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Notes -
Summer in 500 Days of Summer was an emotionally neglectful bitch and Tom did nothing wrong.*
Joking aside:
There are three main attachment styles: secure, anxious and avoidant
Secure people feel comfortable in platonic and romantic relationships, expect their partner to meet their emotional needs and are more than happy to meet their partner's needs
Anxious people often suffer from low self-esteem, require regular reassurance from their partners that their partner still likes them, and tend to act out and engage in "protest behaviour" if their needs aren't being met. This is the classic "needy" or "clingy" woman who complains that her boyfriend doesn't pay enough attention to her.
Avoidant people are put off by emotional intimacy and use detachment strategies to distance themselves from their partner. They often have unrealistic ideas about love and romance, fantasize about an "ideal" partner with whom they will feel no qualms about becoming intimate with, and idealize past romantic partners as a means of maintaining distance between themselves and their current partner. When women complain about men being "commitment-phobic" or "emotionally unavailable", this is who they're complaining about.
(Since the book's publication, a fourth attachment style has been proposed, variously called "fearful-avoidant", "anxious-avoidant" or "disorganized attachment". It's basically the worst parts of anxious and avoidant combined. However, Levine and Heller don't touch on this style in the book at all.)
Levine and Heller acknowledge that, in the anonymized examples they use, they tend to portray women as anxious and men as avoidant, but also point out that they've met plenty of anxious men and avoidant women.
There's a very small amount of evo-psych hypothesizing about how the different attachment styles came about, but Levine and Heller don't pretend it's their area of expertise and don't dwell on it
If an insecure (anxious or avoidant) person is in a relationship with a secure person, the secure person's attachment style can "rub off" on the insecure person's to a limited extent (but conversely, the secure person may be too accommodating of the insecure person, putting up with their protest behaviour to the point that it becomes actively abusive)
Secure people are underrepresented in the dating pool, because they tend to pair off early on and form happy, functional, mutually satisfying relationships
Avoidant people are overrepresented in the dating pool
The underrepresentation of secure people and overrepresentation of avoidant people in the dating pool leads to the "anxious-avoidant trap", wherein an anxious person ends up in a relationship with an avoidant person, which is toxic, unfulfilling and unsatisfying for both parties. Anxious-avoidant relationships are disproportionately likely to escalate into abuse.
In a surprisingly pessimistic moment for a self-help book, Levine and Heller acknowledge that if an anxious and an avoidant person are already in a committed relationship (with children and a mortgage etc.), the differences between the two partners may be effectively insurmountable and the "best" outcome short of divorce may simply be for the anxious person to revise down their definition of love and intimacy, rather than expecting their avoidant partner to meet a standard they never will
The book discusses a bunch of techniques that insecure people can use to stop sabotaging themselves, then a bunch of techniques that single people can use to find a partner who meets their needs, then a bunch of techniques that people in relationships can use to improve their relationships (a lot of which are generic couples-therapy things, like "communicate effectively" and "don't bottle things up")
Do I find the theory convincing and persuasive? On the one hand, it suffers from the same problem as every pop-psychology book** published in the last twenty years: making sweeping generalisations about the entire human species based on a single WEIRD study with a small sample size and a weak effect size. There's a great deal of "avoidants believe X as demonstrated by this implicit-association test". I can only assume most of the evidentiary basis for the book's hypothesis has run afoul of the replication crisis since publication.
On the other hand, it makes a great deal of intuitive sense, reading the description of who avoidants are and why they do the things they do was like looking into a mirror, and it casts my past relationships with romantic/sexual partners in a new light. On the other other hand, practically any psychological theory, from Freud to Myers-Briggs on down, makes "intuitive sense": the real test is whether it has predictive power. I want to give the suggested techniques a try and see if I notice any improvement before reporting back.
*In the conclusion, Levine and Heller do explicitly diagnose Summer as avoidant and Tom as anxious, defend Tom's behaviour, and predict that Summer will eventually grow distant from her husband and end up idealising Tom.
** Looking at you, Malcolm Gladwell.
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