The first person you dated after college took too long to unpack after moving in and you thought to yourself that it was all a metaphor for the emotional baggage they couldn’t put down, and when you saw their shoes by the door, it felt like they were waiting to leave you anytime soon.

Your last partner bought you gifts wherever they went but what you wanted was to spend a Christmas together instead of another postcard in the mail, and when they asked you for an expensive car last month you saw it as foreshadowing that they would later travel far away and never come back. It’s the same story over and over again – you meet someone and you fall in love and they say they love you too, but you’re certain that they don’t and you break up with them and sometimes they break up with you and it doesn’t matter in the end and then you meet someone new again. The cycle never ends. It gets hard to forgive yourself.

Over time, your relationships wear you down. You question if you are capable of being loved in the first place, and if you really were, why couldn’t you do anything right? The search for emotional closure turns into a burden, as you wish that you were someone else, someone who was easily loved. You cannot forgive yourself.

But the way you perceive affection is never a flaw on your part but rather something established early in your childhood. In the attachment theory proposed by British psychiatrist John Bowlby in 1958, a child’s attachment to their primary caretakers are part of an evolutionary process that encodes behaviors later in life. Children who are closer with their mothers generally perform better as adults. The two main determinants of security are the opportunity for attachment and quality caregiving– in other words, whether or not a caretaker’s presence is consistent enough for a child to attach to and whether or not they are responsible enough to depend on. In the 1970s, psychologist Mary Ainsworth conducted a study in which 12-to-18-month-old children were briefly separated from their mothers. Based on their reactions, Ainsworth categorized attachment into four types: secure, ambivalent-insecure, avoidant-insecure, and disorganized-insecure.

1. In a secure attachment, the child shows distress when taken away from their mother, and expresses immediate joy when reunited. This implies that the child trusts their caretaker completely, understanding that any past fears would be eradicated in presence of the people they trust. When children with secure attachments grow up, they feel confident that their romantic partners will be there when they need them, seeking consistent relationships and communicating their thoughts and feelings with ease.

2. In an ambivalent-insecure attachment the child becomes extremely distressed when taken away from their mother, and the distress continues even after reuniting. A result of caretakers not being available when the child needs them, the behavior of continuous anxiousness is interpreted as the child wanting more confirmation than their caretaker returning, as they know that they could leave again anytime. In a relationship, adults with this type of attachment seek more and more affirmations of security, such as wanting to be with their partners 24/7 or over-thinking themselves into believing that their partners do not love them based on small, insignificant gestures, and becoming frustrated when their wants are not met. Behaviors like this often lead to a breakup.

3. In an avoidant-insecure attachment, the child shows no distress when taken away from their mother, and expresses no interest when reunited, appearing to have no preference between their mother and a complete stranger. This is often the result of child neglect or child abuse, in which a child is punished for seeking help from a caretaker, leading them to believe that their emotions are their own to deal with. Children like this appear indifferent in relationships. They feel uncomfortable trusting or depending on others and tend to be alarmed when their partners grow too close to them.

4. A disorganized-insecure attachment is a mix of the other three. The child sees their caretaker as both a source of comfort and fear, because of the latter’s highly inconsistent degrees of care.

As a result of different attachment types, relationships fail through mismatched ideals of what a loving relationship is. People accuse each other of over- and under-loving, people who inherited anxiety from their childhood impose that uneasiness onto others, and people with neglectful parents become neglectful toward their partners. Over time, even those with secure attachments become affected, leading to a vicious cycle of more and more insecurely attached individuals in the world. Because it’s hard to forgive yourself.

To complicate matters more, people seek different things even within the same attachment type. The Five Love Languages, first published by Dr. Gary Chapman in 1992, states that most relationships fail because people often don’t understand their partner’s needs, which they assume are identical to their own, but most likely are not. In further analysis, it has been found that a person’s love language is often what they lacked as a child, ranging from words of affirmation, quality time, physical touch, acts of service, to receiving gifts.

1. People whose love language is words of affirmation want compliments either in text or spoken out loud, such as good morning messages, love notes, and comments on their outfits. They most likely were not praised often as a child, for reasons like grades and behavior.

