When love feels like a debt: on neurodivergence and attachment.
Dedicated to the people I didn’t love enough, and to the ones I loved too much.
—————————————
I’ve suspected for years now that I might have ADHD. I haven’t been diagnosed with it, and I have very mixed feelings about self diagnosis especially for people like me, who could afford an assessment with just a few months of saving up, but at this point the label ADHD explains so much of my life that even just in an Occam’s razor way, I think I can use it. ADHD is a terrible name for a slight variation in brain development, that causes people to have a severe difficulty in regulating their attention, remembering things, long and medium term planning and regulating emotions. Everyone has some occasions in which they forget things, can’t focus or misplace stuff -and we would all benefit from a society where missing one bill doesn’t compromise your ability to buy a house for years- but ADHD people have difficulties in almost every aspect of life because the world is fundamentally not built for them. Living with ADHD, especially when not diagnosed, often means internalising incredibly toxic -and completely false- narratives about ourselves: we get called lazy, selfish, unreliable and uncaring so many times before we even hit puberty that by the time we figure out who we are, we have already made it part of our identity.
ADHD people, despite having a reputation for being social butterflies, often struggle a lot with interpersonal relationships. Many other conditions that sometimes fall under the umbrella of neurodivergence -which is surprisingly nebulous and vague- also bring difficulties in relationships: autism is the biggest example that comes to mind, but folks with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder), DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) and many more, also have a hard time forming deep and lasting human connections. Neurodivergence in general makes you “bad at relationships”, mostly because our model of relationships takes for granted abilities that neurodivergence is hindering, and the fact that the fundamental fabric of your being is labeled as a “disorder” probably doesn’t help. The book Sorting Things Out was a refreshing read, about the ways in which medical categorisations can be a form of preserving the status quo, labelling people who are different as disordered to reassure ourselves that we don’t, indeed, need to change a single thing about the world. I have mixed feelings about this viewpoint, but there definitely is something true there.
Neurodivergent people will miss out or misinterpret social cues at a rate significantly higher that the general population, often from a very young age. These involontary mistakes often get interpreted by the people around us as a personal attack, a sign of our flawed personalities or a deliberate attempt at messing with people. I often lost and forgot things when I was a child -books, hoodies, pencils, jackets, hairclips, my entire backpack, everything- and this was routinely framed as my deliberate action, with the specific intention to upset people in my life. Look what you did, now I have to go back to school and fix the mess YOU made. You always do this. You’re always like this. You know how it makes me feel, why do you always do this? You don’t care about the things you own. You don’t care how this makes me feel. You do this on purpose. You actually enjoy that I have to fix this mess, you enjoy hurting me. Why do you do this to me?
Growing up, I often realised I missed a social cue when it was way too late. I thought everything was going great, until I suddenly realised I had done something wrong -forgot I was supposed to call somebody, realised I accidentally did something that was going to make the people around me lash out, realised I was supposed to be somewhere else and I had missed a date, told that something I did or said was offensive and I had no idea, et cetera. As a result of this, I often feel like I'm walking on eggshells, like it's just a matter of time before I'll disappoint people and mess up. I got good at apologising for my mistakes throughout the years, but never at not making those mistakes. I also got good at charming people, at being bubbly and funny to make up for the rest of my personality. I’m a catch, as long as you don’t talk to me for more than 3 hours. It’s normal to bring your best side to the first stages of a relationship, but what I do is more profound than that: I actively hide the core parts of my personality, I see them as mistakes that must be fixed before the other person finds out. When someone starts to develop a crush on me, before I even have time to think, I fall into the script of putting up my best facade -manic pixie dream girl cranked up to a thousand- and in the meanwhile I secretly stress out beyond words and try to “fix” my personality. I tell myself: ok I have 2 weeks before this person will want to see who I am really, I can keep up this facade for a while, and in the meantime I must become someone who never forgets stuff and is 100% reliable or I will lose them forever. I justify this toxicity to myself by saying that this person deserves the best version of me, that love is a verb not a noun, that love is effort, that I’ve always wanted to become more reliable anyway, that love makes you want to be your best self, that no one will ever put up with the human I am right now. Deep down, I believe all the horrible things that were told to me: I am lazy, unreliable, selfish. It’s only a matter of time before I disappoint them. People deserve better than me.
I feel like I owe more love, like I am constantly paying a mortgage on my relationships. I feel in a love debt.
