Attached

don’t feel guilty for feeling incomplete or unsatisfied. After all, your
most basic needs often go unmet, and love alone isn’t enough to make
the relationship work. If you’ve read this book and understand where
you are each coming from in terms of your attachment styles, you can
now tackle this problem from a completely different angle.
The third hard-to-shed misconception we fell for is that we alone are
responsible for our emotional needs; they are not our partner’s
responsibility. When potential partners “Mirandize” us and “read us our
rights” (see chapter 11) early in a relationship by telling us that they
aren’t ready to commit, thereby renouncing responsibility for our well-
being, or when they make unilateral decisions in a long-standing
relationship without taking our needs into account, we’re quick to
accept these terms. This logic has become very natural to people, and
our friends might say, “They told you in advance they didn’t want to
commit,” or “They always said how strongly they feel about this issue,
so you have no one but yourself to blame.” But when we’re in love and
want to continue a relationship, we tend to ignore the contradictory
messages we’re getting. Instead of recognizing that someone who
blatantly disregards our emotions is not going to be a good partner,
we accept this attitude. Again, we must constantly remind ourselves: In
a true partnership, both partners view it as their responsibility to
ensure the other’s emotional well-being.
Once we let go of these delusions, the movie, like many situations in
life, takes on a very different meaning. The story line becomes
predictable and loses much of its mystique. It’s no longer a boy-meets-
girl story, but an avoidant-meets-anxious one; he has a need for
intimacy and she shies away from it. The writing was on the wall from
the beginning, but the movie’s male hero couldn’t see it. That the
woman he loved went on to marry someone else doesn’t change the
fact that she was avoidant, and it predicts nothing about her happiness
(or her husband’s) in the marriage. It’s very likely that she continued her
behavior and distanced herself from the husband in many ways. For all
we know, the hero became her phantom ex.
What we learned from watching the film is just how hard it is to let go
of concepts we’ve believed in our entire lives—no matter how unhelpful
they’ve been. But jettisoning these ideas is a necessary step; holding