My Attachment Style is "Existentialist"

dateblake.com, Simone de Beauvoir, and freedom above all

What’s your attachment style?

Anxious? Avoidant? Secure?

Mine is “Existentialist.”

Discovering attachment

A dozen years ago, at the end of my first long-term relationship, my partner handed me the best-selling book Attached. We’d been caught in an “anxious-avoidant spiral,” it seemed, and we never found our way out.

I scoffed at the book’s reductionism: how could there be just three attachment styles in the whole world? But I’m a sucker for personality typing, and attachment found its way into my vocabulary. At the beginning of a new love connection, I’d wait for the right moment to disclose my “avoidance,” as if it were an incurable STI.

In the middle of my next serious relationship, one that was struggling despite addressing attachment from the outset, I consulted a therapist.

“What’s wrong with me? How can I be less avoidant?”, I asked her.

She said that I could learn to sit with my uncomfortable feelings a bit longer, to not immediately indulge the urge to escape—but fundamentally, I’m fine. I have a good life, clear values, and the desire to connect. Keep going!

So I kept going, straight through the end of that relationship, across Europe by bicycle, and into multiple sweet and loving “situationships” in recent years—until one of them floored me, and I went crawling back to attachment theory for answers.

Oh no! What if I’m actually the dreaded, lesser-known, fourth style: disorganized, combining the worst of both anxious and avoidant?

My therapist reassured me that I don’t have enough childhood trauma to warrant that label. I’m not broken, she told me, just… different. And fortunately, I seem to know what I’m looking for. I just hadn’t found it yet.

Dateblake.com

That’s when I decided to reboot dateblake.com.

I first ran this experiment in 2017. The concept was simple: I would create my own dating profile (self-hosted, far away from silly dating apps), share it with my friends (amazing people who live all over the world), and encourage them to connect me with potential matches. “If you see something, say something,” I advised, “just like the airport.”

My friends adored the concept. A few introduced me to potential matches, none of which transcended email. I ended the experiment after one year and let the domain expire.

So my expectations were modest when, last October, I re-registered dateblake.com, rewrote the profile, and pitched my friends once again. And as before, just a few possible connections emerged, none of which felt right, and I let the domain go. (The page is archived here.) Meeting people online feels equally alienating, it turns out, whether on an app or via personal referrals.

But despite the two-time “failure” of this experiment, it did offer a chance for reflection. When I revisit my dateblake profiles with fresh eyes, it’s fairly obvious that I’m not actually available for traditional dating.

Why? Because I’m constantly traveling and working on different projects. Because I want to cycle across countries, attend twenty dance weekends a year, and visit my friends who live everywhere. Because I mostly enjoy doing my own thing, don’t seek constant cohabitation, and would be genuinely happy to spend just half of the year in the same place as a long-term partner (assuming reliable and consistent communication).

But if we’re brutally honest, it’s because: the only thing I can commit to is my own freedom.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

Enter the existentialists

[To] me, the word ‘duty’ is weighty and oppressive. I’ve pared my duties down to only one: to perpetuate my freedom. Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit. They will never have dominion over me. I hope, Doctor Breuer, the time will come when neither man nor women are tyrannized by each other’s frailties.

—from “When Nietzsche Wept” by Irvin Yalom

My life has been shaped—to a profound and possibly disconcerting extent—by books I’ve stumbled upon. Some found me in bookstores, libraries, and friends’ shelves. One waited for me on a street corner in Brooklyn. The Amazon algorithm played a crucial role in my deep-dive into alternative education.

So it was that I stumbled upon How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment, written by philosopher Skye Cleary, just a few weekends ago—at the same moment that dateblake.com was expiring.

Until this moment I’d only known Simone de Beauvoir as the author of The Second Sex: the book that launched second-wave feminism. What How to Be Authentic showed me was that Beauvoir was, in fact, a key member of the broader existentialist movement that included Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and Søren Kierkegaard—all of whom held unconventional beliefs about love, partnership, and commitment.

“Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms,” Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex. And this recognition, writes Cleary,

calls lovers to accept uncertainty and separation as the very condition of a relationship. . . . to look for joy in the distance, to welcome and to love the ambiguity, the otherness, and the freedom.

Why, hello existentialism! You’ve got my attention.

I learned that Beauvoir, like Nietzsche, distrusted the false promises of traditional romantic relationships and instead prized friendships, personal projects, and independence. But unlike Nietzsche (who never sustained a long-term romance), she still believed in the possibility of an authentic love grounded in mutual freedom.

