“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 24 styles, and half develop insecure styles.Attachment style isn’t affected by gender—men and women are equally likely to be secure, avoidant, or 25anxious.
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 26adults: Secure Attachment Anxious Attachment Avoidant Attachment • I feel comfortable sharing• I’m afraid I will lose my• I prefer not to show a my private thoughts and feelingspartner’s love.partner how I feel deep with my partner.down. • I rarely worry about my• I often worry that my partner• I find it difficult to partner leaving me.will not want to stay with me.allow myself to depend on romantic partners.
• I am very comfortable being• I often worry that my partner• I don’t feel comfortable close to romantic partners.doesn’t really love me.opening up to romantic partners. • It helps to turn to my• I worry that romantic partners• I prefer not to be too romantic partner in times of need.won’t care about me as much as Iclose with romantic partners. care about them.
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 27 orgasm, and better communication about sex.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