The Risks of Love

Love is a risky business. Loving partners have enormous power over each other’s well-being, a power all too easy to abuse.

Many people hurt when they try to love or when they try to receive love.

As a nation, we inflict enormous injury and death on children and intimate partners. A multitude of suicides results from love gone wrong.

In terms of the likelihood of suffering emotional and physical injury at the hands of another, the most dangerous interpersonal activity most people do is love or be loved.

The great tragedy of hurtful love is that most of the pain and all the abuse is entirely preventable.

The Shadows of Attachment

Attachment is the formation and maintenance of emotional bonds. We tend to think of attachment as positive, based on love, caring, compassion, trust, and support. Indeed, most start out that way. But powerful attachments can also be negative, having gradually devolved into chronic resentment, anger, blame, and criticism.

Emotional Mechanisms of Attachment

Both positive and negative attachments are subject to the emotional mechanisms of contagion and attunement.

Emotions are more contagious than any known virus. But contagion has negative salience. We’re more likely to get resentful or angry around a resentful or angry person than to get cheerful around a cheerful one.

Attunement is an intimate version of contagion, wherein partners automatically tune their emotions to each other. That’s why it seems like a switch is thrown inside you when you come home feeling great, only to find that your partner is angry. Attunement will bring your partner’s emotional state up a little and yours down a lot.

Negative salience sometimes makes us resist attunement altogether: “I can’t let my partner bring me down or make me nervous or angry.”

Repeated resistance to attunement creates distance in relationships, which typically fills with resentment and, over time, contempt and at least minor emotional abuse.

Positive Versus Negative Attachment

Positive attachment is reward-driven—you feel better and like yourself more. Negative attachment is driven to reduce vulnerability. It can make some people feel self-righteous but not genuinely like themselves.

In positive attachment, partners:

• Maintain interest, compassion, trust, and love.
• Have an attitude of connection.
• Mutually empower, encourage, and reassure.
• Are cooperative and forgiving of mistakes.

In negative attachment, partners:

• Diminish interest, compassion, trust, and love.
• Have an attitude of disconnection.
• Engage in power struggles.
• Discourage or disregard each other.
• Evoke anxiety or shame.
• See each other as opponents.
• Carry grudges.

The Road to Negative Attachment

Disputes over issues, problems, or conflicts of attachment styles do not in themselves veer attachment toward the negative. Rather, negative attachment results from repeated failure of compassion, particularly compassionate assertiveness.

With compassionate assertiveness, partners stand up for their rights, privileges, preferences, tastes, and opinions in ways that respect the rights, privileges, preferences, tastes, opinions, sensitivity, and vulnerability of each other.

Failure of compassion turns attachments negative. Reinstatement of compassion will turn them back.

Relationships become insecure when there are threats of abandonment:

“You do what I want, or I’m out of here.”

Unless there is abuse, there should never be threats of abandonment. The attitude in positive attachment is:

“We’ll overcome disagreements and solve problems with value and respect for each other. Our bond is more important than problems and issues.”

Attitude of Connection

Connection is a choice, generally speaking. We choose to feel connected, and we choose to feel disconnected. In general, people like themselves better when they choose to feel connected and like themselves less when they choose to feel disconnected.

In an attitude of connection, partners regard themselves as connected, no matter where they are or what they’re doing, whether they are pleased or disappointed by each other’s behavior. They behave as if they’re connected. They make small connecting gestures throughout the day—brief touch, gentle eye contact, smiles, and embraces. They think and speak in terms of “we,” “us,” “our,” and “ours.”

In an attitude of disconnection, partners think and speak in terms of “me,” “I,” “you,” “mine,” and “yours.”

Test the hypothesis: Try working “we, us, our, ours” into your everyday vocabulary for the next three weeks, and note the effect on your relationship. Try writing this sentence a couple of times to see how it feels:

“We want our relationship to bring us the safety, security, love, and happiness we deserve.”

The hackneyed communication advice to convert “you-statements” into “I-statements” cannot turn negative attachments positive. But replacing “I-statements” with “we-statements” has a chance. “We-statements” tend to invoke common values, such as compassion and caring.

Over time, feelings of connection should be mutual, but they won’t be all the time. At any given moment, one partner will be stronger than the other. Maintaining unilateral feelings of connection gives the stressed partner time to recover. Reactive disconnection makes everything worse.

Bond Over Problems and Mistakes

The maintenance of interest, compassion, trust, and love must be more important than issues and problems. To the extent that partners adhere to those priorities, problems bring them closer together. They’re teammates, cooperating to find solutions they both feel OK about, with neither feeling disregarded, put upon, or treated unfairly. They make mistakes and apologize sincerely.

Resolving issues and problems doesn’t turn negative attachments positive. Turning negative attachments positive resolves issues and problems.

The following helps discern whether your attachment is positive or negative. It also highlights areas for work to save your relationship.

Positive: Feeling of safety and security in the relationship

Negative: Feeling unsafe, filled with doubts

Positive: Sincere attempts to maintain interest, compassion, trust, love

Negative: Frequent withdrawal of interest, failure of compassion, diminishing trust and love

Positive: Guilt, shame, and anxiety are seen as signals to enhance compassion and connection

Negative: Guilt, shame, and anxiety are blamed on each other

Positive: Flexible compassion screens: having your own feelings while being sympathetic to those of loved ones

Negative: Rigid or porous compassion screens raise reactivity: taking on loved ones’ feelings, disputing them, or shutting them out

Positive: General positive regard allows focus on non-attachment areas of life

Negative: High level of resentment keeps focus on attachment to the detriment of work and personal development

Positive: Privacy and sharing are in balance

Negative: Secrecy or compulsive reporting

Positive: Self-regulation and emotional connection

Negative: Emotional dependency and continual rejection anxiety

Positive: Shared responsibility

Negative: High frequency of blame and unequal division of labor and resources

Positive: Mutual empowerment, negotiation-cooperation

Negative: Power struggles

Positive: Negotiation and behavior requests

Negative: Demands, coercion

Positive: Forgiving of perceived offenses

Negative: Grudges/spiteful behavior

The risks of love are preventable and treatable but left on autopilot; they grow like cancer. Prevention takes effort, self-regulation skills, and dedication to humane values.