"Valuing Emotional Bonds" Is a False Concept, and Often Pathological

“Being deeply attached to relationships” is a spurious concept, and often pathological.

Good relationships, in which people truly respect, nourish, and help one another flourish, are rare and precious. Who wouldn’t value them? Saying that Engels was deeply attached to relationships and saying that Engels valued his relationship with Marx are two different things.

The subtext of “being deeply attached to relationships” is one-sided wishful thinking. Often, the other person does not value the relationship nearly as much, and there is nothing particularly special about them, “but that’s just how I am—I’m deeply attached to relationships.” This persona may have value as a psychological defense and offer social advantages. It suggests that you cherish old ties, reciprocate kindness, and so on.

The actual factors at work include placing great weight on others’ judgments, seeking fulfillment externally, feelings of culpability and guilt, narcissism, a savior complex, a patriarchal complex, and nostalgia tinged with dejection.

“The security of the familiar” is a spurious concept. Often, it is actually “the insecurity of the familiar” or “the familiar feeling of poor quality.” At its core, it is the repetition of unresolved issues. For example, a girl who keeps finding awful men has a familiar sense of security around being abandoned. With certain old friends, people are actually immersing themselves in old relationship patterns and psychological patterns, finding a familiar sense of security in being disrespected, treated as an ordinary, conventional person, and so on.

Life is routinely full of spurious concepts. Take “devotion” among young men and women: the word is romanticized, but every instance of it reflects an immature, unhealthy mindset. Much of that cloying inseparability often amounts to a lack of boundaries and the pathological entanglement of overgrown infants.

Rather than keeping each other alive with the moisture of their mouths, fish would be better off forgetting one another in the rivers and lakes. Friendship between people of integrity is as light as water. Daoism and Zhuangzi do not particularly “prize emotional attachments,” because so many karmic obstructions hide beneath the words “emotional attachments.”