avoidant, your parents were negligent or maybe even lightly abusive, so now you’re afraid of seeking relationships because you know they can hurt you, and you might be cold and withholding, or just distant, in close relationships. If you have disorganized attachment, your parents were frightening or treated you in confusing or contradictory ways, so now you both seek and run away from relationships, doing both anxious and avoidant strategies. You behave in confusing and contradictory ways— you might have a penchant for the old “I hate you, don’t leave me.” (Real quick, I also want to let you know that I’m not gonna talk much about disorganized attachment here. Most people who are not securely attached have some level of disorganization, but most of us skew one way or the other. People who are very disorganized act very crazy in relationships, and if you are less disorganized you are less crazy, but still might be a pain in the ass, quod erat demonstandum, the end.)

Dykes LOVE attachment theory. But they HATE avoidants.

Now might be a good time to say that I am not an attachment style realist. I am an attachment theory instrumentalist. This is because I don’t believe that anything in the realm of the mental or the emotional can be mapped so cleanly; I’m not a DSM diagnosis realist either. But I’m also not a trained professional, so who cares.

I have recently gotten into Theodore Millon’s personality taxonomy, though, among others. I’m not a Millon realist either. I don’t care what he thinks about the evolutionary psychology literature. But I think that organization of the personality is a much more useful way to think about inter- and intrapersonal dynamics than attachment styles or simple personality types, such as, God help me, the MBTI. I’ll spare you the details of Millon’s taxonomy; it’s very involved and probably dry to people who don’t share my brainworms. There are a lot of charts. But basically his framework zooms out two levels from attachment theory: he also includes the social context and the broader cultural context into his conception of how personality is formed. In other words, it’s not just your parents who can affect your growth. It’s not just your mother who can fail to meet your needs. Your cultural context can also be a very bad fit for you and can thereby stunt your growth, more or less forever. Millon’s is also a dimensional model, meaning that instead yes you have it or no you don’t, you have x amount of any given trait, and you may have it with y valence or z valence, and it might be doing q thing there. Anyway, the point is that it’s a pretty thorough framework that is a lot more aligned with how I think about people—and how they are and maybe why—than the 4-type pop-psych bastardized Ainsworth-Bowlby attachment theory lens that all the dykes are using.

The way I see it, personality, as conceived of by people like Millon and in psychodynamic literature, is like a solar system. (Shoutout to my beautiful, loving, smart girlfriend, who is a physicist who studies our solar system, for making me think about solar systems every day. The dynamic in psychodynamic makes me think of how so much of what’s going on in space is modeled using fluid dynamics.) We all have many bodies of different sizes and composition in our solar system. They got there in some kind of originating series of events, but I don’t care about that right now; it’s not well understood anyway. We all have one (or maybe two, if you have some kind of conflictual binary system) massive body, a star, around which all the other bodies orbit. There are all kinds of mysterious forces operating in the system—gravity, radiation, electromagnetism, and more. Some people’s solar systems are very harmonious, with nice gaseous and rock planets all synced up in nice circular orbits. Some people have systems with far-flung planets, the farthest of which threaten to escape the gravitational pull of the star. Some systems are full of icy planets and volcanic planets and planets made of pure uranium. If you get close to another person, another system, then the objects and forces of your system and theirs begin to interact in ways that are somewhat predictable, but not always perfectly understood.

In my personal system, the most massive is a planet made of dense, compacted fear. It is the fear of being invaded, engulfed, and destroyed by the capricious needs and desires of others. (I am NOT one of the many dykes that wants to talk about trauma on a first date, and I would be fine with 2 hours instead of 72, thanks.) In Millon’s language, it is called Planet Schizoid. Schizoid is at the outer edge of the system. It has an elliptical orbit. It is not the largest planet, in spite of its great mass, and it’s not flashy, so it doesn’t draw attention right away. It might not even attract your attention at all—unless you get caught in Schizoid’s gravitational field, which is very strong, because it is so massive.

There are some people in the universe whose system contains very massive objects made of need, and these planets are called, in Millon’s language, Dependent. (In fact, I have a sizable Dependent planet, just a little closer to the star than Schizoid; it’s just not the most massive one¹.)

Planet Schizoid has another name in attachment language: Avoidant². Planet Dependent has another name in attachment language: Anxious.

(The metaphor kinda breaks down here because what happens when these two massive objects enter each other’s orbit is not like what happens in space; it’s way worse. Especially because Anxious and Avoidant attract each other. We’re gonna roll with it anyway, just bear with me idk. This is a blog, not a dissertation.)

Though I have such a massive Avoidant body in my system, I have it in me to be both the Anxious party and the Avoidant party, depending on the relationship, depending on the shape and composition of the other person’s solar system. Allow me to illustrate using the two craziest relationships I have ever been in.

