The School of Life

Dying of Nostalgia; Thomas Dixon Explores Homesickness

Dr Thomas Dixon, writer of the excellent History of Emotions blog, recently interviewed Professor of History at Weber State University, and a leading historian of emotions in the United States, Susan J. Matt. Her first book, Keeping Up With the Joneses, was a study of envy in modern consumer society, and her latest work tackles another emotion: homesickness, in a book titled Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011) which explores how homesickness and nostalgia were transformed from deadly maladies to allegedly un-American emotions. 
 

 

Thomas Dixon [TD]: Hello, Susan, and thanks for talking to us. Perhaps I could start by asking you what got you interested in homesickness?

Susan Matt [SM]: The original impetus was that my own emotional experience of mobility didn’t match up with the mythology of American restlessness. Commentators like Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner as well more modern observers all claimed Americans were naturally restless, that somehow it was in our cultural DNA to leave home. I didn’t find it so effortless or easy to move, and began to wonder if I was alone. Perhaps there was a flip side to American mobility–a hidden history of homesickness. Homesickness also interested me because it seemed in many ways to be the opposite of an emotion I had just been studying–envy. Envy sparks aspirations, pushes people forward, often causes mobility. Homesickness pulls backwards. Both emotions play a role in modern individualism in the U.S.. Americans are encouraged to repress homesickness so they can leave home, be independent, seek more of the world’s goods, act on their envy.

TD: It’s interesting that it was your own emotions that fuelled your desire to revisit their history. I suspect many historians of emotion are in that position. So, what surprised you most about what you discovered when you started digging around in the history of homesickness?

SM: First, how prevalent the emotion was. I thought it would be difficult to unearth, but instead, evidence of homesickness was abundant and easy to find in just about every archive I worked in. Secondly, and perhaps more provocatively, I was surprised at how many Americans died of homesickness, or nostalgia as it was called. I knew there had been European epidemics of nostalgia in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but didn’t know of American ones. But indeed, the disease of nostalgia was widely known in the United States–during the Civil War, there were 74 deaths from it on the Union side, and more than 5,200 cases of it in the Surgeon General’s records. 

SD: It became such a problem that army bands were sometimes prohibited from playing “Home, Sweet Home,” which at that time, was the most popular song in the country. In peacetime, civilians suffered from nostalgia as well.  The prevalence and intensity of nostalgia and homesickness throughout U.S. history – from the colonial era to the present - ultimately led me to question whether we were and are the individualists that we are so widely reputed to be. I think we’re not.

TD: I’ve been struck too by the great power of the passions in earlier periods – to cause illness, madness or even death. Medical sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abound with fatal bouts of emotion. Is it possible to pinpoint a date after which this changed – when homesickness and nostalgia became mere feelings rather than powerful and potentially fatal mental conditions?

SM: It gradually disappeared as a dangerous disease in the first half of the 20th century. The U.S. Army provides a useful gauge in its records. One soldier in the American Expeditionary Force reportedly died of nostalgia during World War I. Increasingly during the War, however, many of the symptoms associated with nostalgia came to be defined as signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock. While the diagnosis of nostalgia stayed on the books up through World War II,  and while there were many reported cases of it among soldiers in that war, there were no deaths. In short, from the early twentieth century on, the number of cases of deadly nostalgia declined, although less lethal cases of homesickness continued (and continue) to abound. It seems worth noting that as nostalgia’s cultural meaning underwent this transformation, the tolerance for the acutely homesick declined, since their condition was now seen as less dire.

TD: Historically you clearly have a really fascinating story to tell about nostalgia and homesickness as modern emotions experienced, as all emotions always are, within a particular geographical and cultural situation, in this case in modern America. I wonder what you think about the contemporary importance of this research, and also of research into the history of emotions more broadly?

