attachment’s most prominent statistician, the Strange Situation has been used for research in approximately twenty thousand studies around the world, with many kinds of children and parents—neurotypical and non-neurotypical, perfectly ordinary and uniquely challenged, rich and poor. It’s simply the gold standard in psych labs everywhere for assessing security between children and their caregivers. Some researchers have even used the Strange Situation to look at the relationships between humans and their companion cats, dogs, and chimps.
To give just one example of the wide-ranging application that attachment theory has achieved, a study recently published by a team in South Korea considers Airbnb hosts’ attachment relationships to the Airbnb brand:
To build a robust attachment to the platform company, the firm manager should realize and acknowledge hosts (i.e., individual product owners) as business partners who deserve to be known, connected, shared with, updated, and collaborated with regarding any matters of the company. This sense of belonging leads hosts to be attached to the firm or peer hosts, finally resulting in citizenship behaviors.
I’m not sure if Mary would chuckle at such an extrapolation of her research or quibble with it. I’d love to ask her. I know she’d have something clever and surprising to teach me.
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AS I BEGAN to travel into Mary Ainsworth’s world, my interest in attachment started to grow and shift. I started to admire not just her work, but who she was. Far from being some aloof genius who theorized from an academic perch, Ainsworth was a brave intellectual who loved to roast chicken and drink bourbon and talk all night long and dance and watch tennis on TV. She was a real mush, a sucker for beauty who loved clothes, pretty things, people, and ideas. I was captivated by the sound of her frank but formal voice as I pored over her letters and the raw data from her studies of mothers and babies. And I was in awe of the way she began to discern these universal patterns of attachment out of the wilderness of her observations of families and her own very real relationships. And it was through the flutter of my own heart in reading about her life and her work that I started to really understand attachment, and how close to the bone it is, and must be.
If fact, I became so smitten with Ainsworth, this woman I would never meet, that I started to feel as if she were teaching me from the great beyond. I began to internalize her, approaching my life with her eyes, trying to understand the attachments of my own heart as she might. We became intimate, in my mind, even though she had been dead for ten years when I started my research. And as scary as it was, I wanted to be seen by her—the kind, sympathetic, but disarming expert—and to see myself and my relationships as she might.
It was my desire to merge with Ainsworth’s wisdom that inspired me to go on this journey into the science of attachment. I white-lied my way into an attachment lab in New York City in order to see a real live Strange Situation. I flew to Akron, Ohio, to read Mary Ainsworth’s letters in her own tidy handwriting and typing. I signed up for a training usually reserved for psychologists to learn how to code the Strange Situation. I also traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia, where Ainsworth’s protégé and executor, now white-haired, showed me the boxes of her original Strange Situation notes and her parents’ silver tea set. When I heard about the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), which identifies an adult’s attachment classification—like a Strange Situation for grown-ups—I maneuvered my way into going through it myself with one of the world’s experts, even though it’s not usually administered to random individuals, nor do people usually receive their “score,” like I did. Still not satisfied with someone else’s assessment of who I was, I attended—with Thayer and a group of PhD students and clinicians—a two-week intensive to learn how to code the AAI myself.
At every step along the way, I held Azalea in my heart and in my mind—noticing the person she was becoming, watching our life together, imagining her future—all in the context of what I was learning.