Keeping your mate

#campcrafting 010: A practice of romantic love and campcrafting

So far, we’ve engineered a campcrafting framework to help our chances at our search for a pair bond. But what happens after you've found that mate? How can you maximize the probabilistic success of your relationship? The quest isn’t solely about selecting the right partner; it’s equally about understanding and cultivating your own value within the partnership. What do you bring to the table? How can you assess and enhance your contributions to strengthen the bond?

1. Attachment Styles: Stoking the Fire of Love

Attachment theory suggests that the emotional bonds formed in childhood with caregivers significantly shape adult relationships. This theory, validated by extensive research across diverse cultures, posits that early relational experiences create an internal working model that influences one's future interpersonal dynamics. In the book Attached: The new science of adult attachment and how it can help you find – and keep – love psychiatrist and neurobiologist Amir Levine and psychologist Rachel Heller Levine observe that, “In prehistoric times, being close to a partner was a matter of life and death, and our attachment system developed to treat such proximity as an absolute necessity.”

Attachment theory identifies three primary adult attachment styles: Secure, Anxious, and Avoidant.

Secure individuals are warm and reliable in relationships, anxious individuals crave intimacy but fear its lack, and avoidant individuals prioritize independence and may distance themselves emotionally. Understanding these styles helps predict mating behaviors and relationship dynamics, offering a strategic advantage in nurturing long-term partnerships.

Measure you and your pairbond’s attachment styles. With that data in hand, you’ll be able to outline a strategy for your own relationships, as there are specific strengths and weaknesses to each attachment style. If after assessing you and your pairbond, you both happen to be secure attachment styles, then congratulations, you are, in the words of Levine and Heller, “supermates of evolution.” However, if you or your pairbond fall into either or both of the insecure styles, you will need to be more intentional about how you maintain the relationship.

One particularly challenging attachment style combination is the anxious-avoidant pairing. In this dynamic, the infrequent moments when the avoidant partner becomes available trigger the anxious partner’s attachment system, driving them to seek extreme closeness to get the emotional nourishment they’ve missed. This intensified intimacy, however, can provoke the avoidant partner, who perceives it as a threat and consequently disengages, leaving the anxious partner in despair. This pattern creates a cycle of uncertainty and chronic dissatisfaction, making the relationship feel perpetually unstable, yet often too emotionally binding for the anxious partner to exit.

2. Ritual binds

Rituals are foundational to a deeply attached pairbonding. If you already have a pairbond, you likely already have several rituals. Perhaps it is a way you end the day together? A toast before taking your first bite of food you prepared together, or a kiss goodbye that sanctions the act of going outside the homestead and facing the world alone. There are several types of rituals that can only, and ever, occur with a pairbond and no one else. Childbirth is a great example: Ushering a life into being, and the subsequent ways we can welcome that life to planet Earth can, and should be, imbued with ritual. 

Anniversaries, atonement rituals, and weddings are key rituals that strengthen pairbonds. Anniversaries celebrate another year of survival against the odds, marking our planet's journey around the sun and our continued existence. Atonement rituals are crucial because daily life with a partner inevitably involves some transgressions. Establishing mechanisms to acknowledge and move beyond these offenses can fortify a relationship. Arguably, Western societies communal and ritual life has atrophied. Yet, the wedding ceremony remains a moment in time many are willing to pause the grind of life to honor pairbond oathmaking. A declaration to one’s close and extended kin network is a way to bring to family lineages together.

I challenge you to get together with your pairbond and fill in the below table of rituals you will hold together as sacred. 

We’ve explored these topics with the mind in hopes of maximizing the odds of fulfilling the campcrating quest. Carl Sagan once wrote: “It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic…. It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.” So we have adopted this take, but it is critical to not just tend to the math of love, but also to the feeling of love and building the sense that there is something utterly unique and special between you and your pairbond. Rituals are a crucial ingredient to this recipe.