SM: The history of homesickness explains a great deal about modern American culture and our national identity. Adults in modern America have learned to repress overt expressions of homesickness, for it has come to connote immaturity, a lack of ambition, and failure. It is out of step with the ethos of modern capitalism, which prizes mobility and individualism. However, while they may not discuss their homesickness publicly, in daily habits and behaviors, American make their feelings about displacement manifest. From ethnic groceries that sell the tastes of faraway homes, to sports teams which symbolize loyalty to a hometown, to our addiction to Facebook, cell phones, and emails, Americans routinely show their preoccupation with staying connected to distant places and people. While we may think of ourselves as an individualistic society, our everyday lives suggest otherwise. And our history – full of people suffering and sometimes dying of homesickness - makes clear that mobility has in fact never been an innate trait of Americans. Instead, they had to learn to leave home, and they have still not completely mastered the art of rugged, restless individualism.

The history of the emotions offers historians and the public a new set of tools to assess the past. Rather than merely judging history on the basis of external behaviors, we can bring in people’s motivations and intentions. These often provide a completely different understanding of social life and revises many of our longstanding narratives about national identity.

 Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions. 

Image: American sheet music of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ arranged for piano and violin, c. 1870s. Source American History Online

Not Just a Talking Shop

People often say, after a class at the School of Life, that they weren’t expecting to enjoy talking so much, and especially not to complete strangers.  Perhaps there is a freedom there, they muse; no past, no baggage, just the meeting of curious minds.  I think so too. It is an unusual environment: a place of conversation about the things that matter between people who have probably never met before.  Jurgen Habermas said that in the London coffee houses of the 18th Century we find the origins of a properly public space that had no affiliation to the state - a place where conversation flowed and where ideas thrived.  John Stuart Mill saw conversation as one of the primary sources of progress in human civilization; to put ourselves outside of our assumptions about who we are and what we believe is exhilarating and, at best, down-right life affirming. 

So the conversations that really matter, said Theodore Zeldin, are the ones that change us.  You want to change the world?  You want the future to be brighter than the past?  Start talking, to anyone and everyone, about what matters. Imagine those future professors, sifting digital archives of our times, forced to conclude that we were a wise and subtle people who pursued each other’s company with vigor and abandon, brave souls who knew, if only by dimly lit intuition, that simply to talk to others across boundaries and barriers of difference would be a powerful tool for shaping a better world.  Is that too optimistic? Plug in, log on, dial up, connect, interrupt, catch an eye or just go ahead and introduce yourself.  How ever you like to do it, just think this to yourself:  with whom shall I converse, freely, on this most extraordinary of days?

Hugo Whately is a faculty member of The School of Life and regular teacher of our classes.  Join him for the next session of 'How to Be Alone' this Thursday 6 October. 

Life is not a Rom Com: Finding a Partner in the Real World

What is love supposed to be like? How will we know when we meet our ‘perfect’ partner?

Hollywood, in the form of romcoms, has given us very strange ideas about what is appropriate when it comes to meeting and mating with potential partners. The rules which they whimsically lay out for us, through the vehicles of overconfident men and spineless, dithering women, would end up in disaster if applied in real life. For the record, for most non-sociopathic men, if you say you’re not interested, he is going to believe you; don’t be surprised if he actually leaves you alone, rather than showing up outside your bedroom window with a boom box!

When we are looking for happy, compatible, long-term matches, we don’t tend to meet them the way they do in romcoms, whether it is someone whom we have made bets with our friends about, have pretended to have kids in order to meet, or have been found by our 8 yr. old son from a call in radio show.

In this blog, I will discuss two, of the nine important steps, from my course, ‘Finding a Perfect Partner.’ Two important factors to consider when searching for well-suited matches are commonality and proximity. 

