attachment versus intimacy versus versus versus versus

there are too many ways to feel

Relationships are messy. Our ways of seeing each other are messy. So of course the language of relationships is messy. This will be a brief attempt to clean up my own language, so that I will at least know what I mean when I speak.

“Attachment” is a particularly ambiguous term. There seem to be at least two broad usages. In one, attachment is a mental state. It is a cocktail of connection, ease, familiarity, hominess, and maybe greed. In the other, attachment is an activity. It is something you can succeed and fail at, something which you can do in different styles. But these usages seem related: attachment-as-an-activity is successful if and only if it cultivates attachment-as-a-state. We can likewise understand “secure” attachment as an activity: it is when two people are able to reliably cultivate a feeling of mutual connection through “attachment behaviours” (e.g., seeking a safe haven, seeking integration, seeking physical contact). When an attachment is “insecure”, it is because the feeling of connection is not reliable, inducing anxiety about the integrity of the relationship.

Both of my definitions of attachment could, speaking in a relaxed way, apply also to intimacy. But I think intimacy, both as an activity and as a state, has a slightly different inflection from attachment. I think this is the distinction: When we speak about attachment, we are speaking about the establishment and maintenance of connection. When we speak about intimacy, we are speaking about the intensity (intimacy-as-state) or intensification (intimacy-as-activity) of connection. It’s useful to distinguish between intimacy and attachment in this way because it allows you to discuss their interplay. For instance, our sense of security in a relationship can be pinned to a specific level of intimacy. In other words, our relationships have intimacy fixed points. If you feel less intensely connected than usual, and are feeling insecure, this will either motivate intimacy-intensifying behaviours, or it will motivate you to recalibrate your intimacy fixed point for that relationship. If neither intimacy nor recalibration feels possible, you may be motivated to detach instead.

It can be very easy to confuse attachment, intimacy, and other attitudes. This is partly because they often come together, in a blur of colour, and partly because we are taught to associate them with each other. Here’s my little taxonomy of easily-muddled attitudes:

• Attachment/Intimacy: the cocktail mentioned above.

• Appreciation: recognizing that someone meets some normative standard of appearance.

• Admiration: enjoying someone’s appearance in a way that could motivate you to look again.

• Attraction: enjoying someone’s appearance in a way that could motivate fantasies about them.

• Arousal: the familiar physiological response.

Everyone has, at some point, seriously deceived themselves about these attitudes. Maybe you told yourself that your appreciation was attraction, or that attraction was attachment, or that admiration was arousal. It can be hard to accept that none of these attitudes imply each other. It can be hard to accept that you cannot derive the attitudes you think you should have from the attitudes you do have. But it is freeing to give up on trying to squeeze water from a stone. It allows you to appreciate your relationships as they are, to find joy there, or to finally let go.