I’m crazy: is it really anxious attachment or am I just walking with Patsy Cline?

Mark is a short, pale, bald, white man with deep set blue eyes and a smile my friend Megan once described as roguish – a word that is defined when I google it as both “playfully mischievous, especially in a way that is sexually attractive” and “characteristic of a dishonest or unprincipled person.” I should have known better.

Mark had a clean house and a clean car and, when we got together, he spent a Saturday morning tearing down an old shed in his yard. He seemed capable, like someone I could hand the reins of my life off to for a minute, which I had been holding, alone, for a very long time.

I have known Mark for years. We went on one date when we first met, and I thought he complained too much. He stuck around in the periphery of my Instagram DMs; he was someone who was nice to run into from time to time. He came back into my orbit after my dad was killed by mesothelioma from working in the oil refineries in my hometown, followed just a year later by my mom from lung cancer. Somewhere on the long drives alone on the TransCanada highway, back and forth from the ocean-side life I made in Halifax to the one I left in high school in Sarnia, the deep cleave of loneliness in my soul that I had filled in with accomplishments and friends and elaborate meals and laughter opened back up.

Mark’s mother had died a few months before mine. When I returned to Halifax for good after month after nightmarish month of watching my parents die, he slid into my DM’s to offer condolences and pizza. We sat across from each other at my vintage 1950s kitchen table, thin crust slices drooping in our hands, and talked about cancer.

I hadn’t had sex for a year and a half – not since before my dad first got sick. It felt like salvation when, after dinner, with pieces of dark chocolate from my kitchen cupboard melting in our mouths, Mark lifted me up, carried me into bed and made me giggle while he pulled me into him and gently undressed me. I had nearly given up on the idea of my body as anything more than a vessel for grief. Mark gave me something I had forgotten I needed, and it was a relief to be with a man who needed nothing from me except my pleasure, and who, afterwards, wrapped my head up in his arms while I cried about losing my parents.

The enormity of the loss of mom meant that my mind only gave me the tiniest sips of grief which, even then, were nearly unbearable. So, instead of being with that feeling, I thought about Mark. I wanted him to message me, I wanted him to tell me what to do about the roof of my shed, which he saw from my sunroom was sprouting moss. I wanted to lean the side of my body against the side of his and have him hold me up for a while. That feeling of longing, the enormity of that feeling, was another I had gotten used to ignoring.

Mark described himself as not wanting to date “right now.” He said that he was too busy what with his work and his 17 year old son and his ailing father and his volunteer firefighting and his soul music radio show. I let my perennially naïve and hopeful heart overrule my sensible, 40-year-old brain. I decided to just go with it. I figured he would come around.

When we laid in bed he would talk about going out to dinner, sitting in a booth at the back of a sushi restaurant together, maki rolls between our chopsticks. I teased him about trying to date me without actually dating me. He stroked my hair, put his lips to my head and said softly, “It’s just for right now.” It made me want to wait, and just be cool about it, even though I have never, ever been that girl. I’m not cool about it. I’m wistful. I’m hopeful. Worst of all, I’m earnest.

His withdrawal from me was abrupt. Once he had me, once I stopped being withholding with my text responses, he suddenly took days to respond. It didn’t take me long to ask him the question I already knew the answer to – are you sleeping with other people?

“Yes,” he said, and added, sort of needlessly, that he had no interest in stopping. I steeled myself against my welling tears, put on my sneakers and walked out of his house, wondering whether he even bothered to watch me leave. How could a man who played that much Aretha Franklin on his radio show not know he was a damn fool to let me go?

I cued up some Patsy Cline in my car, drove to a lake by my house and cried.

Patsy Cline

My friends who have dated less than I have, and who were single for much less time than I have been, told me it definitely wasn’t my fault and then asked questions just to make sure it wasn’t. Did I maybe just not like nice men? Perhaps I had an anxious attachment style and was only attracted to avoidant men, which we had all determined Mark clearly was. Tik Tok and Instagram clocked that I was going through something like a breakup. My algorithm told me my feelings for Mark were just something called limerence, which was coined by a psychologist named Dorothy Tennov to describe what I think is a fairly universal experience – intrusive thinking about a person, an acute longing for reciprocation of your feelings for them, and heartache when there is uncertainty about their feelings.

To me, limerence just describes the nightmare of having a crush. The pathologies seemed to suggest that, were I smart enough, I could avoid ever getting hurt. My excruciating longing for my parents in my grief told me something entirely different. Hurt is an unavoidable part of allowing people into our soft and tender hearts.

I wanted Mark to wrap me up in comfort every night, but even one night a week felt better than nothing when I had spent so many by my parents’ bedsides in bleak, ugly hospital rooms or crying into my pillow, alone, after they were gone. I didn’t create Mark out of thin air, and he was not entirely a fantasy. When I laid in his arms and we compared the size of our feet by pushing them up against each other, Mark rapidly pulling his away in mock shame when they were nearly identical, I hoped that he wouldn’t just replace the shed in his own yard, he would re-shingle mine too. I thought that maybe I had found a man who would exasperatedly love me in all my neurotic and embarrassing tendencies, the way I am always sort of hoping for. When he was with me, he was there, in his fleshy imperfection, teasing me and kissing me and enveloping me in the intoxication of reciprocal desire.

The pathologies didn’t make me feel better. What actually made me feel better was when I started to think of myself as being in the company Patsy Cline and Aretha Franklin, SZA and Taylor Swift. A salve for my aching heart was the soothing elixir of shared experience, of shared sorrow.

It wasn’t something I felt I needed to get to the bottom of. Being scorned was not some kind of character defect. I don’t really think I am an anxious attacher doomed to attach to bad, bad avoidant men.

I knew, logically, and from my previous experiences with roguish men, that chances were high that Mark was not just busy with work and his son and his ailing father like he told me he was. I didn’t like him because he was withholding and avoidant, I liked him in spite of it. I let my heart rule me for a moment and it got tossed around. And the internet psychologists (and my friends) were trying to appeal to my brain instead of my heart to heal me.

The only thing I am certain of is that I will get hurt again. When I do, I’m not turning to the pathologies. I’m turning to Patsy.