Flypaper Hearts: Attachment, Grief, and the Limits of Autonomy

 

Foreword: Christmas and the Intransigence of Attachment

It is Christmas Day as I write this, which is perhaps the least neutral moment in the calendar to reflect on human attachment. No other season so reliably exposes the distance between what we tell ourselves about autonomy and what we actually live. Christmas concentrates expectation: reconciliation and warmth, continuity, the presence of those who ought to be present. When those expectations are unmet, the disappointment is existential. Something older than choice registers the absence.

Modern American culture is uneasy with this fact. We prefer to imagine ourselves as self-authored and self-regulating, capable of detachment on command. We speak fluently about boundaries, exit, and reinvention. Yet Christmas returns every year like an audit. It reminds us, whether we welcome the reminder or not, that attachment does not dissolve simply because we would prefer it to. People who consider themselves well-adjusted, independent, and therapeutically informed often find themselves unexpectedly miserable at this time of year. The misery is the cost of bonds that remain operative even when they are strained or fractured or formally severed.

The prevalence of estrangement in contemporary life sharpens the contrast. Clinicians such as Joshua Coleman report that a striking proportion of adults, perhaps twenty percent, are estranged from at least one close family member, including parents and adult children. This scale of relational rupture would have been nearly inconceivable across most of human history. And yet the emotional fallout of estrangement does not conform to the tidy narratives that justify it. Silence does not reliably bring peace. Distance offers no more reliable closure. The heart continues to reach for what has been declared off-limits.

This tension between our ideals and our experience is what prompts the reflections that follow. They are not an argument for preserving every bond at all costs, nor a denial that some separations are necessary. They are an attempt to take seriously a stubborn anthropological reality: that human attachment is extraordinarily resistant to rational management. It persists through disappointment and conflict, through humiliation, and even moral catastrophe. It binds where reason advises release, and wounds precisely because it cannot simply be switched off.

The essay that follows moves across several registers in order to make that claim difficult to evade. It draws on neuroscience, comparative primate behavior, literature, and theology, as well as lived observation. This multiplicity is not ornamental. It reflects a conviction that no single explanatory frame is adequate to the phenomenon. Attachment is biological and psychological, social and moral, all at once. Attempts to reduce it to a therapeutic technique or a cognitive error miss its depth and its force.

What unites these strands is a simple insight, offered years ago by a priest in an unguarded moment, and confirmed repeatedly since: the human heart sticks. It does so because we are built that way, not because we are weak.

 

I. Flypaper

In 1995, in Milwaukee, a priest of the Catholic Opus Dei “personal prelature,” acknowledged by everyone for his brilliance, named Robert Bucciarelli made an offhand remark that lodged itself in my memory and never quite let go. He was speaking about love, duty, and the strange tenacity of human bonds when he said, with disarming simplicity, that “the human heart is like flypaper. It will stick to just about anything.” This was delivered as an observation, almost a shrug. At the time, I took it as a clever metaphor. Over the years, it has come to feel more like a diagnosis.

What Bucciarelli grasped was that human bonding does not obey the rules of rational preference or cost–benefit analysis. People do not simply detach because a relationship becomes painful, unproductive, or humiliating. More often, they remain bound precisely where an external observer would expect release. The heart adheres where reason would advise retreat.

That intuition resurfaced, unexpectedly, years later, in the aftermath of one of the most catastrophic counterintelligence betrayals in American history. After the arrest of Robert Hanssen, federal investigators undertook a broad effort to reconstruct the personal, moral, and religious world in which he had lived. As part of that process, individuals within Hanssen’s conservative Catholic orbit, including those associated with Opus Dei, were interviewed. Bucciarelli was among those spoken to, included as part of mapping the relational ecology surrounding a man whose duplicity had been nearly total, rather than as a suspect.

Hanssen pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. His actions compromised sources and methods, as well as lives. And yet the most anthropologically revealing fact of the case had nothing to do with espionage. Hanssen’s wife, Bonnie Hanssen, did not leave him. Despite public disgrace, moral enormity, and permanent separation, she remained married to him for decades, visiting him until his death in federal custody. This was not denial of the facts. The facts were incontestable. It was attachment persisting in the face of moral catastrophe.

If the human heart were governed primarily by rational assessment of worth or utility, such fidelity would be inexplicable. If it is governed, at least in part, by something like Bucciarelli’s flypaper, it is not.

 

II. Romantic Love as a Laboratory Case

The most dramatic and socially legible form of attachment is romantic love, which makes it a useful laboratory for understanding the phenomenon more generally.

In the 1970s, the psychologist Dorothy Tennov identified a state she called limerence: an obsessive, intrusive, emotionally volatile condition characterized by intense focus on a beloved, fear of rejection, disproportionate affective investment, and compulsive rumination. Tennov’s work relied on pattern recognition and interview-based evidence, but her central insight proved robust. Limerence was not a cultural quirk. It was a recurring feature of human experience.

That claim became difficult to dispute when the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher placed people newly in love into fMRI scanners. Fisher demonstrated that romantic love reliably activates dopaminergic reward circuitry, particularly the ventral tegmental area. The beloved is processed as something closer to a survival-relevant stimulus than as a neutral social object. Romantic love, in neural terms, resembles addiction more than preference.

