Why the attachment is so strong

Two adults meet by arrangement a few hours a month. Six months in, one of them notices that this near stranger takes up more room in her head than people she has known for fifteen years. She came for an arrangement and got feelings, and there is nobody she can mention it to.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Of everything adults run into here, this surprises them most, and I hear it far more often from women than from men. My guess is that it happens to everybody at much the same rate and women are simply readier to say so.

The shape is always the same. You arranged something specific and limited, you meet a few hours a month, and you would not recognise his front door. Yet the day of the month has a colour now, you reread messages you have already read, and his name on your phone produces a jolt out of all proportion. Eleven hours, four meetings, and a preoccupation you would be embarrassed to describe to a friend of twenty years.

A session compresses about a year

Look at the order things happen in an ordinary relationship. You talk for a while. Weeks later somebody sees you undressed. Months after that, you are seen crying and somebody stays in the room for it. Being deliberately hurt and then held afterwards is not on the list at all for most couples, ever.

A first session runs that sequence in ninety minutes, in roughly that order, with a man you met three weeks ago. Undressed or partly undressed. Put in a position you cannot easily get out of. Hurt on purpose, at length, by somebody watching your face. Then wrapped in something warm and asked how you are. Your nervous system has no separate filing cabinet for the fact that you agreed the terms by email.

You told him something you have never said out loud

To arrange this you had to say the sentence out loud, without softening it into a joke. For a great many people the first person they say it to is not their husband or their oldest friend or their GP. It is a stranger from a fetish site, the only safe place to put it. What you have carried privately for most of your adult life went to him first.

I would not dress that up as established psychology, since I have seen no research on it and inventing some would be worse than admitting the gap. What I can say is that people describe it in nearly identical words often enough that I treat it as a main cause. Note how lopsided it is. He knows that about you. You know he owns a good cane.

Somebody saw you at your least composed and stayed

Most adults spend enormous energy making sure nobody sees the ungoverned version of them. A session removes the option. You cry, or you beg, or you make a noise you would not want recorded. Ambler and colleagues measured reduced executive function in receiving partners after real scenes, which is roughly the machinery that runs self-monitoring. That state has its own page, headspace.

And he did not flinch, did not laugh, did not go off you, and brought you a blanket. Somebody who has seen the version of you that you hide, and stayed in the room, occupies a position ordinary friendship never gets near.

Aftercare is a concentrated dose of something people are short of

Look at what aftercare consists of: twenty minutes in which one adult gives another his whole attention with no agenda underneath it, asks how you are, and waits for the actual answer.

Now count how often that happens to a capable woman in her forties who is the one everybody else leans on. Close to never, in my experience. She supplies it continuously and receives it twice a decade. Then somebody supplies it, deliberately, at the end of an evening in which she was more exposed than she has been in years. People ask why they attached so fast as though it were a defect. Given the ingredients, I find the opposite more surprising.

Why it lands harder on the receiving end

Every mechanism above sits on the bottom's side of the room. The disclosure, the exposure, the altered state, the being looked after. Baumeister's argument that masochism works as an escape from ordinary self-awareness applies here too, because if somebody has taken you out of yourself for an hour, the route back has his name on it. That is a theory that fits the reports rather than a proven mechanism, and I hold it loosely.

Tops are not immune. The feeling that follows a good session from the other end is strong, specific and protective, and I have watched a great many men mistake it for love. Most do nothing about it, since the role expects composure and admitting to feelings looks like a breach of the arrangement you proposed yourself. So it comes out as briskness, which the other person reads as rejection when it is nearer the opposite.

When it only goes one way

Sometimes it is not the same on both sides, and that is the version people are reading about at two in the morning. The unfairness is that nobody has done anything wrong. Your feelings came out of a genuine experience and are not a misreading. He has not misled you by failing to feel the same, he cannot be argued into it, and his kindness in that room was not a signal about anything outside it.

I have been the one who handled this badly. Years ago somebody told me, carefully, over a coffee she had clearly rehearsed, that she had developed feelings for me. I said something kind and vague, then let the gaps between sessions get longer until she stopped asking.

I told myself I was being gentle. I was being a coward. A clear no in March would have cost her one bad month, and what I did instead cost her until September, with no explanation but the one she built herself.

Drop will lie to you on a Tuesday

Drop arrives a day or two after a session, detached from anything currently happening, and without a label explaining itself. Your mind supplies a cause, and if there is a man attached to the weekend, he is the cause it picks. What you get is a Tuesday afternoon certainty that you need him, or that he has gone off you. The identical facts on Friday produce nothing at all. So send nothing about feelings inside seventy-two hours.

What it does not mean

It does not mean you have fallen in love with him. It also does not mean you have not.

I am refusing to settle that deliberately, and I would rather say why than let it look like evasion. I have watched it go both ways too often to pretend there is a tell. Some of the fiercest attachments I have seen were novelty and a bad Tuesday, gone by the spring. Others were the real thing from about the third session, and two of those couples are married. At four meetings in, from the inside, they feel identical.

What separates them is slow and dull. Months, and enough contact outside that room to find out whether you like the man or the position. That second one is a real question rather than a cruel one, and neither answer is a disappointment.

What to do with it

The practical handling is set out on can I do this without getting attached, which covers what to agree at the start and what to say if the feelings arrive anyway. The part I will repeat is that carrying it silently is the option that does the damage. Say it plainly, early, to the person it concerns. If that ends the arrangement, ending it well is the page for that.