Life Question 6

Love as attachment

Some psychologists define love as attachment. We come in the world ready to attach ourselves, and attach ourselves almost all of us do. The first attachment is to a primary caregiver, usually a mother figure. Then follows quite a number of attachments as we go through life -- and also some detachments as well.

We vary widely in our ability to attach. An example of a champion attacher is Margaret Wallwork who celebrated her 85th birthday with 250 of her relatives (including children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, one great-great-grandchild, and in-laws). Every holiday the clan has gathered at the home where Mrs. Wallwork and her husband raised 10 children and where she continues to reside with a daughter and two sons. Another holiday tradition has been bringing flowers to the grave of her husband Ralph, patriarch of the clan.⁴ (Even the dead are not detached.)

Still on the subject of champion attachers, in 1943 a group of 17-year-old girls in Lorain, Ohio formed a club and took an oath to remain friends forever. Since then they have provided constant unconditional acceptance and support for each other and met each month as a group. A daughter of one of them told an interviewer that she was amazed by their five decades of loyalty. A daughter of another said that she was jealous of the kind of friends her mother has because, as she explained, "We move around. There's no one to go out to lunch with regularly. We don't have that connectedness anymore."⁵

For contrast to these champions, consider a centenarian interviewed by Jim Heyden for his book One Hundred Over 100. In the interview, this 102 year-old bachelor remarked, "I've never had an intimate friend, man nor woman."⁶ Imagine a century of that kind of life. Or consider the much briefer but seemingly no more connected life of a psychiatrist who committed suicide at the age of 30; this explanatory was note found in his pocket: "I never managed to learn to love another person -- only to make the sounds of it."⁷

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