For example, I was once, many years ago, entangled with a system that was defined by a massive Dependent body, sort of the shape an size of mine. (Girls with a certain stripe of mommy issues often have these planets, it seems.) This girl’s Dependent planet was on an elliptical orbit the shape of a grain of rice: when the Dependent planet was close to me it was too close, so close that it pulled HARD on my massive Dependent planet and my little Borderline planet; and when it was far (which it usually was), it was too far. In fact, when her Dependent planet was far from me, it was usually caught in some other girl’s orbit. (She also had a large Histrionic planet, and probably sizable Borderline and Masochistic ones, too, but I digress.) This made me totally lose my mind; my Borderline planet was so destabilized by this girl’s system that it flew off its axis and out of its orbit and ricocheted all over the system like that 3D space pinball game from old PCs, and I acted very nuts. In that relationship, I was the Anxious one, with plenty of other spicy flavors and dark forces thrown in.

Just a few years ago, I was briefly entangled with a system that was defined by a supermassive Dependent planet, much larger and denser than mine, but also a huge Paranoid planet. (Don’t ask me what made me chose this system; it had to do with loneliness and other extenuating circumstances that I shan’t disclose.) The neediness emanating from this system was totally overpowering, and when I realized that my Schizoid planet was close enough to be pulled into her Dependent planet and obliterated, I made moves to reach exit velocity. What I didn’t realize was that there was also a small but very dense and volcanic Borderline moon, the moon of her Paranoid planet, on a collision course with my Schizoid planet. When the fiery Borderline moon made impact of the icy, hard surface of my Schizoid planet, the result was as explosive as you might imagine. I had to flee my home, call the cops, and go to court over what happened next. And, because of the huge Paranoid planet, the other girl still believes that I am the one who aggressed her. In that relationship, I was the Avoidant one, like I usually am, but with unusually deleterious results.

So, just to recap, moving away from the solar system contrivance: if you are organized around a fear of being consumed by other people and their needs, then your worst fear will be realized in a person NEEDS you all the time. Likewise, if you are a person who is organized around NEEDing other people all the time because you are so afraid of being left alone, then your worst fear will be realized by someone who needs a lot of space, physical and emotional. The thing is, anxiously attached people can get addicted to avoidantly attached people. What better target for your preoccupation than someone who is always trying to get away from you? And avoidantly attached people are more likely to wind up with anxiously attached people because, well, good luck winding up with another avoidant! Who’s gonna pull in that relationship? And if you’re avoidant enough, no securely attached person is gonna want to deal with you. It’s quite the bind.

As someone who has been both, I have to say that being in the anxious role feels 1000% worse than being in the avoidant role. The avoidant role is defended and protective. The anxious role is raw and exposed, like a skinned knee or, at its worst, a case of shingles. I do not blame anxiously attached people for their intensity. It is extremely understandable.

You know, I don’t think it’s literally true that most dykes hate avoidants. I just think that women are more likely to be anxiously attached, and anxiously attached people are more likely to be preoccupied with attachment. Obviously. So it follows that anxiously attached people are more likely to write and talk and generally take up space about attachment. And it’s no wonder, therefore, that so much shit is talked publicly about the avoidantly attached. It’s no wonder that you’re more likely to hear about a shitty avoidant ex on a first date: no avoidant would ever talk about their past relationships with an anxiously attached person on a first date unless under extreme duress by a very anxiously attached person!

I guess all of this, including my silly little solar system illustration, is just to say that while avoidantly attached people get a bad rap, anxiously attached people don’t get a bad enough rap. No, that’t not exactly it. It’s more like… anxiously attached people are so preoccupied with their relationships that sometimes they are not able to see the individual they are in relationship with. As painful as it is to need and need from someone who is scared to give, I really wish it were possible for anxiously attached people to get curious about WHY avoidants are scared to give, and how the anxious’ own need might be contributing to the avoidants’ pulling away. Or maybe it’s more that I wish avoidants could be understood as just as natural as anxiouses. Planet Schizoid and Planet Dependent were both made in the same originating event, which, again, is so poorly understood.

As for my current relationship, it is secure. My girlfriend and I both have the same planets that we have always have. They sometimes pull on each other in painful ways. But overall, we have a pretty harmonious music of the spheres. The right juxtaposition of solar systems is possible for us all. It’s a big universe out there.

1. Of Millon’s 15 named planets, my other most massive ones are Negativistic and Depressive. I’m awesome to be around, basically.

2. “Avoidant” means something slightly different in Millon’s personality taxonomy, bc no one can name things clearly in this damn field. At its most pathological, Millon’s Avoidant actually has kind of a lot in common with the DSM’s schizoid personality disorder, which is actually not really like Millon’s schizoid personality, funny enough.