Come as You Are (20 page)

Now in a relationship with a man who is kind and attentive and committed, Isabel’s “I am lost” fire is not burning—which is a good thing!—and it can’t, therefore, ignite desire. Which doesn’t feel so good.

Solution? Isabel needs to advance the plot.

attachment and sex: sex that advances the plot

We never get to see Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester have sex, but I imagine it would be similar to the sex in modern romance novels, metaphorizing penile-vaginal intercourse in terms of that “pursuit of wholeness.” As if Edward Rochester’s penis is the key to the lock of Jane’s vagina, which opens the door to her heart. Modern romance novels thrive on this kind of thing.

Many romance novels these days are not like
Jane Eyre
or
Pride and Prejudice.
They have sex in them. A lot of sex. Some of them have so much sex, they’re basically Porn For The Ladies. But the best romance novels are the ones where the sex isn’t just gratuitous for the sake of entertainment. In the best romances, the sex
advances the plot
, carrying the hero and heroine, against all odds and in the face of many obstacles, through one of the behavioral markers of attachment.

As just one example, the heroine of Laura Kinsale’s
Flowers from the Storm
keeps trying to leave the hero and return to her father, but as she rides away she grows “more uneasy every mile” (separation distress) “until she turn[s] her back on her father and return[s]” to the hero (proximity seeking) and reunites with him, with, ahem, “rough vigor.”
²²

Romance novels are about the narrative of stressed attachment, from “I am lost” to “I am home,” and sex has a starring role as an attachment behavior.

I’ve been discussing this idea of sex that advances the plot with my women friends, and every time, their eyes widen and they say something like, “And after you’re married, the story’s over. Happy ending, no more plot. Oh.”

Which . . . yeah. But it makes the solution obvious. Add more plot!

So if you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, crap, that means that only in either brand-new or else dysfunctional relationships will the sex ever be exciting,” there’s good news—and also bad news, and then more good news.

The first good news is that sex you crave often isn’t sex that feels good—remember,
enjoying
and
eagerness
are not the same thing. Sue Johnson describes this “solace sex” as “soothing but unerotic,” in contrast to “sealed-off sex,” which is “erotic but empty.”
²³
Solace sex can feel like a relief, because you’re easing fear. But let’s not mistake relief for pleasure.

Like imagine that you need to pee really, really badly, and you have to wait and wait, and then finally you pee, and it’s almost pleasurable because it’s such an intense relief. Sex to advance the plot in unstable relationships is like that. It doesn’t feel good when you experience fear and instability in your relationship, just as it doesn’t feel good to have to pee really badly. It just feels like a relief when you can finally do something about it.

And don’t we want our relationships and our sex lives to be about more than just . . . relief?

So the good news is that if you’re missing this kind of intense craving for sex in your relationship, it’s no loss.

The bad news is that, yes, most of us will find it easier to crave sex, for what that’s worth, when our relationships are unstable—either new or threatened. But the second good news is that there’s a bunch of spectacular research on what people can do to increase their craving and
pleasure
(
eagerness
and
enjoying
) with sex in a stable, happy relationship. I’ll talk about how to do this in chapter 7, but first let’s come to grips with the individual differences that influence how you manage attachment in your relationship.

When Laurie told me about her vacation fiasco and the ugly cry surprise, I asked, “What happened after the hot and dirty sex?”

She said, “I fell asleep for three hours . . . which was almost as good as the sex. I just wish I hadn’t had to cry to make it happen.”

“It sounds to me like crying let you discharge the accumulated stress that was hitting your brake, which freed up your accelerator.”

“Oh. Hm. So are you saying that to have more sex, I should cry even more than I already do?”

“It definitely sounds like you need more opportunities to discharge more of your stress,” I said. “Especially since you don’t have much leeway for getting rid of your stressors. And Johnny is your attachment object, right? He’s where you turn when you’re stressed, and your body totally wants to give and receive affection with him, right?”

“Right.”

“So can I make a suggestion?”

“Yes, please. Anything.”

“Stop. Having. Sex. Make it a rule: no sex for . . . oh, like, a month? You clearly want to give and to receive affection with your attachment object, but the stress of your life is hitting the brakes, and the bonus worry about feeling like you should be having sex just makes it worse. So until you work out more effective strategies for managing your stress, make a rule against all genital touching.”

“That doesn’t make sense. How am I helping our sex life by ending our sex life?”

“You’re not ending it. You’re changing the context.”

“Which still doesn’t make sense to me. We go away together and just get mad at each other; I cry all over Johnny and we get busy.”

“Friend, I am not in charge of what context works for you—and neither are you. But the common denominator here is stress of all kinds, including—especially—stress about the fact that stress is hitting your brakes. So stop stressing about the fact that stress is hitting your brakes. Accept it. Welcome it. It’s completely normal. You’re just in a rotten context, so change the context and see what happens.”