Commonality is critical in our quest to find a partner. While the well-known saying, ‘opposites attract’ is an old favourite, is it actually true? Probably, not. Instead, it should be ‘attraction increases as similarity between partners increases’. People tend to be attracted to people who are similar to themselves.^[1] It is even advantageous to the relationship that our partner also enjoys seven-course tasting menus at poncy French restaurants, or would rather sing karaoke than go to a jazz club. By them sharing similar outlooks and interests, it helps to legitimise our preferences. It also increases the ‘we are on the same wave-length’ appeal or, if you are a die-hard romantic, the ‘soul-mate’ ideology.

Proximity is also important when finding a good match, because when we are near these ‘like-minded’ people, the number of interactions we could have with them increases. Another benefit from frequent sightings of the cutie in red, is that we will like him or her more. Research has shown that we prefer people whom we see more often, even if they are strangers. This is called the ‘mere exposure effect’^[2]

So, while commonality and proximity are important factors, the ideal is when they overlap. We often find people whom we have things in common with are already in our immediate proximity. They are sitting at the table next to us at our favorite restaurant, they are doing a downward facing dog in the row behind us at our local yoga studio, and they are in the same queue while buying vegetables at the neighborhood Saturday market. Open your eyes, the people whom you are well-matched with, are doing the same things that you’re doing, and most likely, in your proximity. Your own neighborhood is the best place to begin your search. So this weekend, I recommend sitting outside your favourite cafe: when looking for love, you need to see and be seen!

Jean Smith is a cultural and social anthropologist – an international expert in human attraction, body language and how we flirt with one another.  She will be leading 'How To Find the Perfect Partner' on 27 September and 7 November at The School of Life.  For more details and to book, click here.

 

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^[1] Byrne, D. (1971). The attraction paradigm. New York: Academic Press.

^[2] Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 1-27.

Susan Quilliam on the Impossibility and Joy of Sex

I've worked in the field of intimate relationships for nearly three decades. But it was only in 2006, when I was asked to rewrite the classic erotic manual The Joy of Sex, that I fully realised how impossible sex can be.

Because ironically, there was very little joy in much of what I found when researching the book. The sexual revolution, which gave us so much liberty, also opened a Pandora's Box of Furies: more widespread pornography, infidelity, sexual infections; immense pressure to have perfect life-long intimacy; these added to the traditional but still present baggage of embarrassment and guilt.

The conundrum is that we're freer to have sex than ever before, but more than ever faced with double-binds and unhappy endings. We reach out for the luscious apple in the Garden of Eden - unlike Adam and Eve, we're now constantly conscious of the snake in the undergrowth.

Happily, rewriting The Joy of Sex eventually showed me that the above is often a red herring. As I expanded my academic research to interviews with real people who delighted in lovemaking, I also recontacted what you might call the naked truth. I came to understand that for all the current complexity, sex can still be what it always has been - an immensely powerful but nevertheless beautifully simple act. As such, it is absolutely possible.

Much of the work I've been doing of late has been aimed at helping people become aware of that. In particular, I've been presenting and teaching on the positive aspects of sex, on ways to strip away the negative associations. to reclaim what one might call an 'innocent' perspective.

To do this, of course, we need to understand how we've come to see sex as impossible. How society has through necessity fenced sexuality round, and how our current revolution has by removing those fences made everything more complicated. How even the most well-meaning of upbringing leaves a legacy of insecurity and shame, and how, by triggering a deep spectrum of human need, the sexual act makes everything more fraught.

All that once understood, it becomes much easier to separate out what we need to take on board around sex and what we don't; to develop our own sense of what is good and what we don't want to accommodate; to cut through the double-binds and make our own sexual decisions - in short, to make sex a real and wonderful possibility in our lives.

Susan Quilliam is a relationship psychologist working in the field of sexual wellbeing; she is the co-author of The New Joy of Sex and will be running The Impossibility of Sex evening at The School of Life on Wednesday 5th October.  For more details and to book click here.

