Love vs. Attachment: A dangerous misconception
There is a subtle difference between love and emotional attachment; one that assigns vastly disparate meaning to these two distinct sentimental statuses. If you can’t identify the difference, you are bound to make mistakes; erroneous life decisions that could prove destructive to you and those around you.
Mistaking attachment for love may delude you into attributing unwarranted value to a relationship. In reverse, confusing love for mere attachment may render you unappreciative of meaningful connections.
So, what is the difference between love and attachment?
The difference between love and attachment is choice.
Attachment comes from involuntary desperate need. Love comes from free conscious want. Love is not desperate, because you can live without it, but you still choose it. This makes it worth having. Love meaningful, noble, virtuous, graceful, commendable. Attachment… not so much.
Attachment is sourced from your instincts: your children, your parents, the people who’ve happened to spent time with, and thus can’t help but feel invested in. For some types of relationships, there are even mental architectures already mapped in your brain that are waiting to be filled. For example, ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ are the first words that come out of your mouth because the concepts of mama and papa are already built in to your nervous system. This is why, even if you don’t have one or both parents, you rush to fill those positions with the closest thing to those roles. There are relationship roles in your brain that need to be filled: siblings, best friends, spouse, child, mentor, mentee - and who knows what else... prophet and strong leader perhaps? You have no choice over these mental architectures. The relationships you attribute to those roles aren’t meaningful unless you’d value those people regardless of their type of connection with you.
With relationships of emotional attachment, you wonder why you are so invested in them and connected to them, because there is no logical reason to connect with them. You know you share none of the values, none of the virtues, none of the common opinions, principles and agreements. You have no history of proven support or valiantly being there for each other. Yet you feel “attached” to them, and there is no logic behind it.
It makes no sense why you would “love” them when they share none of the ideals or experiences that define you. Sometimes you even wish you didn’t “love” them at all; but you can’t. Your logic tells you there is nothing connecting you, yet your emotion says otherwise. And you can’t help but follow emotion, as emotion always overrides logic. Attachment is involuntary and emotion-driven.
Love is a choice. Love is voluntary and logic-driven, since you can will to love or not to love someone. Love is grounded on logic first; emotion second. You can let go of love at any given moment. But for whatever logical reason, you choose not to. This is what makes it all the more meaningful: you can live without love but you choose to love regardless; assuming they are worthy of your love. Where there is no desperation there is meaning and value.
The reasons that may make you want to keep hanging on to love include the things that make someone special to you: their principles, their ideals, their virtues, their values, their experiences; in essence, their identity.
Resentment
There is resentment that comes with attachment because it feels involuntary, and therefore, desperately needy. It feels like slavery, especially when the people you are attached with aren’t worthy of your love. It’s a burden you can’t shake off. You feel like you are chain-bound to a person without having chose it, and without the choice not to be attached to them. And since it’s attachment instead of love, the relationship isn’t quite beneficial; in many cases it is even toxic to both. Of course you’ll feel resentful of them for being in your life, and resentful of yourself for keeping them there.
You’ll loathe yourself for not having the emotional control to choose whom to emotionally invest in, and for letting your instincts make that choice for you instead.
Emotional investment
Similarly, you are attached to your ethnic background, the religion you happened to be born into, the ideologies you were randomly exposed to when you were young. This attachment is involuntary and mechanical. You follow those ideas, and attach yourself to them, not because you consciously made a logical choice based on your dispassionate logical values, but because you just happened to invest emotion in those concepts early on. Had you happened to be exposed to a different ideology, then you’d be just as attached to that instead. There is no logic or meaning behind your ideological attachments because you were never truly free, dispassionate and self-aware in choosing them.
Why do you support a certain politician or sports team? You might think you freely willed your choice, but you didn’t. You had no choice in the matter whatsoever. Your animalistic brain made the choice for you. You - the conscious you - was passive, and was just there for the ride. You needed to get attached to an idea, and the more you invest emotionally in it, the harder it is to cut your losses in favour of meaningful voluntary choices. The harder it is to choose love.
