Love, Attachment, Dependence, and Hatred in Long-term Relationships

Myths about attachment, dependence, hate, and love within long-term relationships and the family abound. They are fed by romantic notions gained from books, fairy tales, movies, popular music, television, and the ego ideals of earlier societies sometimes presented, by psychologically untrained historians, as the same as the realities of these societies. Nothing could be further from the truth. Such myths are encouraged by our defense mechanisms, culminating in the human tendency to repress bad experiences and the desire to idealize life in the “good old days.” This human proclivity is illustrated in the data of the Harvard longitudinal studies revealing what people actually said about their experience of life over a period of 60 years: they were inclined to repress that which was most painful. This issue is discussed in some of the writing of the psychoanalyst George Vaillant who has headed this invaluable study for a number of decades in The Wisdom of the Ego: Sources of Resilience in Adult Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002).

The incredible rise in the standard of living and life expectancy of humankind has reshaped love relationships in the modern world. The most basic love is that of the mother for her child as she shapes the world in which the child is born and grows up. However, myths about motherhood dominate discourse on the subject in modern society. Loving attachment is not automatic, as has

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been demonstrated by many researchers and by the long history of infanticide carried out by mothers and the other women of the family. Our relationships with our mother, father, and siblings will have a profound impact on all of our subsequent love relations and life. Until the creation of modern society, children were enormously dependent on their parents. They were taught to thank their parents for providing life itself. The primary form of education of children was by their parents and mostly through identification as the children copied what their parents did. Children were put to work alongside their parents at very young ages. Daniel Defoe, in the early 18^th century, all but rhapsodizes at coming across young children barely beyond the age of toddlers working alongside their parents and thus increasing rather than decreasing the “wealth of the realm.”

Mothers (and to a lesser extent fathers) and children have the ultimate long-term relationships. These are lifetime relationships—unto death. When our parents die, the relationships still live within us, shaping our future attachments. (Of course, when our children die before us, they also still live within us.) One of my most difficult and favorite courses to teach for the last 30 years has been Children and Youth in History. Most students do not like to confront many of their feelings about their own childhood and their parents. In a similar vein, decades ago I also did child therapy where I came to see some of the incredibly violent feelings broiling below the surface of polite society. I quickly came to learn just how inclined children were to act out the violent, disclaimed, and repressed feelings of their parents and how abruptly some parents would terminate therapy if they felt the therapist was saying that the problem was in the family itself, rather than only in the child who was acting out. One striking phenomenon was how when one child stopped acting out as a result of therapy, another within the family would assume the role of the problem child.

Role reversals were also a major issue. For example, two bright, intellectual parents were raising their five-year-old to be the brilliant one in the family, unconsciously denying him the chance to

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know the simple joys of childhood. He was the project holding their shaky marriage together. When, as a result of therapy, they allowed him to be a child, as well as an extremely bright human being, they could go on with their own separated lives.

Marriage and love relationships have changed dramatically in the last few centuries. In traditional societies prior to the French Revolution (1789-99) marriage was about property, social status, and acquiring in-laws, as well as controlling sex and procreation. Among the ruling classes it was used to cement military and political alliances as well as to secure succession to the throne. Amid the ordinary people, the focus was on finding a healthy and reliable work partner. In all social groups, in all societies, and throughout all of history, personal attraction was of secondary importance. Love was seldom considered a legitimate reason to marry. Women sought security rather than love—if they were lucky love came after marriage, not before. Indeed, the very notion of marrying for love threatened the economic and political organization of society, as Stephanie Coontz has made clear in Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005).

Traditional families suffered considerable loss, though not usually from divorce, which was a rarity. (Abandonment was certainly common, especially with rapid urbanization and male immigration from Europe to the New World as alternatives to marriage.) The loss in traditional families stemmed from the high death rate of all parties concerned: most especially infants, young children, and women. Women so often died in childbirth, as in the case of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), or were literally worked to death in the era before laborsaving machinery.