2. Quality time is best shown with undivided attention, in which the partner physically turns off distractions, such as their phone, and spends time with them. During this period, people with this love language prefer eye contact and affirmation over solutions to the obstacles they are facing. They also believe in quality over quantity of time. The caretakers of these people as children possibly multi-tasked often when taking care of them.

3. While many interpret physical touch as inherently sexual, the love language leans towards otherwise. Physical touch can be displayed as holding hands, hugging, or massaging. As a child, most people were lovingly touched often, but the ones who were never hugged and patted grow up with the love language of physical touch.

4. People who desire acts of services are often the ones with packed schedules, and the way to show affection is by helping them out with small chores, such as doing dishes and buying groceries. As a child, these people probably managed a lot on their own and believed that they had to complete every task alone while hoping someone would come by and unload this burden.

5. Receiving gifts is not about the price of the gifts, but rather, the detail that the giver spent time and effort on finding something that appeals to them. Individuals with this love language enjoy the idea that their partner has thought of them, and likely used to believe that they were not worthy of gifts as a child.

When people don’t understand their partner’s love language, it leads to a relationship where both people feel like they’re giving more, without realizing that, regardless of how much love they put on the table, their partner does not receive anything because of the mismatch in love languages. This isn’t to say, however, that relationships work better with two people using the same love language – any combination can work just as well, as long as each person takes the initiative to understand the form of love their partner wants. Even still, it’s hard to forgive yourself.

The coexistence of attachment theory and love languages creates a paradox: people grow up to embody the ways they were treated as a child, yet at the same time crave what they lacked when they were younger. In other words, you only perceive the exact type of love you do not want. You don’t know how to react to the type of love you do want, the type of love that went missing in your life and returned decades too late, and you embody a child and an adult, a victim and an assailant, because, in the end, everything about love is just another form of self-destruction. A person tells their partner in a thousand unspoken acts how much they want them, not knowing that the partner can only hear what is explicitly stated. A person becomes distressed when their partner steps out the door, and the partner screams that they don’t know what more to do and leaves even faster. A child whose caretakers always kept their distance develops an avoidant-insecure attachment, causing them to be distant towards their partner, while desiring to be touched because they were never touched lovingly by their caretakers. The child wants to be touched and leaves when their partner tries to touch them, and as a result, never feels loved. To be uncomfortably touched or uncomfortably not-touched – it’s a dilemma with only wrong choices, two roads equally taken that lead to the same undesired land.

And the only escape from this cycle is to forgive yourself. Before anything else happens, you forgive yourself, you forgive your past relationships– the ones that shattered you and the ones that almost made it through– you forgive yourself for your childhood and you forgive yourself for seeing your parents’ faces in the mirror. It is so god-forsakenly difficult but in the raised, bloodied fists and wartime cries, you forgive yourself; in the shattering of a wedding-to-be, you forgive yourself; in the solitude of midnight city lights, you forgive yourself. Close your eyes and meet your childlike self in the distortion of time– tell them you’re sorry. Wear a child's skin and run up to your grown body–tell them you forgive them. The only mode to acceptance is to understand that how you react to love is never your fault. To forgive yourself is to forgive your parents and their parents and the parents before them; to forgive yourself is to break the cycle of generational trauma.

Sources:

Cherry, Kenda. “What Is Attachment Theory?” Very Well Mind, 17 July 2019, https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-attachment-theory-2795337. Accessed 20 September 2021.

Fraley, R. Chris. “Adult Attachment and Research.” University of Illinois Psychology Department Labs, 2018, http://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm. Accessed 20 September 2021.

Gordon, Sherri. “What Are the Five Love Languages?” Very Well Mind, 27 June 2019, https://www.verywellmind.com/can-the-five-love-languages-help-your-relationship-478353. Accessed 20 September 2021.

Vasak, Mallika. “Your Love Language is What You Lack.” Medium, 27 October 2020, https://medium.com/illumination/your-love-language-is-what-you-lack-6f7637982e72. Accessed 20 September 2021.