Codependency: A Defense (sort of)

Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to be atomized. There’s, of course, the Marxist theory of labor alienation: laboring away at work in which you do not see yourself reflected back. Marx conceptualized this in terms of labor, partly as a consequence of the division of labor that accompanied industrialization. “As the principle of the division of labor is ever more completely applied, the workman becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent. The art advances, the artisan recedes,” Tocqueville famously observed. This is philosophically distinct from what Arendt calls “work”: the process of creating something meaningful that will outlast you. But how do these concepts apply when removed from the sphere of political economy and applied to interpersonal relationships? Where is our grand philosophy of relationship alienation?

Contemporary culture increasingly treats a degree of atomization, particularly in romantic relationships, not as a problem but as a virtue. A feature, not a bug. Something to strive for in a “healthy” partnership. We see this in the rise of pop stoicism, with its focus on self-improvement, and in the therapy-speak addled cult of wellness, which seems to teach us that the ideal relationship consists of two fully formed, self-sufficient people who simply choose one another, as though from a position of total completeness. It is a sterile rejection of Hegel’s dialectical conception of love, in which one gives up the illusion of absolute independence and finds oneself in the recognition of another. Instead of two halves coming together to complete something, we are told to be two complementary machines. How romantic! “Will you be the iPad to my MacBook?” the healthy, well-adjusted specimen of late-stage capitalist alienation asks his potential mate, whom he no doubt met by swiping endlessly on a dating app. Work on yourself endlessly. Become independent. Don’t need anyone. Only when you have achieved some stoic level of independence is the time right to find a partner. The message cuts both ways, for men and women alike: don’t rely on others, and if you get cut, heal the wound yourself.

There is an ideology working behind the scenes here, as there always is. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a mode of production that prizes the individual over the collective, that teaches self-sufficiency as an a priori moral good and the need for others as a weakness. In the West, Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism won that argument a long time ago. Who knows Kropotkin, with his argument for mutual aid and cooperation, rather than competition, as a central engine of evolution and survival? Outside of anarchist circles, do people even know his name? Do they teach Kropotkin at HBS? One wonders why not.

I was wondering where the word “codependency” even came from, so I did a little sleuthing. It sounds distinctly modern. It turns out its roots are in the rooms of Al-Anon, the offshoot of AA, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, as a way of describing the spouse of an alcoholic. This was a real and specific diagnosis: a person losing herself inside someone else’s disease, organizing her whole life around a catastrophe she did not cause and could not stop. Codependent, indeed. (And yes, the origins of the term are gendered, much as the language of AA’s Big Book is.)

That version of the word still means something. I, particularly as the child of two alcoholics and an addict myself, am not interested in defending that definition of the word or unhealthy and exploitative relationships generally. But I do think there needs to be some corrective to what we might call the modern notion of “codependency.”

Language is descriptivist, and words change over time. Codependency now means something completely different. It means attachment. But attachment with a negative connotation. The word leaked out of addiction-recovery literature and into the general lexicon of American self-help until it stopped describing a specific relationship to a specific pathology and started describing something much closer to ordinary human attachment. Arguably, healthy human attachment. Through the natural diffusion of language, and with the aid of self-help books, “codependent” came to mean almost anyone who needed another person too visibly. Wanting reassurance became “codependent.” Missing someone became “codependent.” Even wanting to be with someone became “codependent.” The clinical term for enabling an alcoholic’s disease became the pop-psychological term for love that doesn’t hide itself.

Brief interlude while we all go listen to the Beatles’ “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.”

This is not simply an accident of language drifting, the way words do. It is ideological work, and it did exactly what ideological work does: it took something structural—a culture that wants workers who are frictionless, individuated, endlessly available, unencumbered by obligations that might compete with the demands of the market—and repackaged that structural demand as a personal virtue. Don’t need people too much. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Rely on yourself and no one else. The self-sufficient individual is a requirement of capitalism if it is to sustain itself. A person who needs no one, who is a lone and solitary island, is easily expendable. An object. Something that can be moved, fired, relocated. Interdependence is expensive to this mode of production. It creates people who might, for instance, refuse a transfer because it would separate them from someone they love. Is that codependency? It creates people who take a sick day to sit with someone else’s grief. Is that codependency? Atomized individuals are simply more efficient.

My mind drifts here to the disintegration of several long-term romantic relationships I’ve experienced in my own life. Relationships that were, admittedly, codependent. There is a way of narrating those losses, the therapy-culture way, that would ask me what I’ve “worked on” since, what I’ve learned to self-soothe, what boundaries I’ve built so that a loss like that couldn’t destabilize me so completely again. But I don’t want to build those barriers. I don’t want to fortify myself against heartbreak at the expense of actually experiencing meaningful connections, all so they fit neatly into the very narrow box of sanctioned healthy relationships. My grief is not a vulnerability to be patched, a design flaw to be corrected so that next time I’ll be more independent, more resilient, more able to absorb the blow alone. More like a robot.

Somewhere between the Al-Anon meeting and the self-help shelf, we lost the distinction between losing yourself in someone else’s dysfunction and simply, deliberately, needing someone. We let a culture that benefits from our atomization convince us that the second thing is merely a milder version of the first.

It isn’t.

I would like to propose reconceptualizing “codependency” as a form of mutual aid. It was Kropotkin’s whole argument: that cooperation, not competition, is one of the primary mechanisms by which anything survives. A relationship where two people are genuinely, structurally dependent on each other, symbiotically, is not a relationship in need of recovery from itself. It might be the only kind of relationship built to withstand what atomized, self-sufficient love cannot: the actual, ongoing, unresolved fact of needing another person and being needed in return.

Needing someone else is beautiful. It’s part of what makes us human. And we shouldn’t be ashamed of that.