Dr Mark Taubert on How To Think About Death

“Where was it?” said he to himself. “Where was it that I read of a condemned man who, at the hour of death, says or thinks that if the alternative were offered to him of existing somewhere, on a height of rock or some narrow elevation, where only his two feet could stand, and round him the ocean, perpetual gloom, perpetual solitude, perpetual storm, to remain there standing on a yard of surface for a lifetime, a thousand years eternity! – rather would he live thus than die at once. Only live, live, live! No matter how, only live!”  - Raskolnikoff in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

This particular passage in the novel 'Crime and Punishment' captures perfectly that very chilling fear of death. I sometimes think of it when I see people as part of my work as a palliative care doctor. What must it be like to know that time may be short, that death is close and to live with this notion day-in, day-out?

I work in a hospice. At the time of writing this, I have finished seeing fifteen people on my ward round. Of these, some may have years to live, others months, some only weeks or days. We work to try and address a lot of the symptoms people can get when their illness advances. But we would not be doing our jobs well if physical symptoms were all we dealt with. There is a whole person here, with often a whole host of other people around them and they are of course frightened, have a lot of baggage and have questions upon questions. “How long have I got left to live, Doc?”. Our team have to address this very common and reasonable question daily. Rarely is it phrased that clearly or said in quite that straightforward a way, and unpicking what someone is really asking requires skill and time.

For many reasons it is a difficult question to answer. Every illness is different, although it may be called by the same name. Every individual is different. Every treatment has the potential to have a different response. Add in the newspapers that will inform of a new miracle cure on their front pages about once a week and you have more questions and sometimes dashed hopes. The truth is that no one really knows the right answer, no one is perfect at predicting the outcomes of a terminal illness other than to say that it is likely to lead to death at some point in time. If I personally were to find myself in a similar situation, as a patient or as a carer, I would ask exactly the same searching questions of whichever professional I was seeing. It is a natural thing to want to know. And it is not uncommon to discover that there is another, underlying question to the one above. Often the real question is "Are you someone who will listen to me and who will be frank and honest- when I am ready?".

How important this supportive communication is, was highlighted by a nurse who was dying of breast cancer. Days before her death she wrote: “There are so many questions, concerns and problems to face in the lightening ball mirror. To overcome the sense of powerlessness the traveller runs through a maze seeking someone who might actually listen to their pleas for help, someone who actually knows that the traveller is there.” (Bushkin E. 'Signposts of survivorship' Onol. Nurs Forum, 22(3), 537-43 1995).

Death is a certainty and we know it is inevitable. But some events in life bring it into much closer focus. The death of a friend or loved one, or being told you have a terminal illness, are just some examples. Health professionals can rely on the latest scans and blood tests to tell us what is happening within someone’s body at a given moment in time. Add to that some intuition, as well as past experience with similar pathologies and we might hazard a guess. Weeks, perhaps, days, not months? We are often inaccurate in our predictions, as research has shown. But what we can do is listen, discuss and maybe help the person to achieve what is important to them in whatever time they have left.

I try to explore what people are most frightened of: dying or death itself. The process of dying is for some the most distressing thought. Will there be suffering, pain, agitation, breathlessness? Then there is the perceived loss of control in those final hours or days. For a few, even the final years seem unbearable, knowing that the illness will catch up with them eventually. How futile an existence that must end soon! Then there are those with the overwhelming fear of death itself as a construct, that sheer panic when someone realizes that their essence, their being, their self will at one point no longer be there. Void? Nothingness? What? Yet again these are issues that need to be explored in the context of an individual and the people closest to those in this terrifying situation. And talking about it openly helps.

Let me join other writers on this site by inserting a quote from someone famous; Bob Dylan said “Those not busy being born are busy dying.” This wisdom in part depends on your outlook on life. Here in the hospice, we meet a broad spectrum of people who know they will die at some point in the not too distant future. Of course, they all have different outlooks and personalities. Some spend the last days/weeks/months/years of their lives focussing on living, some on dying. Most do a little bit of both. What makes me most happy is to see those people who know they are living with dying be able to lapse into moments of fulfilment and contentedness; to this effect we try to help fulfil some of their wishes, some of the things that make life worth living. Pain-free time with loved ones, enjoying a meal without feeling nauseated, organizing a trip or even just going back to their local pub for a drink or two are some examples of what we can try to achieve. Some think of hospices as dark and miserable places, but only yesterday I arrived on the ward and there was laughter, a patient leaning over the nurses station and telling staff and fellow-patients a joke (it was rude). No one was thinking about dying.

