We all know the feeling: that creeping, overwhelming sense of sudden disgust. It might hit when you’re out to dinner, in bed or even as a text flashes up on your phone at 8am on a random weekday. It’s the dreaded ick, and it can come out of nowhere.
“My list of icks was vast and varied,” writes Charlotte Bitmead, Stylist’s senior beauty writer, in this week’s Stylist+ cover story. “There was the guy who drove hunched over the steering wheel like a Mario Kart character; the one who didn’t know the difference between ‘their’, ‘there’ and ‘they’re’ (Sabrina Carpenter, I relate); the one who had their mum saved on their phone as ‘Mummy’; and the one who only used voice notes for replies, making me feel like I was listening to a podcast for one. I used every excuse under the sun to justify these icks as reasons not to see my dates again.”
It turns out Charlotte had something called an ‘avoidant attachment style’ – a theory pioneered by psychiatrist John Bowlby in the 1960s after completing several studies on children’s emotional bonds. According to Bowlby, we all fit into a particular attachment style: secure, anxious, dismissive-avoidant or fearful-avoidant (often known as ‘disorganised’), and it massively impacts our romantic relationships.
“The truth was that I wasn’t forming any attachments in my dating life. I didn’t feel sad because I wasn’t letting myself be vulnerable, allowing for no shred of intimacy,” says Charlotte. Ultimately, her realisation led to her doing the work to overcome the ways in which this attachment style was affecting her life. Now recovered, she wonders why more people don’t do the same. In an age when we love to slap a label on ourselves (people-pleaser, empath, avoidant), it’s an excellent question.
Hannah Keegan
Features Director, Stylist
