The Love Files No.22 // Confusing attachment with love

I think very often we mistake something for love that truly has nothing to do with love like the following ones; physical attraction, attachment, lust, chemistry…just to name a few. But let’s get real here, all of those things have nothing to do with true love that is based on mutual goals, respect, trust, acceptance and that represents a deep soul connection.

I’d say physical attraction, chemistry and lust pretty much go hand in hand. It is something sexual, not more and not less. And I can tell from my own experience and after having done a bit of research about it, the more ‘chemistry’ I felt, the more more incompatible me and my significant other usually were. Also those men were the total opposite of me, their morals and values (or should I better say their lack of morals and values) were completely incompatible with my morals and values. And yes, here the chemistry and physical attraction usually was the strongest - probably because there was barely anything besides it that bonded us.

IMHO opinion attachment follows after having spent some time / or quite a lot of time with the so-called significant other. I mentioned before in a former TLF post the feeling of sexual guilt and shame after having gotten too quickly into something sexual with a guy and having regretted it afterwards (because my gut feeling told me right away that it’s a horrible match or simply because I did not want to get sexually involved with that guy so early or not at all with him in general), so afterwards we try to justify the sexual investment (thanks Nat Lue for having pointed this out in your blog) and we get attached to a person even though deep in our heart we know how incompatible we are and what a bad match this is.

We stay in toxic relationships because of convenience, maybe also because we fear being by ourselves (very likely after a painful breakup), we don’t feel worthy enough for being in a mutually fulfilling relationship probably is another reason why we stay attached to someone who clearly ain’t for us. And if this significant other seems to be decent from time to time, then we get to the point of confusing attachment with love I suppose.

Of course it is needless to say that relationships that aren’t based on mutual core values and morals are doomed, they are toxic and unbalanced and they are prone to fail - but nevertheless we stay, most probably because we ignore lots of bad sides of our partner and instead we focus on the very few good character traits or the very few moments when they actually did something for us that made us feel good about ourselves or that brought us some sort of joy and happiness. But let’s get real here, those pretty moments make up the minority of the time, the rest usually consists of lots of drama, jealousy, stupid fights and if you end up in a really abusive relationship, it can even get quite dangerous.

Just to give you an example of the religious fundamentalist guy I was dating way too long, who was constantly looking for his new narcissistic supply on dating platforms and his Islamic Facebook groups while he was super jealous and possessive and even took my phone searching through all my messages and photos for more than one hour, inviting a random stranger from one of his dating pools to sleep in his bed for 2 weeks, threatening me to cut off my throat if I dare to criticise his religion, borrowing money from me and so on.

I think you get an impression with what I mean by saying that relationships that got to this point because sexual investment and guilt turned into attachment and later on get mistaken for love and if you end up with the most incompatible person you could ever meet, then chances are high that you might experience something like extreme jealousy, cheating and lying, abandonment, trying to pressure you into marriage through lining up the new supply that gets used to put pressure on you (because you are told, if you marry me, then I tell her not to come and yada yada yada), threats and getting treated like a sex object instead of the gorgeous soul you are, then you got to the point of being in a dangerous and abusive relationship.

But I think those experiences and relationships should be seen as a lesson, through them you get to see the obvious, which are your inner wounds you still have to work on, to feel the pain and to let go of it. As much as it hurts and as painful as these lessons are, but I think this is is what we have to see in them. If we set healthy boundaries from the beginning on, we would not end up in relationships like that. If we loved and respected ourselves more than we do, then we would not fall for people who will do nothing except for degrading and hurting us.

It is a very obvious sign that we have to put the focus back on ourselves, that we have to do lots of inner work, figure out our old patterns and then replace them with new patterns and habits that actually serve us instead of them hurting us. Otherwise it is relationship insanity, choosing the same package of a person over and over again, even though we know the results right away - even though we know already from the beginning on that we will be suffering in the end, especially because we missed out on setting boundaries at the first place and taking good care of our own wellbeing and mental health.

I guess we neglect our soul (we can also call it our inner child) like it got neglected by a caregiver in our earliest years. Through this we repeat the rejection, abandonment, feeling unworthy, looking for confirmation in the wrong person etc. that we experienced in our earliest childhood years. Basically we repeat what we emotionally know and as soon as we get aware of this, we can learn new patterns that actually serve us and our emotional health. So we have to unlearn what is bad for us and (re)learn what serves us.

So here to make it short. Attachment is not love! An early (sexual) investment is not love. Ignoring all the red flags that were already so obvious in the beginning, all of that has absolutely nothing to do with love - it’s pure self-sabotage and people-pleasing, that’s all.

We can take all the feelings of ‘romance and love’ out of a relationship that is based on dependency, the feeling of guilt and shame because that is exactly what a relationship based on attachment is. It is a million lightyears far away from love.

Love yourself (easier said than done, I know) and then it will be much easier to find someone who will love you as well and who shares the same morals and values with you.

Love,

Phyllis