Sometimes, open discussions about what happens at the end can help people prepare, and they can address questions like where they would like to be in the final days and hours and with whom. Hopefully this collaborative approach means that less of us will feel like Dostoevsky’s afore-mentioned condemned man on his rock, but can prepare for death, with support, comfort and knowledge about what may happen, by living, not dying to the end.

Dr Mark Taubert  - Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Marie Curie Centre Penarth, Cardiff, Wales

Limited tickets are still available for the 'How To Think About Death' class on Wednesday September 26 at The School of Life, Russell Square. Click here for more details

Fact: Reading Fiction Makes You A Nicer Person

 ...Or at least a more empathetic one, according to studies carried out by Buffalo Univeristy, USA.

The trick seems to lie in reader's absorption into fictional stories, and the tendency for readers to emulate the 'situation' of the characters in their novels, indicating that on some level, they can 'put themselves in their characters' shoes... or, in other words, have some empathy towards that character.

"It is the first empirical finding, so far as I know, to show a clear psychological effect of reading fiction," says Keith Oatley, a professor in the Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology at the University of Toronto.  
 
"It's a result that shows that reading fiction improves understanding of others, and this has a very basic importance in society, not just in the general way making the world a better place by improving interpersonal understanding, but in specific areas such as politics, business, and education. In an era when high-school and university subjects are evaluated economically, our results do have economic implications."

Read the full article at The Guardian online.

If you're keen to find more great fiction reads, visit our Bibliotherapy page to get some assistance with your book list.

 

Geoff Dyer on Our Fear of Conversation

For a while, on flights back across the Atlantic from America to Euroland,  we are under the spell  of America. Instead of plonking ourselves down next to someone without a word  we  say, “Hi.”  Maybe even indulge in a little conversation, though this American readiness to chat is counterbalanced by the fear that once we’ve got into a conversation we might not be able to extricate ourselves from it. By the time we’re mid-ocean a kind of preparatory freeze has set in.  As the flight stacks up in the inevitable holding pattern over Heathrow we begin to revert to our muttering and moaning national selves.  But, for a week or so after landing, a form of what might be called Ameristalgia makes us conscious  of a rudeness in British life - a coarsening in the texture of daily life - that had hitherto seemed quite normal. 

Geoff Dyer is author of several novels including the recently published collection of essays ‘Working the Room’ and the wonderfully titled: ‘Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It’. http://geoffdyer.com/

Join us for the first of our autumn sermons on Sunday 18 September that will challenge our engrained ‘British’ ways of approaching life. For further details about this and the rest of the autumn series, click here.

Image: Ryan Bartaby at YCN

David Baker on Leaving a Job You Love

This month I leave a job I love.

Since 2008 I have been the managing editor of Wired magazine, a job I fell into almost by accident. I had clocked up 20 years as a freelance journalist and decided to take a sabbatical year to travel, pause and think about what to do next. I was pretty sure I was going to leave the media world, but first I needed to make some space.

To give the year some purpose I made a rule that I could go anywhere I liked, except that I couldn't use a plane. At first, I didn't travel at all, enjoying London, and especially Hampstead Heath, as is it moved from winter to spring. But in March I took the train down to San Sebastian in northeast Spain and travelled along the coast to Lisbon, and this was where the thinking started to happen.

