Tamara’s story continued (retrieved from the cutting room floor)
Dodging potential heartache while keeping your eye on the ball:
One woman’s story of dating like a pro and finding great love
While writing ATTACHED, large parts of the original manuscript — many stories and even entire chapters — ended up on the cutting room floor, so to speak. One such case is the continuation of Tamara’s story from chapter 1. In the final version, we edited out part of her story and summed it up shortly on page 17. Here, we bring her full story. As with all the other cases in the book, hers is a real life story with only minor changes made to hide her identity. Here goes:
Tamara, of course, had learned everything there was to know about attachment theory and about the new discoveries we’d made – she brought the subject up in nearly every conversation we held. Some time after she and Greg had broken up, she met Rob at a cocktail party, and using her new skills, quickly determined that he was avoidant. Since he already had a girlfriend, Tamara wasn’t afraid that she might get too close to Rob and didn’t worry about spending time with him. At some point though, Rob, feeling threatened by the level of intimacy in his relationship, began to push his girlfriend, Jody, away. He started to notice minor physical imperfections and complained to Tamara that Jody talked too much.
Despite Tamara’s awareness of his attachment style and their incompatibility, she and Rob became close very quickly and before too much time had passed, she found that they were talking for hours on the phone and hugging a little too long when they parted. There was that feeling of magic between them, and yet those tell-tale warning signals were ever present: After an especially close conversation he wouldn’t call for two or three days and despite herself, Tamara would constantly think of him. She then realized that she was slowly but surely falling for him, and into a trap. Of course he wanted to be close to her, it was the perfect way to distance himself from his Jody! It helped him reassure himself that he was just fine — it was only Jody who was wrong for him.
Realizing all that, Tamara immediately took the necessary precautions. She minimized contact with him and dissipated that “special magic” between them by talking about more mundane topics, not getting physically close, and going out with him only in the company of others. She joked around with us about his avoidant behavior, “Rob had an overdose of intimacy tonight, It’ll take him a week to recover before he’ll be able to call me again.”
It became apparent to us that in dating situations, Tamara had become a changed person. Knowing about the different attachment styles gave her a new sense of power and self-acceptance. She’d grown much more confident and relaxed. Ordinarily, since she really liked Rob, she would have been tempted into believing that Jody wasn’t right for him, and that she alone had something special with him. She would have dived into this relationship headfirst only to be devastated months later when Rob replaced her with somebody else.
But none of that happened.
Tamara had a few good laughs and went on with her life. Since he didn’t get what he wanted, Rob soon lost interest in their “special friendship”. A while later she ran into him on the street. He said that things were going great; he was dating a yoga instructor and they’d been together for a few weeks. “But what will happen in a few months when it gets serious?” she asked, referring to their discussions about his aversion to too much intimacy and closeness. “Oh, I don’t worry about that. I’m just enjoying the moment,” he answered. Tamara continued to walk down the street smiling and thinking to herself: “I’m enjoying the moment too, Rob. I don’t have to worry about where you are, what you’re up to, or why you’re distancing yourself from me. And that, my friend, is a wonderful thing!”
A few months later Tamara met Tom, a clearly secure man, and their relationship developed so smoothly that we heard very little about it. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to share things with us, it was that she had found a secure base and there were just no crises or dramas to discuss. Most of our conversations now revolved around the restaurants she and Tom had been to, their plans for the future, or her career, which was in full swing again.
It’s important to remember that by going secure, if you’re anxious, you’re also saving someone avoidant from getting attached to a partner s/he isn’t going to be happy with. A true win-win situation.
No Comments » | Posted by Rachel Heller on 03.10.2011
