Heller agreed, they wrote the book together, and sold it through an agent. He explained his revelation, and his ambition to explain this science to laypeople to help change their lives, but needed help packaging it into a digestible, actionable book that wasn’t just a bunch of research citations. He reached out to a longtime friend, psychologist and writer, Rachel Heller. Levine’s “eureka” moment came not long after, when he imagined that, if this research could be practically applied to adults’ love lives, its implications - that one can (theoretically) learn how to better understand romantic partners or choose romantic partners or cope with the behaviors of a romantic partner - could be significant. The research, conducted by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, showed adults’ relationships in romantic settings as similar to the styles of children’s attachments to parents.ĭr. Right,” et al).īut “Attached” is built on a key differentiator: the social science underlying its upshot, starting with attachment theory, the well-established thesis of psychology dating back to the mid-20th century dealing in children’s bonds with caregivers.

Published in December 2010, “Attached” sounds, superficially, like so many other schmaltzy self-help tomes that came before it (“Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” “He’s Just Not That Into You,” “The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. She’s been recommending “Attached” for the last eight years, and I was just the latest in a new, recent stream of patients who got to this book well before she could push it on me. But for the briefest of moments, my therapist was stunned: not because familiarity with this book and its contents made me unique, but just the opposite. “I’ve read ‘Attached.’ What about it?” I went on to describe the various attachment styles the book describes, characterized my own, and explained how I’ve seen it reflected throughout my life. So “yeah, of course ,” I told my therapist, like she asked me about FM radio. To say it changed the way I view (let alone operate in) romance since then would be a vast understatement. Not for what I learned about them, but for what I discovered about myself, my own contribution to this romantic meltdown, and one thing or another about pretty much all the relationships that came before it.

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