I have always loved travelling on my own but I have also often found it intensely, almost unbearably, melancholic. I had taken with me Anthony Storr's book 'Solitude', which turned out to be a perfect companion for a solo, and sometimes aimless, traveller. On long walks through the snow-covered Picos de Europa I discovered a calmer state of mind and the difference between being alone and being on your own. In Santiago de Compostela I met a friend and we walked the moss-coloured streets in the rain. And for the summer I enrolled at a Rabbinical college in Jerusalem, travelling there through Europe, Turkey, Syria and Jordan and, then, in the autumn, back by cargo ship across the Mediterranean.

It was when I got back to London from that trip, exhausted and broke but also feeling clean and excited, that I first started thinking about what to do next with my work life. I was still subscribed to an old journalists' mailing list and there I saw the Wired job advertised.

At face value it had little to offer. It was a journalism job and I wanted to move on from journalism. It was full-time and I wanted to work part time. It was a company job and I enjoyed being freelance.

And yet, somehow it kept on calling. In a rather serendipitous way it combined different strains of my work and non-work life so far: journalism, psychology, counselling, human resources, teaching, business – things I had dipped in and out of since leaving school but never really brought together in a single role. I felt, immodestly, that the job had been made for me. And, in fact, so it proved: for almost three years I have enjoyed the company of sociable and creative colleagues; I have been involved in the launch of really excellent print magazine and iPad edition; and I have grown immeasurably as a manager and as a man.

Now, though, it's now time to leave. There's no crisis. I haven't made a big mistake. And I still look forward (almost) every day to going into work. But I also enjoy self-employment and I can feel its call. It could be something to do with the fact that insecurity can make your life simpler. It could be that I will certainly have much more time in my week. Or it could be that, comfortable and happy as I am at Wired, every so often I need to head out into the Great Unknown.

I will be teaching at the School of Life and I hope to be writing more here. But at this stage the only certainty about the future I am about to step into is that it is not certain, and that excites me. Watch this space.

We're delighted to welcome David Baker on board to The School of Life faculty.  Catch him teaching our ‘How To Find A Job You Love’ class on Tuesday 6 September, and How To Balance Work With Life on Thursday 20 October. He will also be a regular contributor to this blog, so keep reading…..

Lizzie Shupack on Anger and Synchronicity

Week 3 of The Artist's Way, is all about emotions.  The chapter starts with Anger.  It continues with further discussion about Synchronicity.  I found the passage about Anger extremely synchronous, given that prior to reading it, I had just had a blow-out argument, centered around my struggle to make decisions about what I want, what I need, and what I am striving for, both in this process and beyond.

Helpfully, Cameron explains that Anger is useful, and is there to be listened to.  That said, she does note that it is "to be acted upon.  It is not meant to be acted out." Oops…  Nonetheless, I am glad that the emotional turbulence that surrounds me, has some context, and I am relieved that I'm not an anomaly in my confusion.  

In my first post, I wrote that one of my motivations for embarking on this process, was to become unselfconsciously creative, and find clarity around what it is in life that makes me fulfilled, makes me feel excited, makes me feel proud of what I do.

It's a big ask to be honest.  Those are big questions.  In my case, they are also complicated by the fact that as I write this, I'm sitting in Kaffe 1668 in New York, which means that in the three weeks since embarking on this course, I've travelled to five cities; cities which are all inspiring, creative and full of people and opportunities which all contribute to my decision-making process.

However, despite all that, the biggest thing that's holding me back, is without doubt, me.  Cameron spends some time talking about Shame, which I think is deeply tied to self-esteem and confidence.  Shame is often what prevents people from pursuing creative projects; "What if my work/my idea isn't any good?", "I can't write about that, it's too embarrassing!", "If I'm not honest, this won't have integrity, and I'm too scared to be honest".  They are all understandable fears, but fears that keep us wedded to analytical work, and logic-based activities, which are all very safe.  And very boring.

Cameron therefore suggests, that you find a couple people who can nurture and protect your early work.  Your prototypes, test-cases, scribbles, stories.  They are probably not the people you go to for constructive criticism - that’s a whole different thing - but instead they are simply proud of you and your aspirations, and have the creative and emotional intelligence to help you along.

