Does He Love Me? Part 2A: Attachment vs. Love

In Part 1 of this series, we began to untangle the question, “Does he love me?”

We discovered that love is more than a feeling. St. Thomas Aquinas described love as willing the good of the other, and in Jesus Christ we encounter the clearest revelation of what authentic love looks like. We also discovered something that makes applying that definition much more complicated:

Human beings are capable of genuine love and profound contradiction.

So before we try to discern what authentic love looks like in a relationship marked by betrayal, we need to look more closely at some of the experiences we commonly call love. One of the most powerful is attachment.

Attachment is not counterfeit love. It is not unhealthy by definition. It is part of the way God created human beings for relationship.

But attachment and love are not the same thing.

Attachment Feels Like Love

Attachment begins long before we have words to describe it. A baby depends upon caregivers not only for food and physical protection, but also for comfort, soothing, connection, and help regulating distress.

As adults, we become far more capable of caring for ourselves, but we do not stop being relational beings. We still long to belong. We seek comfort. We miss people. We feel safer when someone we trust is near, and we experience distress when an important relationship feels threatened.

Marriage naturally becomes one of our deepest attachments. A spouse may feel like home. Because attachment includes longing, closeness, desire, comfort, belonging, and fear of loss, it can feel remarkably similar to what we call love.

But they are not identical.

Attachment tells us that someone is deeply important to us. Love asks something more.

What Attachment Says

Attachment is fundamentally concerned with connection. It asks questions like:

Are you there? Are we okay? Do I still matter to you? Are you going to leave me? Can I reach you? Will you come back?

When an attachment bond feels secure, we may experience warmth, comfort, connection, and peace. When it feels threatened, we may experience fear, longing, anger, panic, desperation, numbness, or an overwhelming need to restore connection.

None of those feelings are wrong. They tell us that something important is happening within our attachment system.

But they do not necessarily tell us what is happening with love.

What Attachment May Feel Like for the Addicted Partner

A man may be deeply attached to his wife. He may experience her as home, feel comforted by her presence, miss her intensely when she withdraws, or experience tremendous anxiety at the possibility of losing his marriage or family. He may feel a powerful longing for closeness, affection, reassurance, sexual connection, or simply the familiar rhythms of life together.

He may sincerely feel:

I need you. I miss you. I don't know what I would do without you. I can't imagine my life without our family. I just want us to be okay again.

Those feelings can be extraordinarily intense, and they may be completely genuine.

After betrayal, it is understandable to interpret the intensity of those feelings as evidence of the depth of his love.

Look how devastated he is at the thought of losing me. Look how much he misses me. Look how desperately he wants us to be okay.

It may tell us something about love.

But first and most clearly, it tells us something about attachment.

When the Addiction Becomes an Attachment

There is another attachment we need to understand.

For many people struggling with addiction, the addictive behavior has become far more than a bad habit or an isolated sexual behavior. It has become a place they repeatedly turn for regulation.

When they feel lonely, inadequate, rejected, ashamed, stressed, angry, bored, afraid, or overwhelmed, they may turn toward it. The addictive experience may provide relief, escape, excitement, comfort, predictability, control, a temporary absence of painful emotions, or simply a way to disappear from an interior world they do not know how to tolerate.

Over time, the nervous system can begin to experience the addiction not simply as something pleasurable, but as something necessary:

I need this. I need relief. I need to escape. I need to feel different.

In this way, addiction can begin functioning as a powerful attachment—and sometimes as a primary place of emotional regulation.

This helps us understand one of the most confusing realities betrayed partners encounter. A man may experience a powerful attachment to his wife while simultaneously experiencing a powerful attachment to the addictive system.

He may experience his wife as home while experiencing the addiction as refuge. He may long for connection with her while also longing for the relief he has learned to find somewhere else. He may genuinely fear losing his marriage while also feeling terrified of losing the coping mechanism upon which he has come to depend.

Those experiences can exist simultaneously.

Different Parts Can Experience Different Attachments

Parts work gives us another helpful way of understanding this complexity. Different parts of us can carry different needs, fears, desires, and protective strategies.

One part may desperately want closeness while another fears vulnerability. One may crave reassurance while another carries tremendous shame. One may want to be known while another desperately wants to hide. One may feel deeply connected to a spouse while another has learned that escape is the safest way to manage distress.

