Tender Distance: Bobby’s Avoidant Attachment
Plus, more from our conversation with "Blue Moon" screenwriter Robert Kaplow, and a flower-themed Sondheim crossword
Bobby is good at people.
Not “good” in the grand, messy sense of being good at love, good at intimacy, good at being undone by another person. Good in the smaller, more immediate way: he remembers birthdays; he shows up; he hosts; he holds court. He can fill a room. He can keep everyone laughing. He can make you feel, for an evening, like you matter.
And yet, leaving his apartment, would you feel you’d truly met him?
That paradox is one of Company’s great achievements: a protagonist who is constantly surrounded, constantly sought after, and still curiously unreachable. One way to name that unreachability, without reaching for commitment-issue cliché, is to borrow a set of ideas from adult attachment research. Not as a diagnosis or verdict so much as a vocabulary for patterns: how adults manage closeness, threat, need, and the terrifying prospect of being known.
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Attachment theory began with infants and caregivers, but one of the landmark moves in the field was the argument that romantic love, too, can be understood as an attachment process: an affectional bond, with its own rituals of safety, of proximity, of distress.
In the broadest version of the model: when we feel threatened (by loss, shame, uncertainty, loneliness), the attachment system activates; we seek closeness and reassurance. If that bid for closeness is met reliably, security grows. If it isn’t—if closeness feels unsafe, unavailable, or costly—we tend to develop secondary strategies. Some of us respond by intensifying pursuit: reaching out more insistently, monitoring cues more closely, escalating feeling in the hope that enough urgency or intimacy will finally secure a response.
Others do the opposite: suppressing need, minimizing vulnerability, and leaning hard on self-reliance. That second route, the route of deactivation, is the one Bobby seems to have perfected.
We might think of deactivation as the management of desire. It’s the skill of keeping the attachment system quiet enough that you don’t have to feel the full force of wanting another person, or being wanted in return. In Mikulincer and Shaver’s formulation, it’s the move toward emotional distance and “compulsive self-reliance.” Suppress thoughts of vulnerability; rely steadfastly on oneself; keep proximity from becoming necessary.
Viewed this way, Bobby’s behaviours start to look less like random bachelor habits and more like a coherent repertoire. Let’s explore that in more depth: