Brief proposal for a new attachment style
Forced intimacy, concealing a sinister narcissism…
Within hours of your first meeting, they are telling you that they love you, demanding selfies, and calling you “sister”. There is a certain vacancy of spirit, a deadness in their eyes when they speak to you. Something is desperately missing here.
As you spend more time around this person, you are haunted by a sense that your particular existence, your unique status as a unique Other, is of no importance to them; you feel that you could just as easily be replaced by anyone else. There’s something oddly relieving about this—you get the sense that you could disappear completely in their presence and they’d be none the wiser.
They want to know your chart, which means they want to Figure You Out—and then you watch their eyes slowly glaze over with dissociation and disinterest as soon as the conversation departs from anything having to do with Them. And can you even call it a “conversation”? It feels much more like a one-sided libidinal exchange, a hopelessly self-absorbed self that is forever in dialogue with…itself.
It’s weirdly exhausting to be in this person’s orbit for too long—there’s a vampiric quality to the time you spend together; it’s as if they’re draining you of some critical life-force.
And yet, they seem intent on establishing their version of intimacy with you. And here you are—stoned, bemused, and hopelessly along for the ride, so long as you remain within arm’s (or selfie stick’s) length of this person. All this talk of closeness, and yet you struggle to recall a single moment wherein they actually asked you anything of importance about your life.
To understand another person, to get Close, this shit takes work. It requires a surrendering of the self, a gentle abandonment of preconception, an openness to true novelty. A person afflicted with this attachment style wants all of the payoff of establishing a deep connection with none of the difficult work required. This is why they so adore shit like astrology and personality types—low-effort thought systems that allow one to feel as though one has Figured You Out in the absence of any real, deep work or inquiry.
This is how they attach—unstably, with a mania that reeks of desperation. This attachment style is developed in response to a brutal alienation. They are trying, against the odds, to form a Genuine Connection with an-other in a social ecosystem that has violently eroded the very possibility of such connections ever coming to fruition. They have come of age under the tyrannical rule of an Insta-industry that has forced their social bodies into a decidedly anti-social vacuum of endless conformity and self-referentiality. In this environment, the Other has been foreclosed upon—any possibility of true intimacy has been annihilated by what Byung Chul Han calls “the tyranny of the Same”.
This is the violently autistic environment that gives birth to the mass shooter, the Astroworld ambulance dancer, the anorexic cutter intent on self-annihilation at all costs. I know the aforementioned examples are rooted in so many other things, and I am trying (always) to resist a hyper-reductionist “Phones Bad Make Kids These Days Crazy” attitude. But we mustn’t deny the ever-growing incidences of this Person showing up in our lives, trying to get Really Close in the span of a night, leaving us feeling weirdly dirty, somehow violated, craving true human connection as an antidote to whatever fast food version of pseudo-intimacy we just got force-fed.
A possible antidote to this madness:
xenophilia (noun; feeling-state; orientation): Obsession with the strange, the alien, the unassimilable. Love for that which can not be comfortably integrated. Worship of the Other as Other, not as approximation of Self.
…which brings with it a concomitant appreciation for complexity, an ability to sit with ambivalence. All of this, a lovely counter-balance to the virulent narcissism that threatens to destroy us all.