On Masculinity: Attachment

You are not on drugs. This is legitimately happening. I'm writing the second blog post in two days. I understand if your panties can't handle it. Please, if you know you may need some time go and take a breather before you read any further. It'll be here when you get back. Promise.

We'll be back after this brief intermission

And we're back. Thanks for staying with us here at impulseprose as we continue On Masculinity. Today I'll be talking about attachment. As usual my thoughts aren't based on any proven facts and I may be dead wrong. This may be lengthy, you have been warned. Enjoy. 

So yesterday (this still feels weird) I spoke about masculinity in general and some implications of society's approach to the socialisation of boys into men, and some of the personal effects on me. However, to be honest, that wasn't the plan going into the blog post, it just kind of became that. Originally the post was titled: On Masculinity, Attachment and anything else that comes to mind. So this will be the Attachment portion.

But we must still go deeper. I was spurred to write the blogpost mainly because (Pathetic in...3...2...1...) I hadn't spoken to (our beloved) Fairytale in a mind-boggling 4 hours at the time. Not giving you much more background to that. It raised the whole matter of how powerful my attachments tend to be, and basically how much abandonment anxiety I have. Now, with the idea of masculinity I outlined yesterday, all I have to say is this isn't a part of my "me I can look at without shame or disappointment".

I believe this is one of those emotional shortcomings we males tend to have. I personally have some degree of abandonment anxiety, I'm not saying that's a male thing. But problems regarding attachment seem to be a male thing.

You see, we humans are social beings. Our brains are so big because social-ness takes up a shit tonne of space, processing power and complex systems. Complex communication, empathy, morals, that urge we have to "fit in"... all of these things are grounded in the brains pre-occupation with making this social thing work (believe me, it is. Whether you think so or not.) One of those mechanisms is, of course, attachment.

Think about it. What's an easy way to, let's say, ensure parent humans actually expend effort to ensure their offspring humans are fed, when they don't actually benefit directly from doing so? Well, of course you can create a social system where that's a social norm, so to ensure they aren't ostracized by their local humans who all feed their offspring humans they do it too. That may work. OR You can automatically assign value and importance to the offspring humans by forming an emotional bond to that offspring human, thus being compelled to feed them because if you don't your precious offspring human will die. While both of these are probably factors, the latter will most likely be the deciding one. I mean if only the former was present a lot more offspring humans would die. And attachment has many more uses. Like keeping relationships together. Because relationships are the basis of making that social thing work on the individual level.

Now back to attachment and masculinity. We teach males a lot about detachment. A man shouldn't show his emotions (Fun fact: Left unchecked emotions can be seen and read. These served social purposes.) A man should be independent. A man should be "strong". This whole thing just teaches boys detachment., so we know how to do that shit by time we're all grown up. However, the brain does attachment anyways. So we have friends, not too emotionally taxing most of the time, so we're good (generally). But the more emotionally demanding the attachment is the less we seem to be able to cope.

So personally, due somehow to how I grew up, I have abandonment anxiety. I don't have a problem with being alone per se. I do, however, have a problem being left alone. Specifically by those I'm attached to Now I can't say I understand why, but I make attachments faster than I make empty bags of crackers. It's not something I would recommend. Easily Attached + Abandonment Anxiety is one hell of a party. This is basically how it goes. Let's say we are friends (haha... only my friends read this anyways) and we're having a conversation via text or whatsapp or (God forbid) Twitter DMs, and you suddenly disappear (and by disappear I mean not reply for like... 5 mins) I panic. Usually I blame your disappearance on myself ("shit, I shouldn't have said that","ugh, it's because I'm boring") and sending a message a reasonable time later with my unsure face ("hey :x"), like a little puppy who's not really sure if he's okay with you right now. Sounds fun right?

Life's a non-stop party

So what about other men? What attachment issues do they have? I can't be sure, as I don't actually interact with my fellow guys particularly often. But let's see.
The Possessive Guy may be equating attachment with possession/ownership.
The Needy Guy may see attachment as an emotional outlet.
The Detached Guy may see attachment as a sign of weakness.
The Clingy Guy may equate (the object of) attachment with self-worth. (I think I'm somewhere here... Fairytale disagrees)

By no means an exhaustive list. But these are a few possible correlations between these common complaints (I have a lot of female friends) and possible flawed attachment philosophies.

I said attachment problems are a male thing. Well, honestly, it's (like everything else) a human thing. But the differences between sexes are not to be downplayed. Society affects both differently, and the factors which contribute to the male problems may not be contributing factors to female problems and vice versa.

I may have another On Masculinity blog post left. That's not a tomorrow thing though. But, till then:

-Me