—————————————
Attachment theory is the idea single handedly holding together the pop-psychology-girlies industrial complex. If you’re not familiar with it, I envy your Instagram feed. Here is what attachment theory says: in relationships, especially romantic ones, we often mimic the way we were treated as children. Children who were supported by their parents and felt secure during their development, usually grow up to be securely attached adults, who don’t fear intimacy and can easily trust their partners, who don’t feel a need to rush relationships and who can communicate effectively. Children who weren’t so lucky -and mind you, not because their parents fucked up or were horrible people, but because of a network of complicated reasons, mostly outside of anyone's control, neurodivergence often being one of them- can fall into two different categories: the anxiously attached, who feel like love is never enough and are constantly “chasing” the other person, and the avoidantly attached, who have a hard time being intimate and showing affection and are constantly “fleeing”. As you probably guessed, when an anxious and an avoidant meet, it can become pretty toxic pretty fast, with the first one always feeling like they want more love and demanding it with sometimes manipulative means, and the second one constantly feeling like they are being trapped and tricked into giving love, and therefore clamming up. Couples like this are not necessarily doomed to fail, but the amount of therapy and self reflection necessary to make it work is incredible, and most people are just not up for the challenge.
If you read that and went I feel like I’m neither of these, or rather I’m all of these depending on the relationship yeah, it’s called being a human. What the instagram therapy girlies never seem to mention is that we all have the capacity for all three of these attachment patterns, and what we end up doing usually depends on the person we’re dating. I’ve been the anxious partner quite often, clingy and needy, but I’ve also being the avoidant one, distant and cold. I’ve also been in a bunch of situations where I was demanding a perfectly reasonable amount of attention or personal space, and I got told to go to therapy for my non-secure attachment, to which the only appropriate response is a giant fuck off.
This is a problem that all people have to an extent, relationships are complicated in painful ways, but since it’s very common for neurodivergent people to grow up being told by the world that we are fundamentally wrong and defective, I suspect that neurodivergent people have non-secure attachment styles at a percentage higher than the general population -but take everything I say with a grain of salt, fact checking is for pussies. We come to perceive relationships almost like tests: this person has the misfortune of having a crush on a mess like you, are you gonna screw this up like you screw everything up? Or are you finally gonna get your act together and be a person worthy of love? We can respond to this narrative by constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, feeling like our partner is going to leave any minute now and we’re allowed no mistakes -that’s the anxious response- or we can avoid thinking about it like the plague because I can’t hurt them if I don’t talk to them -that's the avoidant response.
While both of the non-secure attachment styles are very painful, full of shame and fear and self loathing, anxiously attached people get a lot more sympathy. They are usually the ones who read books about attachment theory, who talk openly about this with their therapist and friends, who consume endless content about personal development and journal and do self reflection, breathe work and all the other million things that are sold with a subconscious message that this will finally fix them. In the words of Clementine Morrigan, they are the ones for whom love always feels like an emergency. Anxiously attached are the ones -usually- with the panic attacks, the crying sleepless nights and the soul piercing pain, so they are way more likely to look for solutions. In the logic of capitalism, they are the ones who are doing the work and therefore deserve someone who treats them right and shows empathy for their pain.
But avoidant people are a lot harder to show empathy for. Since they clam up, reject and suppress their pain, since talking about relationships is difficult for them, since they tell themselves that it’s no big deal anyway, no one really sees how much shame they carry around. Avoidant people are often framed as the problem, because the reaction of their anxiously attached partners are a lot easier to empathise with and it must always be someone’s fault, and look how much your partner is hurting, you could be a bit more [insert thing that comes difficult to them]. It doesn’t help that women tend to be anxiously attached a lot more then men -and viceversa men tend to be avoidant a lot more than women- so there’s a layer of gendered stereotypes that gets in the way too: if you’re a man, you’re already expected to sort your feelings out completely on your own, and protect your female partner from your own fucked up emotions, all while not being given basically any tool to explore those feelings by society. The avoidant people -often men- I know are devoured by shame, they often ruminate on what they should and could have done differently in this and that love story, they fixate on the “hurt” they have “caused” to people, but their tears look so much like guilt tripping that they skip them all together.
They feel like they owe more love, like they are constantly paying a mortgage on their relationships. They feel in a love debt.
What I want to tell them is the same thing I want to tell my inner child, that scared little girl that was guilt tripped so much into being something she can't be: you aren't in a love debt. Respect is owed to everyone, but love is owed to no one. The truth that anxiously attached people can’t fathom -at least when they haven't googled protest behaviour yet- is that no one changes because their partner wants them to, and no matter how much one feels like they are owed a relationship, they never are. No matter how much they’re doing the work. If my partner constantly feels like they are not doing enough to make me happy, that’s not a good relationship and I don’t want them to be in it. This thought feels like a dagger through my heart, but that’s the reality of it, and no amount of working on myself can change it. No one was ever changed by shame.
It is not normal or healthy to enter in a relationship with the mentality of this time I won’t screw it up. It is normal to not want to love someone, if we feel that person is demanding affection at gunpoint. And most importantly, just because we feel hurt, it doesn’t mean someone is hurting us.
Love is not a debt.