Life expectancy in the modern world has expanded enormously, making for longer marriages. The dramatic increase in the standard of living means that the focus has shifted from mere economic survival of the family to their quality of life, which has resulted in new strains on the family. Children have gone from being an economic asset, as in traditional society, to become an economic

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liability in our world. At the same time, the ego ideals of Western society have changed so that rather than children being the servants of the parents, the parents are now held responsible to serve their offspring and support them for many decades. Is it any wonder that traditional, arranged marriages established by the families of the marital partners have a much higher rate of success than our modern marriages based upon notions of love?

Academics and novelists have generally approached love, marriage, and relationships in history with modern preconceptions. They so often take the middle class Victorian ideal as the reality rather than looking at the Victorian reality that the psychoanalytically trained historian Peter Gay has brought to the fore in recent decades. Twentieth-century popular culture has intensified the idealization. For example, the song “My Blue Heaven” with the lyrics, “Molly and me, and the baby makes three/ We’re happy in my, in my blue heaven/” is still so popular in the minds of many that it is available as the ringtone of cell phones. This longing for and acceptance of romantic notions of love encourages the prevalent failure to recognize the complexities of the feelings that are brought to or emerge in love relationships.

Disappointed expectations are built into the modern notion of romantic love as depicted in the media and in pulp fiction. A professional woman cannot be a perfect lover, spouse, mother, workmate, and best friend while building a professional identity and picking up after her family. She may fall into the pattern of being like her spouse’s nagging mother. A man cannot be a perfect lover, spouse, father, and breadwinner while trying not to fall into the habits of expecting his wife to support him just the way his mother did. Many have gone from serial marriage to a living together arrangement rather than making the commitment of marriage and children.

In popular culture and non-psychoanalytic thinking, the issue of attachment is so often lost amidst the romantic notions of love. Attachment can come about as a result of many different circumstances. Sulia Rubin was a “forest wife” who used to come to

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my course on the Holocaust to talk about her experiences as a teenage Jew who, upon joining a group of partisans trying to survive the murderers of the Third Reich and their local collaborators, had to immediately choose a “forest husband” from the men in the group. She chose one she had previously seen at a distance, who looked “kind.” They lived and loved for the next 60 years, with Sulia always saying, “Hitler was our matchmaker.” When I last saw her she was visibly shaken after her spouse’s death from natural causes. The lifelong marriages to their “forest wives” of two Bielski brothers, depicted in the book by Peter Duffy and the 2009 movie Defiance, reflects a similar situation. Sharing traumatic experiences can be quite bonding.

Aggression can be a barrier to love, or a facilitator. A close friend was drawn to strong women he could fight with. This was in sharp variance with his relationship with his parents, with whom he had not been able to fight with openly when growing up. A former patient of mine was so afraid of his own aggression that he, although experienced sexually, could not have sex with the “nice girl” he had married for many months after their marriage, because of his unconscious fears that he would somehow destroy her through sexual intercourse. They fell into a pattern of wrestling together, and in the course of “playful” wrestling he was able to overcome his fears sufficiently for their body contact to end in coitus.

The arranged marriage in pre-World War I of my Polish paternal grandparents forged an incredible bond, but in their case, of hate rather than love. Grandma Esther thought she had married beneath her station because of her “advanced age” of 21 years and so Grandpa Morris was looked down upon by his wife and the children she raised to share her contempt for him. Although, as far as I knew from direct observation and family members, they did not say a kind word to each other, sleep in the same bed, or otherwise have intimate relations for most of their marriage of close to six decades, they lived together in a small house and died within several months of each other. Their marriage attachment was “till death do us

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part.” My other grandfather, known as a ladies’ man, years after being widowed in middle age, married the same woman three times. Clearly, their trouble in living together resulted in two divorces, but on the other hand, this couple did not seem to be able to live without each other. Living with another human being is a complex and often difficult affair, regardless of what system brings two people together.

The dark underside of the feelings arising in living together, friendship “with benefits” (sex), love, and marriage must be dealt with if people are to successfully navigate intimate relationships. Generally, those whose approach these relationships realistically will have a better outcome.

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