Letting go · 2 min
Needing or preferring: Walter Riso on detachment in relationships
Letting go isn’t loving less or turning cold. It’s choosing someone without your wellbeing hanging entirely on them. An idea from Walter Riso, brought to first dates.
· This is my message
The word ‘detachment’ sounds like distance, like not getting involved. The psychologist Walter Riso, in his book Desapegarse sin anestesia (roughly, ‘Letting go without anaesthetic’), argues the opposite: a detached person cares about the other, commits and looks after them, but does so without anxiety and without losing themselves.
Needing versus preferring
The key is a simple distinction. To need someone is to feel you can’t be OK without them. To prefer them is to have chosen them from other possibilities and to be glad they’re there. Riso sums it up like this: ‘Needing something or someone means being unable to live without it.’ The first ties you down; the second leaves you both free.
If I lose them, it’ll hurt, but I’ll carry on. That isn’t coldness: it’s having your feet planted in your own life.
Detachment isn’t indifference
This is the big misunderstanding. Loving without attachment isn’t loving less. It’s loving without possessing, without humbling yourself to keep someone by your side, and without staying where you’re not loved or where you’re being hurt. Nor is it the same as the avoidant style Levine and Heller talk about: someone avoidant protects themselves from closeness; someone detached in Riso’s sense moves closer without clinging.
And it doesn’t mean needing nobody. Attachment research shows that relying on a responsive partner makes us more independent, not less: it’s known as the dependency paradox (Feeney, 2007). What Riso proposes isn’t that you stop leaning on the other person, but that your worth and your peace of mind don’t hang on just one person.
Three questions before you message someone
- Am I writing because I want to, or because I need a sign to feel calm?
- If they don’t reply today, does my day carry on just the same?
- Am I looking for someone to complement me, or someone to fill a gap? Riso suggests working on your own empty spaces rather than looking for someone to fill them.
How it looks in a first conversation
- With attachment: you tweak your answers to be liked, hide whatever you think won’t fit and take every silence as a verdict.
- With preference: you say who you are, ask questions out of curiosity and, if there’s no fit, you’re sorry about it without feeling you’ve failed.
That’s why it makes sense to get to know someone by how they think: if you answer 50 questions honestly, the people you click with prefer you for who you are, not for who you tried to seem.
It isn’t about giving up wanting. Wanting is human. Attachment begins when you can’t let go of something even though it’s hurting you. If you feel a relationship is consuming you, talking it through with a psychologist is a good first step.