Romance plot

You are probably familiar with the babies experiment. Suppose three babies are each put in a room for observation. Their mother leaves the room and is briefly replaced by a stranger before returning. The babies react one of three ways: the first baby is distressed at the mother’s absence, but forgets its distress upon her return; the second baby is also distressed at the mother’s absence, but when she returns, it sulks, pulling her closer and pushing her away; the third baby does not show distress upon the mother’s departure and shows little emotion when she comes back, instead passive-aggressively withdrawing.

Attachment disorders are at their core a form of object impermanence. The insecurely attached babies experience their reliance on their caregiver as ephemeral. They do not trust it will continue. They do not trust she will return. They do not trust their needs will be met. When she leaves the room, she might as well cease to exist. Physical separation or emotional absence is experienced as total rupture.

The Strange Situation Procedure described above was designed by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth in 1965. It is one of the foundational studies of attachment theory. Early on, in the 1960s and ‘70s, attachment theory was mostly about mothers and babies, drawing on existing psychological conventions which dictated that all neuroses were formulated in early childhood. As such, it feels a little bit like a period piece. It dovetails neatly with anxiety about the collapse of the nuclear family and the encroachment of feminism, the decadent mores of the nascent hippie movement, the enforced social conservatism of the Cold War. It conjures up images of depressed housewives high on barbiturates and Valium or cold-hearted professional women lacking maternal instinct. Bad mothers, in other words. Mothers in this system are the only real caretakers. What would babies do, you are left wondering, if their fathers leave the room? What about babies that do not have mothers? Are they doomed to a lifetime of avoidance?

Later, attachment theory, like most things, becomes about love. Attached, the 2010 book on the subject, is so popular that once at a restaurant in Brooklyn the server, who was carrying it around in her pocket, had a long conversation with my dinner companion about it, comparing neglectful mothers. TikTok is flooded with analyses of dismissive avoidant men, how the anxiously attached and avoidantly attached attract and repel each other; skeptics counter that it is a comforting delusion to chalk up disinterest or bad behavior to childhood wounds. “What could be more appealing,” writes Danielle Carr in a scathing Gawker article on the topic, “than a theory that claims that the person leaving you on read is suffering from an indelible psychic wound at the core of their ability to relate to the world?”

Carr critiques attachment theory on scientific grounds. The unreplicability (or at least lack of replication) of its major studies, how vague and mobile its categories seem to be, how it functions as a self-fulfilling heuristic, a closed theoretical loop. But she also takes issue with how it seems to run along gender lines, reproducing gendered expectations about how heterosexual couples will attach to each other, but in pseudo-psychological terms. Women, prone to be more anxiously attached, will be clingier, more dependent on their partners, more fearful about being abandoned. Men, more prone to avoidance, will flee their partners, holding them at arm’s length, trying to avoid being trapped into commitment. Like much psychological theory, it both tries to explain and simultaneously reproduces existing tropes of behavior. Are men more prone to avoidance because of their relationships with their caretakers (mothers)? Or because of the state of masculinity, which punishes vulnerability? Or because of the state of romance, which is fucked up in too many myriad ways to list?

Attachment theory will not give you any answers. Carr calls it the “libidinal economy,” theorizing that women’s desirability plummets more rapidly than men’s and that they must cope and anxiously speculate more about why their love interest seems so indifferent. This is a common idea, although I think it is also a closed loop. It is such a prevalent cultural narrative that it reinforces itself. A heuristic where men wield power to give or withhold commitment and where women must desperately chase after it is perhaps also more appealing than interrogating where such a relationship will really get you, if you really want it in the first place.

Like all things, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. It does not seem very likely that anyone’s behavior is solely dictated by their emotional wounds, a trauma-driven world structure. It does not seem much more likely that anyone’s behavior is solely driven by the brutal logic of stock market like dating values. There are certainly people, including men, who appear to desperately crave intimacy and who struggle to form and maintain close relationships. Intimacy can burn at contact. It can feel like a kind of wound forming. Its end can feel like a small death. Mourning it is maybe more natural and healthier than pathologizing it. In an essay for 4Columns about SZA, Harmony Holiday calls her song “Kill Bill” “an upbeat tribute to the invigorating fantasy that when we’re done loving someone they’re done living. […] This is music that mourns the inadequacy of modern love without knowing what to do about it.”

