The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

part to step back. After a few days of being shut out, Rabih will get fed up and
accuse Kirsten of being cold and weird, to which she will reply that she suspects
he must really enjoy upsetting her, since he does it so often. She retreats to a sad
but oddly comforting and familiar place inside her head where she hides when
others let her down (as they tend to do) and takes comfort in books and music.
She is an expert in self-protection and defense; she has been in training for much
of her life.
An avoidant attachment style is marked by a strong desire to avoid conflict and to reduce exposure to the other when emotional needs have not been met. The avoidant person quickly
presumes that others are keen to attack them and that they cannot be reasoned with. One just has to escape, pull up the drawbridge, and go cold. Regrettably, the avoidant party cannot
normally explain their fearful and defensive pattern to their partner, so that the reasons behind their distant and absent behavior remain clouded and are easy to mistake for being uncaring and
unengaged—when in fact the opposite is true: the avoidant party cares very deeply indeed, it is just that loving has come to feel far too risky.
While never forcing conclusions, Mrs. Fairbairn nonetheless holds up a

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figurative mirror so that Kirsten can start to see the impact she has on others. She
helps her become aware of her tendency to flee and to respond to stress through
silence, and encourages her to consider how these strategies might affect those
who depend upon her. Much like Rabih, Kirsten has a habit of expressing her
disappointments in such a way that they are guaranteed not to draw sympathy
from those whose love she needs most urgently.
Rabih never brings up his night with Lauren directly. He sees that the priority
is to understand why it happened rather than to confess that it did, in a way that
might unleash the sort of insecurities that would forever destroy trust between
Kirsten and himself. He wonders, between sessions with Mrs. Fairbairn, what
could have rendered him so apparently blithe and indifferent about hurting his
wife and sees that there could really only have been one explanation: that he
must have felt so hurt by things in the relationship that he had reached a point of
not caring too much that he might severely wound Kirsten. He slept with Lauren
not out of desire but out of anger, the sort of anger that doesn’t admit to its own
existence, a sullen, repressed, proud fury. Explaining to Kirsten, in a way she
can understand, that he has felt let down will be central to saving his marriage.
At the heart of their struggles, there is an issue of trust, a virtue which comes
easily to neither of them. They are wounded creatures who had to cope with
undue disappointments as children and have consequently grown into powerfully
defended adults, awkward about all emotional undress. They are experts in
attack strategy and fortress construction; what they are rather less good at, like
fighters adjusting badly to civilian life after an armistice, is tolerating the
anxieties that come with letting down their guard and admitting to their own
fragilities and sorrows.
Rabih anxiously attacks; Kirsten avoidantly withdraws. They are two people
who need one another badly and yet are simultaneously terrified of letting on
just how much they do so. Neither stays with an injury long enough truly to
acknowledge or feel it, or to explain it to the person who inflicted it. It takes
reserves of confidence they don’t possess to keep faith with the one who has
offended them. They would need to trust the other sufficiently to make it clear
that they aren’t really “angry” or “cold” but are instead, and always, something
far more basic, touching, and deserving of affection: hurt. They cannot offer
each other that most romantically necessary of gifts: a guide to their own
vulnerabilities.
A questionnaire originally devised by Hazan and Shaver (1987) has been widely used to measure attachment styles. To ascertain what type they might be, respondents are asked to report
which of the following three statements they can most closely relate to:
1. “I want emotionally close relationships, but I find that other people are often disappointing or mean without good reason. I worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to
others. I don’t mind spending time on my own.” (avoidant attachment)
2. “I want to be emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that they are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I worry that others don’t value me as much as I value them. It can make

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me feel very upset and annoyed.” (anxious attachment)
3. “It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others. I feel comfortable depending on others and having them depend on me. I don’t worry about being alone or not being
accepted by others.” (secure attachment)
The labels themselves certainly lack glamour. It’s rather a blow to the ego to be
forced to conceive of oneself, not as some kind of infinitely nuanced character
whom a novelist might struggle to capture in eight hundred pages, but rather as a
generic type who could easily fit within the parameters of a few paragraphs in a
psychoanalytic textbook. The terms