This does not mean that one part is the “real” person while the others are false. It means that human beings can carry multiple realities at once.

Understanding this can help us resist the temptation to use one intense emotional experience as the definitive answer to the question:

“Does he love me?”

Attachment Is About Survival

One reason attachment can become so intense is that our attachment systems are connected to survival. For a young child, losing connection with a caregiver really is dangerous.

As adults, we have capacities and resources that we did not possess as children. But our nervous systems do not always experience relational threat so calmly. A threatened attachment can feel like an emergency:

Fix this. Don't leave. Make everything okay. Tell me we're going to be okay.

That urgency can easily be mistaken for love because it feels so powerful.

But intensity is not the same thing as love. Sometimes intensity tells us how threatened an attachment system feels.

This is important for the betrayed partner to remember as well. Missing him, longing for his reassurance, feeling calmer when he is near, or becoming frightened by distance are real experiences. They deserve compassion. But those feelings do not, by themselves, tell you what is true about the relationship or what you should do next.

The feeling is real. The conclusion may not follow.

Attachment, Self, and God

Attachment becomes especially difficult to understand when another human being has gradually begun carrying things that no human being can ultimately carry for us:

Tell me I am worthy. Make me feel safe. Convince me I am lovable. Take away my shame. Make me feel whole. Tell me who I am. Save me from myself.

A wife will inevitably fail at this task—not because she has failed as a wife, but because she is not God.

She cannot provide another human being with an unshakable identity. She cannot heal every wound, regulate every painful emotion, remove every insecurity, or make another person feel perpetually safe, wanted, competent, desirable, and enough.

She will disappoint him. She will misunderstand him. She will be tired. She will have needs of her own. She will sometimes disagree with him. She will confront things he would rather not see. She will have limits.

She will be human.

And this is where an addictive attachment can become extraordinarily powerful.

At least initially, the addiction can seem to offer something no human relationship possibly can. It does not have needs of its own. It does not become tired. It does not ask him to tolerate another person's disappointment. It does not confront him with an uncomfortable truth unless he chooses to face it. It does not require him to remain present to another person's pain.

It can be shaped around what he wants, when he wants it. It can tell him what he wants to hear and help him feel—at least temporarily—exactly how he wants to feel: wanted, powerful, comforted, excited, desired, in control, relieved, enough.

Of course, the addiction cannot actually give him what he is seeking. It cannot love him. It cannot know him. It cannot restore his identity, heal his shame, or offer communion. It cannot give him the freedom, dignity, or wholeness for which he was created.

It can only create the temporary experience of having those needs satisfied.

Because that experience is available without the vulnerability, mutuality, sacrifice, frustration, and limitations inherent in a relationship with another human being, the addiction can begin to feel extraordinarily dependable.

The wife inevitably disappoints him because she is human. The addiction appears not to disappoint him because it asks nothing of him except that he return.

But what the addicted person is ultimately longing for cannot be found in either his wife or his addiction. His deepest identity, worth, security, and belonging are rooted in God.

Only God can encounter the whole person without turning away. Only God can reveal both the truth of who we are and the depth of our dignity. Only God can enter our shame without being overcome by it. Only God can offer the grace that allows us not merely to escape ourselves, but to become increasingly free.

Attachment Is Real. But Attachment Is Not the Whole Story.

His longing may be real. His fear of losing you may be real. His affection may be real.

His attachment to the addictive experience is very real.

While different parts of him may carry very different feelings at the same time, we do not have to dismiss any of those experiences.

But we also do not have to call all of them love.

Attachment tells us something about connection, need, comfort, belonging, and fear of loss. It does not, by itself, tell us whether authentic love is present or how much capacity a person presently has to love well.

Learning to distinguish those realities does not make attachment less meaningful. It simply helps us stop asking attachment to answer a question it was never designed to answer.

And attachment is only the first layer.

When addiction and betrayal have shaped a relationship over time, another dynamic can begin developing—one in which the relationship itself becomes organized around the addiction and the protection of it.

That is where we turn next.

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Next in the Series

Part 2B: Shadow Bond vs. Love

➡️ Continue Reading (Coming soon!)

This version feels much closer to the editorial style you established for 1A–1C: substantive paragraphs, occasional short sentences for emphasis, rather than every important thought being visually isolated.