It is starting to feel like spring in New York. The temperatures have risen, the trees are blossoming, the streets feel livelier, more libidinously charged. “I think that desire can rise and dissipate with the movement of seasons,” writes Hanif Abdurraqib in a 2019 Paris Review essay about crushing. He listens over and over to “How Will I Know” by Whitney Houston, finding comfort in her joyous and uncertain fantasizing. She is agonizing, crazy high on desire, asking her friends over and over all day long (as I have done and as my friends have done in my hearing): does he really love me? How will I know? Calling him on the phone and then taking it all back because she’s too shy. Hanif Abdurraqib, by his description, agonizes less than Whitney. He enjoys the act of silently yearning, is content to let it play out in peace. All he’s doing is manifesting or maybe just fantasizing. “There’s this old Kevin Durant tweet I love from 2010,” he writes in the crushing essay. “It reads: “#uever wake up n the middle of da night and think about a girl u like or startin to like and sit at da edge of the bed n say damn i want her.”

There was a time a couple years ago, it feels like, when everyone was writing or thinking about crushes. Kathryn Davis, also in The Paris Review, recalls an old teenage crush over the course of a school trip to the Cloisters in New York and experiencing, in the depths of her fantasy, the entire life cycle of a love affair from beginning to end. “It’s called a crush,” she concludes, “because it’s like something landed on top of you, making movement impossible. It isn’t the same as a love affair that—whether star-crossed or blessed—confers motion, ferrying you through time. […] And, truly, what is the point? In terms of the future of the planet, for example.”

A crush is unrequited, obsessive, totally personal. It exists in your own private world, reorienting time around desire. Clare Mao, in a tiny chapbook about crushing that I think is out of print, writes about how the best way to get to know your crush is to act normal around them, but if you can act normal around your crush, you are probably a cop. Annie Ernaux goes shopping, waits by the phone, wanders around Paris, thinking about her married lover who she cannot contact. Everything takes on new significance in this loopy universe. At best, it is a harmless kind of daydreaming. Often, it is more brutal and hungry, a kind of cruel optimism, the ultimate striving towards heartbreak for the really deluded. Tiana Reid writes on crushing in The New Inquiry that “In her 1998 album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Ms. Lauryn taught me the word ‘reciprocity,’ a practice of mutual and fair exchange, and 20 years later i have come up with this shitty corollary: unreciprocity.”

Crushers, the point is, indulge in a funny kind of transference of agency. They appear to prostrate themselves. They gift total power to their crush, invest them with celestial kinds of significance. Your crush, it is tempting to think, could fix you. But in reality, they hoard power. All this wanting exists in their desire. They are unwilling or uninterested in making the leap to be known, to be seen. Perhaps they realize, subliminally, that their crush will not fix them.

Of course people crush in many ways. Some do want to make themselves known. Like an adolescent, I tend to call a sometime lover or new romance a crush. The start of something is so fragile, so shaky, so undefined. But I have also had periods of crushing in a totally closed off and obsessive way, the kind of crushing that is predicated on unreciprocity. It gave me something to think about. It’s a relatively harmless pastime. But it can also feel like disordered object attachment, the fear that coming too close to something will wound you, that making it real will perversely make it vanish, that connection is bound up with abandonment.

I think of this as a parable about scarcity. Like most forms of scarcity, it is largely artificial. There is not a real shortage of love in the world, not an inherent shortage of connection. Time, which is relatively short for all of us, tends to feels long while you are experiencing it. But romantic fantasy is often predicated on imaginary scarcity. If you cannot simply approach your crush, if they are really or apparently unavailable, then it is easy to believe that they would rock your world, that everything would suddenly be different. Romance novels are full of absurd and artificial barriers to love. It is the whole thesis of the romance plot. In Bridgerton, and many similar stories of the genre, the romantic hero is estranged from the heroine not by any lack of desire but because of bizarre extenuating circumstances (usually surrounding an inheritance clause in the case of historical romance). Some heroes, wounded by a dead or deceptive lover, think themselves incapable of ever loving again. They can literally only be thawed by that one special girl. In Some Like It Hot, Tony Curtis, posing as a millionaire in order to seduce Marilyn Monroe, spoofs this trope, claiming that his broken heart has rendered him so incapable of feeling, he can’t even be turned on by a kiss. Marilyn Monroe outdoes herself to prove him wrong. Suddenly, he can feel again.

Maybe the most famous jilted lover in English literature is Miss Havisham from Dickens’s Great Expectations, whose fiancé steals her fortune and abandons her. For the rest of her life, she sits in her decaying home, still wearing her wedding dress, her rotting cake and decorations all in place. In most interpretations, she won’t take off her wedding dress because she is stuck in the moment of abandonment. But I think she is clinging onto the moment just before her abandonment, freezing time in a space where she was still happy and loved, where the world had boundless potential ahead of her. Disordered attachment, sure. But more hopefully delusional than vengefully crazy. Her yearning defies the logic of space and time, bends it to her desire. If she sits very still for long enough, her lover will come back. Arguably a romantic to outdo them all.