In the last half century, no psychological theory has had as much impact on our knowledge of adult love and relationships as attachment theory. By looking at a person’s relationship with her or his parents and how he or she handles stress within the relationship, attachment theory brings insight to some of the unconscious ways that humans relate to other humans and helps to explain ruptures and disconnections.

At the end of 2016, Christine Baker published a study on celibate gay Christians revealing this population’s common attachment styles — how a person handles stress within their closest relationships. Using the four categories of attachment styles including secure, ambivalent/preoccupied, avoidant/dismissive, and fearful/avoidant, her findings show that celibate, gay Christians experience far more anxiety in their relationships than the general population. This anxiety often leads to poor views of one’s self and contributes to a lot of insecurity within relationships.

In this blog series on gay men and falling in love (see Part 1 here), understanding attachment theory and the insecure ways that people tend to relate to their attachment figures will greatly help us think about the ways that we approach falling in love.

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One of the paralyzing fears and deep dreads for a gay man pursuing celibacy is falling in love with his male best friend. It is a phenomenon that is often spoken about implicitly in gay Christian circles, it’s often given the quick theological answer of suffering for the sake of the Kingdom, and it’s one that is shared across the theological spectrum.

Matthew Vines, in a lecture on the Bible and homosexuality, remarked,

Falling in love is one of the worst things that could happen to a gay person because you will necessarily be heartbroken. You will have to run away, and that will happen every single time that you come to care about someone else too much.

And Wes Hill, after confiding in his pastor about his heart break over his best friend, writes

I didn’t want to say that was right [that I had been in love with him], because if I did, then wouldn’t that mean I would have to give up the relationship? If I admitted, “Yes, I’ve been in love with him all this time, even though I’ve tried to hide that fact, even – or especially – from myself,” then didn’t that mean I was also admitting that the friendship was all wrong? That it had to end?

For Side-A gay Christians, it is often this reason (coupled with several others) that they find celibacy unlivable choosing then to pursue deep relationality in romantic same-sex relationships. For Side-B gay Christians, they identify this as part of God’s call to bear one’s cross and deny one’s flesh, and they look to the resurrection of the body as that time when they will finally be able to connect interpersonally like their heterosexual peers. Until then, they remain in this state of brokenness and distress.

What a terrible choice to choose between a moral violation against one’s deeply-held convictions or a life of deeply searing pain and isolation. Yet thankfully this is mostly a false dilemma.

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