You sing along to every Taylor Swift song in the car and know the lyrics to almost all the love songs out there. You have a perfect version of what love is, and how sparkly and beautiful it is. You, however, tend to interchangeably use the terms ‘love’ and ‘attachment’. Well, you aren’t the only one. How do you assess love vs attachment, then?
Even when we are familiar with the words love and attachment, we aren’t very aware of the difference between them. Is loving someone the same as being attached to them? Are they similar or poles apart? If yes, then how? If you find yourself wondering about the same things, you are in the right place. Let’s explore together what attachment and love is.
Attachments are a very important and natural part of any human relationship, be it with objects or people. Do you remember hanging on to your toys and caregivers as a kid? As we grow old, we get over the clinging to our toys bit but we still maintain the emotional attachments that we built during our childhood. This forms the basis for our attachment style in adult relationships. Emotional attachment is a comfortable and positive feeling of bonding that develops over time. While love might seem like a similar concept, they are distantly apart. So, let’s get started. Let’s learn about both their meanings and explore emotional attachment vs love.
Love is characterized by variety while emotional attachment is not
Love is an umbrella of emotions, both easy and difficult. It helps you grow in different aspects of life and is full of different colours, like the rainbow. Emotional attachment, however, is single-coloured. It is just about the bond that two people share with less room for variety and growth. A crucial point to remember when discussing love vs attachment is that love gives you room to explore vulnerability, intimacy, forgiveness and care while emotional attachment is mostly limited to physical contact and approval.
Love is about your partner while emotional attachment is about self
Love, like we have all heard, is mostly selfless. It involves giving and taking and caters to the needs of both partners. In terms of priorities and perspectives, both partners are considered. Emotional attachment usually is only about what you need. It’s about taking and not so much giving to your partner. Unlike love, it is self-serving.
A balance of both works wonders but attachment, without any altruistic feelings, can be a downhill slope that leads to an unhealthy relationship. This is a major difference between love and attachment.
Love is difficult while emotional attachment is hard only when not together
I know I said love has all the colours of the rainbow, but it has both the bright and the not-so-bright ones. It takes effort to make a relationship work and get through the ups and downs of life together. Love requires continuous effort and is, therefore, hard.
Emotional attachment, on the other hand, is single-coloured. It’s difficult only in the absence of the other person. Emotional attachment is mostly about missing the other person because you are so accustomed to needing their presence in your life.
Love is expansive while emotional attachment is restrictive
An important point to note when it comes to attachment love vs romantic love is that the latter is full of opportunities while the former will confine you. Romantic love makes you feel both happy and sad. It makes you see the good and the bad. It’s wide and all-embracing. Everything is welcome right through the front door when it comes to love.
Emotional attachment is confining. It comprises just two people with very little room for embracing all the emotions and feelings that love allows in. It’s not so much about anything else other than physical touch, needs, and approval.
Love harbours growth while emotional attachment doesn’t
Like we’ve said before, love is like the rainbow. Each colour represents a different aspect of your life and love helps you grow in each of those avenues. It helps both partners grow individually as well as a couple. Emotional attachment isn’t about growth as much as it’s about possession. It is single-coloured and does not promote well-rounded growth.
A crucial point to keep in mind while talking about being attached vs being in love is that attachment can exist within love as well. But love is the bigger umbrella of which attachment is just a small fraction. Emotional attachments are necessary to facilitate a relationship but only the attachment doesn’t drive it, love does. Love vs attachment can be a bit challenging to understand since they are both similar in the way they look but recognizing the difference is important in order to define your feelings and emotions. Understanding the difference between being attached vs being in love is imperative if you want to recognize and assess your feelings.
So far, we’ve spoken about healthy attachments, where trust is an underlying factor, attachments that nudge you to explore your support system. Similarly, there are a few unhealthy attachment styles as well that are recipes for mental health issues. It is important to identify these unhealthy attachments so that we can be mindful of not letting ourselves fall into these patterns. Here are a few tell-tale signs of unhealthy attachments that you should keep in mind:
Their mood dictates your entire mood
To identify true love vs attachment, assess if your partner’s actions dictate your mood for the entire day or week or even month. If it does, then it’s most probably an unhealthy attachment. Of course, our partner’s mood affects our mood as well but when it happens in extremes, it is important to assess if it’s healthy for you or not.
Love in general is more balanced and subtle. It doesn’t happen in extremes. The highs and lows aren’t as strong. Love promotes autonomy as well, which is the antidote to codependency. Love vs attachment is so contrasting, isn’t it?
There’s a need for power and control
If you feel the need to dominate and take control of the relationship all the time, then this might be a sign of an unhealthy attachment. This behaviour can leave the partner feeling lonely in the relationship. It can make them feel like their insecurities and vulnerabilities are being exploited. Love isn’t about control or power, it’s about developing mutual feelings of affection and care where both of you feel heard, understood and secure in each other’s presence. This is a very important point to keep in mind whenever you assess attachment versus love.
It triggers feelings of anxiety
Love is supposed to make you feel secure but when all it gives you is anxiety, it’s a clear sign that there is an unhealthy attachment at play. While a certain level of it can be harmless and natural (like feeling butterflies in your stomach), it is largely a crippling feeling. If it spirals out of control, it can be harmful to your mental health. In love vs attachment, feeling safe and secure is a big part of what love should feel like. If that sense of security and emotional safety is absent or replaced by anxiety, it might get very chaotic emotionally and mentally. Love isn’t about chaos. It is about calm.
Their approval means everything
If all that matters is their approval about every decision you make, whether it is what you wear, where you go, whom you talk to and the like, then it’s time to call it out for what it is – an unhealthy attachment style. If your own decisions don’t matter as much as your partner’s and if you, as an individual, are sidelined most of the time, it’s a textbook sign of an unhealthy attachment. While a relationship means that your partner’s opinions matter, it shouldn’t be the ONLY thing that matters.
You can’t say no, ever.
Healthy attachments always have boundaries where there are already communicated lines of what is acceptable and what is not. When this is not created, saying no becomes a difficult task and that indicates that it is an unhealthy attachment pattern. Love is all about healthy boundaries where the negotiable and non-negotiable behaviours are communicated to each other and there are mutual respect lines that we call boundaries.
We form unhealthy attachment styles based on our unmet needs that are somehow getting met by following these patterns, consciously or subconsciously. If you resonate with any of these, it’s a good idea to address them with a support member or a counsellor who can create a safe space for you to explore this at length.
