adventure but rather a deactivating strategy to keep them isolated.) In fact,
in a study of married and cohabiting couples, Canadian scientists Audrey
Brassard and Yvan Lussier, along with Phillip Shaver, found that avoidant
men and women had sex less with their partners than did people with other
attachment styles.
Intriguingly, they also found that avoidant men and women were more
likely to engage in less sex if their partner had an anxious attachment style!
Researchers believe that in relationships like Marsha and Craig’s, there is
less lovemaking because the anxious partner wants a great deal of physical
closeness and this in turn causes the avoidant partner to withdraw further.
What better way to avoid intimacy than by reducing sex to a bare
minimum?
What’s more, it’s been found that the anxious partner uses sex to achieve
a sense of affirmation and as a barometer of attractiveness in the eyes of
his/her mate. We can see that a clash is almost inevitable when the anxious
person ascribes so much importance to the sexual experience and the
avoidant person wants to avoid physical intimacy.
Of course there are anxious-avoidant relationships in which sex is not an
issue. In that case, the emotional detachment will take on a different form.
LIFE IN THE INNER CIRCLE
But sex was hardly the main concern for Marsha during the time she was
with Craig. It constituted just a fraction of the deactivating strategies used
by Craig, day in, day out, whether with friends or in the privacy of their
own home; his deactivation was relentless and never-ending. In short, Craig
treated Marsha as if she were the enemy, in sharp contrast to the loving and
caring persona he exhibited to the rest of the world (“Craig was a great guy
and he made a good impression. People who knew him superficially
thought he was really nice”). That dichotomy confused Marsha. Of all the
people in the world, she was the one closest to him, and yet he treated her
the worst. How could he be so nice toward everyone else and so mean to
her? It didn’t make sense, and she thought that if she could make him see