Later today I’m doing a podcast interview with the author of Polysecure, a new book about how attachment theory intersects with non-monogamy. It’s packed with eye-opening information, but one of my favorite revelations in the book is that routines and rituals within relationships are a valuable route to more secure-feeling attachments.
It makes sense. Our attachment systems are developed in infancy and childhood through, in part, observing how available (or unavailable) our caregivers are to us. When one of our attachment figures is frequently absent – either literally, physically absent, or just mentally/emotionally “not there” when we’re together – it can cause ruptures to our sense of safety in those connections. Routines give us comforting patterns by which we can predict when we’ll next have access to the feelings of safety and love we experience around our attachment figures when they’re present and emotionally attuned to us.
I notice this effect every time my partner Matt shows up to one of our planned phone calls, or follows through on a promise they made earlier to send me dinner, or settles in with me to watch the online improv show that makes us howl with laughter every week. My body palpably relaxes, like: Ah yes. The comforts I was expecting have indeed materialized. I was right. I am safe. This is a powerful sensation for just about anybody, but especially for people who have trauma around abandonment and/or past attachment figures’ erratic and chaotic behavior.
When Matt had to go back to New York in July after spending 4 months cozily quarantining with me in Toronto, I felt scared and unsettled. Some of it was normal, adult fear – what if they get the coronavirus? what if the borders stay closed and we can’t see each other for a long time? what if their country sinks even further into fascism and I can’t do anything to help? – but some of it was that deeper, older, more primal fear, of the disruption of security. How could I know I was safe – in my relationship or in my life – if there was no one in my bed to cuddle me when I awoke from a nightmare, no one to bring me a cocktail and massage my feet at the end of a busy day, no one to whisper filthy compliments against my skin while fucking me in exactly the right ways?