Throughout all this, Cameron advises you to be nice to yourself.  To not beat yourself up, and to accept compliments and nice things from people along the way - things like an invitation to dinner, or new socks.  She acknowledges that yes, you will be babying yourself, but that thinking positively, and kindly, will go a lot further towards aiding your productivity; creative or otherwise, than tough-love or deprivation.

Next week, Week 4, is about Integrity.  And it requires a whole week of reading deprivation!!!!!!  A whole week!!  Beyond the books, magazines and newspapers I read, I have at least 50 RSS feeds and hundreds of bookmarked articles that I look through all the time...  Help!

 

'The Artist's Way' is by Julia Cameron and can be found at amazon.com

Lizzie Shupak is a Digital and Brand Strategist.  She is also one half of the international social experience, Wok+Wine.  She is currently on a journey of creative discovery, which may or may not affect her biography, in the weeks and months ahead.

Wok+Wine - The World's Most Delicious Social Network

Global Lifestyle Project - A Global Experiment in Lifestyle Design

Rachel Heller and Amir Levine on Attachment Styles

How would you react to the following scenarios?

• You call your date/partner and after the first ring, you're transferred to voice mail.

Do you barely notice or do you assume s/he is purposely ignoring you?

• You're sitting in an experiment room and suddenly you notice smoke seeping out of the computer? 

Do you assume everything's under control or do you immediately alert those around you to  the imminent danger?

• Your spouse buys you your favorite brand of coffee on the way home from work.

Do you feel gratitude or are you more likely to take this gesture for granted?

What all these scenarios have in common is that your response is likely to vary depending on your attachment style. 

Attachment styles were first discovered by Mary Ainsworth in the context of the infant-parent bond.   She devised an experiment by which she observed children playing in a room with their mothers.  The infant's response to a series of separations/reunions from their mother determined their attachment style. 

Infants with a secure attachment style were able to use their mother as a secure base from which to explore the environment and derive comfort in times of stress. Anxious infants were too preoccupied with the mother's whereabouts to be easily soothed and Avoidant infants were too seemingly indifferent toward her to use her as a secure base.

A couple of decades later, researchers Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, both then from the University of Denver, set out to discover whether these three styles of relating in infancy continued into adulthood.  Their groundbreaking study confirmed that adults too fall into three attachment styles that influence the way they interact with their romantic partners:

• Secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving

• Anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back

• Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.

Every person, whether he or she just started dating or has been married 40 years, falls into one of these categories (or more rarely into a combination of the latter two). Just over 50% are estimated to be secure, around 25% are avoidant and 20% are anxious.  The remaining 3-5% fall into the mixed anxious-avoidant category. 

During the past two decades since Hazan & Shaver's seminal paper, hundreds of scientific studies in a wide range of countries have carefully delineated the ways in which adult behave in romantic ties.  Understanding these styles is an easy and reliable way to understand and predict people's behaviour in romantic situations.

One of the most fascinating aspects of attachment research is the discovery that people with different attachment styles perceive situations in different and often opposing manners: They pay attention to different aspects of situations, they interpret them differently; even their brain activity is often remarkably different.

Gaining insight into adult attachment styles is akin to a having a road map to romantic behavior, not only others' but also your own.

And in case you were wondering:

If you interpret the transfer to voicemail as a rejection, you may well be anxious

If you alert others to the smoke hazard, it's likely you're anxious or avoidant but not secure

If you're unimpressed by your partner's coffee gift, it's more likely you're avoidant.

[Of course, in reality, no one criterion determines your attachment style but rather a combination of factors.  To discover your attachment style, go to: http://www.attachedthebook.com/compatibility-quiz/ 

 

Rachel Heller, M.A and Amir Levine, M.D are authors of 'Attached: Identify your attachment style and find your perfect match' (Published by Rodale). Visit www.attachedthebook.com