Beauvoir practiced what she preached, enjoying a famously public and long-term open relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre—an unconventional project from the beginning:

Early in their relationship, Beauvoir and Sartre agreed to a two-year commitment, on a stone bench by the Louvre. While it was neither state-sanctioned nor enforceable, the psychological contract was strong. They wanted intimacy and freedom without the risk of decay into duties and inertia. . . . It mostly worked out for them and, after the two years, they made their commitment permanent, and theirs remained a deeply intimate relationship until the end of their lives.

Beauvoir was a famous critic of marriage, and not just on feminist grounds. She believed that “marriage’s monotony and vacuity can be metaphysically mutilating, cramping people’s freedom.” When one’s romantic partner is around all the time, “there is little space for missing and yearning,” which leads to the death of intimacy, and results (at best) in “companionship and cohabitation.”

Read more of my favorite quotes from How to Be Authentic, or just take my word for it: the punchline is freedom.

Beauvoir believes in romantic love and commitment—but only when both people care deeply about perpetuating each other’s freedom: the freedom to grow, transcend, pursue meaningful projects, “self-overcome,” and work to eradicate oppression in the name of the “collective freedom” of all humans.

Existentialism is not a complete philosophy for life. While I didn’t agree with everything in How to Be Authentic, in the chapters about romance and marriage, I found myself saying Yes, Yes, Yes. Because Simone de Beauvoir, like Friedrich Nietzsche, clearly sees the value of avoiding false promises of security (which are inherent in traditional relationships) and injecting life with danger, desire, and the recognition of inevitable death—all of which make life infinitely more precious and worthy of engagement.¹

The existentialist view of love and commitment rings so true, in fact, that I now question why I would continue labeling myself “avoidantly” or “anxiously” attached when I don’t even seek the conventional, entangled relationships assumed to be most “secure” by mainstream culture.²

When someone recognizes, values, and honors my own pursuit of freedom—I like that person more, feel secure around them, and experience a genuine desire for commitment.

This is why friendship, which honors mutual freedom by default, has always worked out well for me—and feels like the foundation of true, long-term security.

This is why viewing life as a series of endless adventures—even at age 43—doesn’t feel like Peter Pan syndrome, but rather a reliable way to avoid becoming a “warm corpse, merely going through the motions of life but not living in any meaningful way.”

And this is why I’m going to start telling people—especially those love interests who I meet in the flesh, not online—that my attachment style isn’t avoidant, or anxious, or disordered. It’s existentialist. 𖤓

El Chaltén, February 2024

1. It’s no surprise that existentialism and the Beat movement (which heavily influenced me) both germinated in the wreckage of World War II. As John Clennon Holmes wrote in This is the Beat Generation (1952):

“Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds, swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in gin mills and USOs, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers, or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world, or in the home town invaded by factories or lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later.”

2. Yes, I am proposing that “secure” and “conventional” relationships are popularly assumed to be the same thing. I might be wrong—but I think it’s more true than not.

My friend Siân (who writes an excellent newsletter) suggested that I might be fighting against the tendency for couples to remain in the “merging” stage for too long.

According to the “Development Model of Couples Therapy” created by Dr. Ellyn Bader and Dr. Peter Pearson, couples tend to go through stages of symbiosis, differentiation, and individuation (later followed by reconnection and mutual interdependence).

What I seem to want is to quickly enter the individuation stage. But this is like swimming upwater, for reasons explained Jessica Fern in the book Polywise:

Unfortunately, for many the phase of differentiation often feels more like disintegration than evolution, and the involuntary impulse to alleviate the discomfort leads couples to regress back into the familiarity of symbiosis where things seemed easier, closer and more comfortable. However, the return to symbiosis comes at a high cost. The intoxicating fusion of self and other that characterized the original bonding experience now becomes a state of relationship stasis, leaving partners as partial individuals harboring obscured desires and muted preferences. The initial pleasure of symbiosis turns into stagnation of both the relationship and the individuals, creating the perfect breeding ground for codependency and enmeshment.

While obviously not every relationship is destined to fall into the trap of codependency, many partners do succumb to the dynamic just described. Part of what makes this reversion back to symbiosis so prevalent is the fact that the monogamous romantic ideal aggressively promoted in North America actually encourages the fusion of our personal identity into coupledom, suggesting that this fusion is the endgame of romantic love. Instead of being a beautiful but transient step along a much more integral journey, symbiosis is touted as the end-all and be-all of ‘true love.’ The tragic shortsightedness of this narrative leaves many partners left with the sensation that they, as individuals, are somehow not good at love, while failing to recognize that the all-encompassing intensity of symbiosis isn’t meant to be sustained forever. Collectively, the impact of our over-fixation on symbiosis has created a culture where we’re generally unaware of the importance of developing the skills that would facilitate our progression through the stages of relational growth. When you combine this hyperfocus on romanticized symbiosis with the fear and discomfort that arise during the differentiation stage, it can feel almost impossible to resist the gravitational pull of codependency.