free spirit. She gets involved with men—sometimes for more than a
year—but then eventually tires of them, moves on to the next conquest,
and jokingly refers to the “trail of broken hearts” she left behind. She
sees need as a weakness and looks down on people who become
dependent on their partner, mockingly referring to such situations as
“jail time.”
Are Susan and others with avoidant attachment styles simply devoid
of the need to meaningfully connect with a significant other? And if so,
doesn’t that contradict the basic premise of attachment theory—that
the need for physical and emotional proximity to a spouse or lover is
universal?
Answering these questions isn’t an easy task. Avoidants are not
exactly open books and tend to repress rather than express their
emotions. This is where attachment studies come in handy.
Sophisticated research methods are able to reach beyond people’s
conscious motives and succeed where straightforward communication
fails in cracking the avoidant mind-set. The following set of
experiments is particularly revealing.
Six independent studies have examined how accessible attachment
issues are to avoidants. They did so by measuring how long it took
subjects to report words flashed quickly on a monitor. These tests
operated on the well-established premise that the speed with which
you report a certain word is indicative of how accessible that theme is
in your mind. Researchers found that avoidants are quicker than other
people to pick up on words such as “need” and “enmeshed,” related to
what they consider negative characteristics of their partner’s behavior,
but slower to recognize words like “separation,” “fight,” and “loss,”
associated with their own attachment-related worries. Avoidants, it
appears, are quick to think negatively about their partners, seeing
them as needy and overly dependent—a major element in their view of
relationships—but ignore their own needs and fears about
relationships. They seemingly despise others for being needy and are
themselves immune to those needs. But is that really the case?