Loving ear
Love listens. Attachment doesn’t tolerate listening to you. Notice how people who claim to love you don’t care enough to listen to you, to give you the benefit of the doubt, and to humble themselves as they accept the possibility of you being right. They don’t love you; they merely feel attached to you out of circumstance.
They are your relatives or some situationship that resents the fact that they desperately need you instead of willingly wanting you. They just hear you; they don’t listen to you.
On the other hand, love listens. People who love you don’t interrupt you when you talk about something important to you. Since you share the same values, it’s rare to disagree. But when you do disagree, they listen. They give you every benefit of the doubt because they value you. They value you because they chose to love you; they didn’t settle with you just to fill an emotional gap in them. If they are with you out of desperation and lack of options, then they don’t have to love you; they’ll resent you for needing you, and even hate you for not being more like them, even though they “chose” to settle with you.
Parenting
Most parents do not love their children at all. It’s just instinctive attachment. Don’t believe me? Look at all those parents who don’t listen to their offspring, whether the offspring are adults or not. Listening - really listening - is the ultimate test. Especially when their grown-up children need their parents to acknowledge mistakes in parenting, those parents don’t tolerate listening. Parents deny abusing their children; parents refuse to listen or acknowledge their children’s trauma. Parents seek out all kinds of pathetic excuses instead of meaningfully apologizing.
This is because those parents don’t love their children; they never did. Parents merely feel attached. Parents feel like they have no choice in being attached to their children, because it is a nature-given instinctive imperative. They are just attached to them in neurological familiarity; psychological association with certain relationship roles mapped in the brain. It’s just temporal/circumstantial emotional investment.
The only meaningful child-parent relationships are those that share the knowledge that they’d each value each other if they weren’t biologically linked.
Ask yourself this: Would your parents choose to love you if you weren’t their children? If you were born to different parents, and you met your real parents randomly, would they choose to value you for being you?
The bottom line
Make sure you choose your relationships, friendships, etc., rather than mindlessly and falling into them out of circumstance and a need for attachment. Yes, choosing requires quality options to choose from. Without options, you become desperate, and thus settle for people that have nothing in common with you. So, you get attached to them, causing a two-way resentment that builds up and festers.
But even if you don’t have the value, the social skills or the right environment to have options for relationships with quality people that meaningfully connect with you, then you must always retain the option of having no relationships at all. A strong man/woman is able to live alone, and prefer to live alone than to settle. If you are able to live alone and be OK with yourself, then you immediately increase your standards as well as your value to others. You are instantly less desperate, and you always have “options,” since ‘no relationship’ is always a viable respectable option for you. You prefer to be alone than to be with the wrong people.
You can decisively break any relationship the second you realize the person isn’t sharing the same values with you. This lack of desperation makes you powerful, in control, and valuable to others who can sense this coolness and self-reliance about you. And if you can instantly break a relationship without attachment holding you back, but you still choose to keep it, then that’s a meaningful relationship. Relationships kept together by attachment alone are not meaningful. They are just situationships.
If you choose love, then it’s either a good relationship or no relationship at all: these are dignified self-empowering choices. You save your love for people who deserve it. Anything in between is just attachment and a waste of emotional capacity. It’s killing your love, twisting it into desperate meaningless attachment. Then you’ll wonder why you’re stressed, depressed, resentful and passive-aggressive.
When you always keep the choice of ‘no choice’ as a viable scenario, you’ll always feel empowered to make the right choice, or no choice at all. It’s noble that way. You won’t settle for anything in between, and you’ll be much more respectable to people (And to yourself), since you are less in supply to them (Economics 101). So, you’ll have even more quality choices. Yes, you might end up actually taking the ‘no choice’ option, but at least you’ll keep the respect of others, and the respect of yourself.
Do not let emotion overpower your logic. Do not passively surrender to instinct; choose choice instead.
Choose love.