Fisher also distinguished this state from both lust and long-term attachment. Lust engages broadly distributed hormonal systems. Romantic love is intense and volatile. Long-term attachment, by contrast, tends to emerge after roughly eighteen to twenty-four months and is associated with oxytocin and vasopressin systems that stabilize pair bonds. It is less euphoric, but often more durable.

The implication is straightforward and unsettling. Human beings form bonds that do not track happiness, merit, or advantage. Once established, attachment often persists long after pleasure has faded and even when the relationship becomes a source of chronic misery.

 

III. Attachment Beyond Romance: Psychology and Persistence

This insight generalizes beyond romantic love. Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and elaborated by Mary Ainsworth, treats attachment as a primary motivational system, rather than a derivative one. Children attach to caregivers regardless of caregiver quality. Insecure attachment remains attachment. Separation distress, protest, and despair follow predictably when bonds are threatened.

Crucially, attachment does not dissolve when relationships become inconsistent, rejecting, or harmful. It reorganizes around pain. This is why individuals remain emotionally tethered to relationships that cause them suffering. The attachment system does not ask whether a bond is pleasant or adaptive. It asks only whether it exists.

–

IV. Primate Grief and the Persistence of Attachment Under Loss

Comparative ethology confirms the same pattern. Field observations by Jane Goodall and others document chimpanzee mothers carrying deceased infants for days or weeks, grooming the bodies, fending off flies, and withdrawing socially. Similar behaviors have been observed among gorillas, including prolonged vigil and altered group routines.

These behaviors occur without symbolic language or moral instruction. They suggest catastrophic grief rooted in attachment. If attachment were merely a cognitive construct or cultural artifact, such persistence would be inexplicable. Instead, attachment appears to be a deeply conserved mammalian system, one that survives absence and even death.

Human neuroimaging converges on this conclusion. When individuals are reminded of attachment figures during rejection or loss, regions associated with physical pain and distress, including the anterior cingulate cortex and insula, reliably activate. Separation is processed as injury. Suffering does not weaken attachment; if anything, it often intensifies its salience.

 

V. Literature Already Knew This

Long before neuroscience or ethology, literature recorded the same truth. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet presents romantic attachment as totalizing and irrational. King Lear presents filial attachment as catastrophic. Lear’s love for his daughters persists through humiliation, betrayal, and ruin, destroying both man and kingdom. The tragedy lies in affection that cannot be withdrawn even when it should be, not in excess affection as such.

Literature understands what therapy often forgets: attachment is not governed by prudence.

 

VI. The Performance of Autonomy

Modern culture prefers to minimize this fact. We emphasize autonomy, boundaries, and self-actualization. Persistent attachment is treated as weakness or pathology, a failure of insight. Those who remain bound to unhappy marriages or estranged children are often regarded with faint amusement or contempt.

This posture is theatrical. Publicly, autonomy is celebrated. Privately, lives remain structured by loyalty and grief and unchosen devotion. The scorn directed at others’ attachments rarely survives close inspection of one’s own.

The language of self-actualization itself is historically parochial. For most of human history, lives were understood as embedded in obligations that could not be optimized away. Attachment was a fact to be endured, not a defect awaiting a cure.

 

VII. Aquinas the Realist

This is where Thomas Aquinas becomes relevant. He was no moral scold; he was a tragic realist. Aquinas did not imagine that attachment could be dissolved by willpower. He assumed its force. The virtue of pietas acknowledged obligations owed to parents and kin as objective, grounded in natural law rather than sentiment. Gratitude was not optional. Duty outlived pleasure.

In this sense, pietas functions as a moral accommodation to an anthropological fact: attachment binds even when it wounds.

 

VIII. The Radical Extrapolation

The Nazarene took this insight further still. “Love your enemies,” he said. “If you love only those who love you, what credit is that to you?” This was not a call to sentimentality. It was a radical extrapolation of attachment beyond kin and tribe. As Tom Holland has argued, this move represented a rupture with the moral architecture of the ancient world, which privileged kinship and civic loyalty above all else.

One cannot be commanded to love one’s enemy unless the human heart is already capable of attachments that defy comfort and calculation. The Christian wager was that this adhesive faculty could be morally universalized.

 

Coda: What Sticks

The human heart sticks. It always has. Neuroscience, ethology, literature, and theology, along with lived experience, all converge on this point. Attachment is not a malfunction of the human condition. It is one of its defining features, for better and for worse.

Modern culture’s discomfort with this truth has not eliminated attachment. It has merely stripped us of the language to live with it honestly. Aquinas appears severe only because he refused to flatter fantasies of autonomy. Bucciarelli’s flypaper endures because it names something we already know.

The question before us is how to acknowledge attachment rather than abolish it: without illusion, without scorn, and without pretending that what binds us can simply be willed away.

Works Cited

Joshua Coleman, Rules of Estrangement (2021).
Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence (1979).
Helen Fisher et al., neuroimaging studies of romantic love, early 2000s.
John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss.
Jane Goodall, Through a Window; related field reports.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q.101.
Matthew 5:44–46.
Tom Holland, Dominion.

 

Table of Contents

 

Christopher S. Carson,  J.D., M.A., formerly of the American Enterprise Institute, is a criminal defense attorney in private practice in Milwaukee.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast