attachment and sex: the dark side Mr. Rochester’s words hint at the place where attachment and stress overlap: distressed relationships.
In the previous chapter I mentioned John Gottman’s stories from women in abusive relationships, who said that some of the best sex followed immediately after acts of violence, and Isabel in What Do Women Want?, who craved sex with a commitment-phobic ex but lacked desire for her awesome current boyfriend. Both of these puzzles make perfect sense when we understand attachment-driven sex when the attachment is threatened.
Attachment is about survival; relationships are about survival. When they are threatened, we do whatever it takes to hold on to them, because there are no higher stakes than our connection with our attachment objects.
I’ll illustrate this idea with some of the darkest and most disturbing science I’ve ever read—it’s disturbing precisely because it shows us how powerfully attachment affects the emotional wellbeing of mammals like us.
In Harry Harlow’s series of “monster mother” studies, conducted in the middle of the twentieth century, his research team invented mechanical “mothers,” to which infant rhesus monkeys attached. Once the infants were emotionally attached to the monster mothers, the mechanical devices shook the infants, spiked them, or jetted cold air onto them, to force the babies away.
And what did the infant monkeys do when their “mothers” treated them
badly, shook them off, rejected them?
They ran back to their mothers.
In an episode of the radio show This American Life, Deborah Blum, author of a biography of Harlow, Love at Goon Park, puts it this way: The [rhesus monkey] babies came back and they did everything they could to make those mothers love them again. And they cooed, and they stroked, and they’d groom, and they’d flirt, and exactly what human babies do with their moms. And they would abandon their 19friends. They had to fix this relationship. It was so important to them.
Of course they did. When we feel distressed, our attachment object is our safe haven. Even—or perhaps especially—if our attachment object is the source of our distress.
And just as the baby rhesus monkeys used attachment behaviors to repair their relationships with their monster mothers, women in unstable relationships may use sex as an attachment behavior to build or repair the attachment. So what Isabel “wanted,” to answer Bergner’s titular question,