She sighed, then went home and talked to Johnny. They tried it. I’ll talk about what happened in chapter 5. For now, I’ll just say that one powerful way of changing the context is to take away the stress of performance anxiety that comes with feeling obligated to have sex.

attachment style

Whom we attach to as adults and how we attach—our attachment “style”—is shaped by the way we were parented.

At their broadest, we can describe attachment styles as either secure or insecure. Remember that infants’ lives literally depend on their adult caregivers, so effectively managing potential abandonment is a serious issue for babies. We attach securely when our adult caregivers (usually our parents) are pretty reliably there for us when we need them. We cry, they come. We turn around, they’re there. No adult caregiver is always there, unfailingly, no matter what, but when they’re there reliably enough, we attach securely. Under these conditions, our brains learn that our adult caregivers will come back when they leave; they will not abandon us.

Kids who are securely attached to their adult caregivers will, as adults, most likely attach securely to their romantic partners, and kids who are insecurely attached to their adult caregivers will, as adults, mostly likely attach insecurely to their romantic partners.

But if parents are under extreme stress or have lots of other children to take care of or have an active drug or alcohol addiction or mood or personality disorder, they won’t necessarily be present, physically or emotionally, when the child needs them. When our adult caregivers are less reliable, we attach insecurely.

We can think of insecure attachment as fitting into two different strategies: anxious and avoidant. With an anxious attachment style, you cope with the risk that your attachment object might abandon you by clinging desperately to them. Anxiously attached children get jealous and experience intense separation distress; so do anxiously attached adults. People with an avoidant attachment style cope with the risk that their attachment object might abandon them by not attaching seriously to any specific individual. Avoidant children don’t prefer their parents to other adults; avoidant adults, according to the research, are more likely to approve of and have anonymous sex.

About half of people in the United States develop secure attachment
styles, and half develop insecure styles.
²⁴
Attachment style isn’t affected by gender—men and women are equally likely to be secure, avoidant, or anxious.
²⁵

To give you a more specific sense of what the styles are like, here are the kinds of statements researchers use to assess attachment style in adults:
²⁶

Now, if you had to guess who has a more satisfying sex life, folks with a secure attachment style or folks with an insecure attachment style, whom would you guess?

Of course. Secure attachment folks. By a mile.

A 2012 review of the research on the relationship between sex and attachment found that secure attachment was associated with every domain of sexual wellbeing you can imagine. Secure attachers have more positive emotions during sex, more frequent sex, higher levels of arousal and orgasm, and better communication about sex.
²⁷
They are better at giving and receiving consent and are more likely to engage in safer sex practices such as contraception use; they enjoy sex more, are more attentive to their
partners’ needs, feel a link between sex and love, are more likely to have sex in the context of a committed relationship, and are more sexually self-confident. Secure attachers have the healthiest, most pleasurable sex lives.

People with anxious attachment styles are the most likely to engage in anxiety-driven “solace sex”—that is, using sex as an attachment behavior—which can make sex intense without making it pleasurable. Anxious attachers worry more about sex, and yet they also equate the quality of sex with the quality of a relationship. They’re more likely to experience pain with sex, particularly in low-intimacy relationships. They’re less likely to use condoms, more likely to use alcohol or other drugs before sex and, unsurprisingly, have higher rates of STIs and unwanted pregnancy. Anxious attachers experience more pain, anxiety, and health risks.

People with insecure attachment styles, anxious or avoidant, are more likely to be involved on either side of a coercive sexual relationship. People with avoidant attachment start having sex later in life, have sex less often, with fewer noncoital behaviors. They have more positive attitudes toward sex outside committed relationships, have more one-night stands, and are more likely to have sex just to fit into a social expectation rather than because they really want to. Avoidant attachers experience sex as less connected with their lives and their relationships.

In the end, insecure attachment interferes with sex. We can’t understand sexual wellbeing without understanding attachment, and we can’t maximize our own sexual wellbeing without learning how to manage attachment in our relationships.

managing attachment: your feels as a sleepy hedgehog

Attachment style is an inescapable factor in sexual response and relationship satisfaction—and it varies not just from person to person but also from relationship to relationship.
²⁸
And it can change.
²⁹
These deep emotional patterns are not always very tractable and sometimes require
therapy. Many people, though, can make a great deal of progress by increasing their nonjudgmental awareness of their own emotional responses and by reading excellent books on the subject.
Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships
by Sue Johnson, who developed Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, directly addresses attachment as it relates to sex, and there’s always my own brief
Scientific Guide to Successful Relationships.
In that guide, I discuss a skill that I call “staying over your own emotional center of gravity,” which I define this way: “Staying over your own emotional center of gravity . . . means owning your feelings, listening to them, and being responsive without being reactive, taking emotions seriously without taking them personally.”