Today, it’s 11:05 a.m., and the sun is still hiding behind the clouds, casting an overcast scene in front of me. The air is humid, wrapping around me like a blanket. I don’t mind humidity, though. I’ve visited desert regions of the United States, and I’ve come to appreciate what I call nature’s moisturizer. Humidity leaves our skin soft and shiny instead of rough and dull.
I’ve been excited to write about what I learned over the weekend because I seem to process things best when I’m forced to articulate them. Writing in my journal, to people, or on this blog helps me clarify where I stand and, ultimately, find peace.
This weekend, I read a book that I think everyone should read—especially if you are married, have children, are a teenager beginning to date, or are a teacher working with children from a variety of households.
I’m sitting here listening to the birds chirp, trying to figure out where to start because the book offers so much insight. I expected to learn about relationships. Instead, I learned something about myself.
A few days ago, I was outside working in the yard while listening to the audiobook. Before long, I found myself walking inside to find Robert.
“You make sense now,” I told him.
Then I laughed.
“Actually, I make sense now, too.”
Before reading the book, Robert thought he was avoidant. I didn’t know what I was—maybe just a basket case. If you know me, you know you laughed.
It turns out everything I assumed I knew about myself, my marriage, and my relationships with others was mostly wrong—in a good way. Attachment theory ended up explaining things about our marriage that had puzzled me for years.
If you have read the book Attached, you know where this is going. If you haven’t, I highly recommend it. I had no expectations when I purchased it. I enjoy scientific studies on human behavior, but I wasn’t prepared to be confronted with the possibility that I had misunderstood something fundamental about my own marriage.
I think sometimes we carry on like slightly ill people who never go to the doctor, so we never realize that headaches at 3:00 every day aren’t normal. Then one day we go in for something completely unrelated, and the doctor says, “Hey, you don’t happen to get headaches every afternoon, do you?”
As it turns out, there’s a reason.
Suddenly, something you’ve experienced for years makes sense.
That’s how this book felt.
For years, a certain symptom kept showing up in my relationship with Robert.
When we were dating, friends would tell me to break up with him.
“He doesn’t prioritize you,” they would say.
But that explanation never quite fit the man I knew.
He was kind.
Yes, he liked spending time with his friends. Sometimes he chose them over me. But even when I was disappointed, it never outweighed the character, gentleness, and steadiness I saw in him.
He wasn’t constantly whispering sweet words in my ear.
He wasn’t overly emotional.
He wasn’t intense.
But somehow, it still felt right.
Then we got married.
We had children.
Time alone together became harder to find.
And suddenly, some of those things that hadn’t bothered me before became harder to ignore.
My friends were married now, too.
Some had husbands who became jealous over interactions with other men. Some would confront perceived threats. Some seemed intensely protective.
But not Robert.
In fact, when I was in college (and married), I had a close male friend. Our friendship was completely platonic. We had some of the same classes, studied together, grabbed lunch occasionally, and sometimes he even came to both Robert and me for advice about his relationship.
Robert never seemed threatened.
Never seemed jealous.
Never seemed concerned.
And it wasn’t just him.
As the years passed, I wondered. Then, I began filling in the blanks.
Maybe he wasn’t worried because he wasn’t attracted to me.
Maybe he wasn’t worried because he didn’t see me the way other husbands seemed to see their wives.
Maybe he loved me, but not with the intensity I saw in other relationships.
The strange thing was that those explanations never quite fit the evidence. Overall, I was often just as happy—or happier—in my marriage as friends whose husbands were intensely jealous or protective.
So how can I make this make sense?
I’ve always been perceptive.
One time, Robert wanted to move a family friend into our home. The moment I met him, alarms went off in my head. I told Robert absolutely not. Later we learned that the man had been scamming a family member out of thousands of dollars.
Another time, I got off a brief phone call and immediately told Robert that I thought a family member knew something we had intentionally kept from them.
“No way,” Robert said.
But they did.
So I began to trust my instincts.
Actually, that’s not quite right.
I began to trust my interpretations.
That sentence changed the way I think about nearly every relationship in my life.
I thought I had become an expert relationship meaning-maker.
If I sensed something, I assumed I understood it.
If I noticed a shift, I assumed I knew why.
What I would eventually learn is that observation and interpretation are not the same thing.
According to attachment theory, there are three main attachment styles, but two of them immediately caught my attention.
The securely attached person generally assumes the relationship is okay unless given a reason to think otherwise. They are open to love, receive love easily, and tend to believe the relationship will persevere.
The anxiously attached person also builds deep connections. But when they sense a change in that connection, they don’t always interpret it as neutral.
Research discussed in the book found that anxiously attached individuals are often remarkably perceptive. They notice subtle changes in emotional connection faster than many other people.
The problem isn’t necessarily what they notice.
The problem is what happens next.
An anxious attachment style doesn’t just notice the shift.
It assigns meaning to the shift.
A delayed text becomes rejection.
A quiet evening becomes distance.
A distracted spouse becomes a spouse who has lost interest.
The observation may be accurate.
The interpretation may not be.
That distinction hit me like a ton of bricks.
For years, I thought my intuition was infallible because I had been right enough times to trust my conclusions.
What I failed to realize was that being a good observer and being a good interpreter are not the same thing.
Attachment theory didn’t teach me to distrust my intuition.
It taught me to slow it down,
Looking back, I can see how often I confused observation with certainty. I noticed shifts and immediately assigned meaning to them. I filled in blanks. I connected dots. And because I had been right before, I trusted my conclusions without always questioning them.
What I didn’t know then was that one of the biggest misconceptions in my marriage wasn’t about Robert at all.
It was about the story I had created to explain him.
And that’s where attachment theory changed everything.
