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In recent years, Americans appear to be getting more and more uncomfortable with intimacy. Why? And is this trend reversible?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The GOP’s unworkable work requirements Why won’t powerful men learn? Just wait until Trump is a chatbot. Disconnected People

When my colleague Faith Hill recently interviewed Michael Hilgers, a therapist with more than 20 years of experience, he painted a worrying picture of intimacy in America: “It’s painful to watch just how disconnected people are,” he said. Even when Hilgers can sense that clients do want to pursue deep social connections, “there’s a lot of confusion and fear in terms of how to get there,” he noted.

One might say that America is in its insecure-attachment era.

Let’s back up a little: Insecure attachment is a term used to describe three of the four basic human “attachment styles” that researchers have identified. The framework has risen in popularity in recent years, appearing alongside astrology signs and Enneagram types as social-media-friendly ways to understand the self. Faith lays out the four styles in her recent article:

People with a secure style feel that they can depend on others and that others can depend on them too. Those with a dismissing style—more commonly known as “avoidant”—are overly committed to independence and don’t feel that they need much deep emotional connection. People with a preoccupied (or “anxious”) style badly want intimacy but, fearing rejection, cling or search for validation. And people with fearful (or “disorganized”) attachment crave intimacy, too—but like those with the dismissing style, they distrust people and end up pushing them away.

Over the past few decades, researchers have noticed a decline in secure attachment and an increase in the dismissing and fearful styles. These two insecure styles are “associated with lack of trust and self-isolation,” Faith explains. She notes that American distrust in institutions has also been on the rise for years—it’s well known that more and more Americans are feeling skeptical of the government, organized religion, the media, corporations, and police. But recent research and anecdotal evidence suggest that Americans are growing more wary not only of “hypothetical, nameless Americans,” but of their own colleagues, neighbors, friends, partners, and parents.

The root causes of America’s trust issues are impossible to diagnose with certainty, but they could well be a reflection of Americans’ worries about societal problems. One psychologist who did research into Americans’ insecure-attachment trend “rattled off a list of fears that people may be wrestling with,” Faith writes: “war in Europe, ChatGPT threatening to transform jobs, constant school shootings in the news,” as well as financial precarity. As Faith puts it: “When society feels scary, that fear can seep into your closest relationships.”

Some researchers argue for other likely suspects, such as smartphone use or the fact that more Americans than ever are living alone. The decline in emotional intimacy is also happening against the backdrop of a decline in physical intimacy. Our senior editor Kate Julian explored this “sex recession,” particularly among young adults, in her 2018 magazine cover story.

A lack of trust is showing up in the workplace as well. In 2021, our contributing writer Jerry Useem reported on studies suggesting that trust among colleagues is declining in the era of remote and hybrid work:

The longer employees were apart from one another during the pandemic, a recent study of more than 5,400 Finnish workers found, the more their faith in colleagues fell. Ward van Zoonen of Erasmus University, in the Netherlands, began measuring trust among those office workers early in 2020. He asked them: How much did they trust their peers? How much did they trust their supervisors? And how much did they believe that those people trusted them? What he found was unsettling. In March 2020, trust levels were fairly high. By May, they had slipped. By October—about seven months into the pandemic—the employees’ degree of confidence in one another was down substantially.

All in all, as Faith writes, “we can’t determine why people are putting up walls, growing further and further away from one another. We just know it’s happening.” The good news is that if humans have the capacity to lose trust in one another, they can also work to build it back up. “The experts I spoke with were surprisingly hopeful,” Faith concludes:

Hilgers [the therapist] knows firsthand that it’s possible for people with attachment issues to change—he’s helped many of them do it. Our culture puts a lot of value on trusting your gut, he told me, but that’s not always the right move if your intuition tells you that it’s a mistake to let people in. So he gently guides them to override that instinct; when people make connections and nothing bad happens, their gut feeling slowly starts to change.”

As Faith argued in an earlier article, attachment styles are not destiny, despite what the internet might lead you to believe. “Your attachment style is not so much a fixed category you fall into, like an astrology sign, but rather a tendency that can vary among different relationships and, in turn, is continuously shaped by those relationships,” she wrote. “Perhaps most important, you can take steps to change it”—and connect with others better as a result.

Related:

America is in its insecure-attachment era. The trait that “super friends” have in common Today’s News Russia’s Defense Ministry said that it had targeted Ukrainian army reserve units with high-precision missile strikes to prevent them from reaching the front lines. A Utah judge postponed ruling on a statewide abortion-clinic ban to next week, following the failure yesterday of two anti-abortion bills in Nebraska and South Carolina. Former Vice President Mike Pence reportedly appeared before a federal grand jury for more than seven hours to testify in a criminal investigation into alleged efforts by Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Dispatches Books Briefing: We need to make room for more voices in philosophy, Kate Cray writes. With a wider canon, enlightenment could come from anywhere. Work in Progress: AI tools are a waste of time, Derek Thompson argues. Many people are simply using them as toys.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Maskot / Getty

A Teen Gender-Care Debate Is Spreading Across Europe

By Frieda Klotz

As Republicans across the U.S. intensify their efforts to legislate against transgender rights, they are finding aid and comfort in an unlikely place: Western Europe, where governments and medical authorities in at least five countries that once led the way on gender-affirming treatments for children and adolescents are now reversing course, arguing that the science undergirding these treatments is unproven, and their benefits unclear.

The about-face by these countries concerns the so-called Dutch protocol, which has for at least a decade been viewed by many clinicians as the gold-standard approach to care for children and teenagers with gender dysphoria.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A cheerful goodbye to the Guardians of the Galaxy Why Hollywood writers may go on strike Nikki Haley’s dilemma is also the Republicans’ problem. Long-haulers are trying to define themselves. Culture Break Graeme Hunter / HBO

Read. “The Renovation,” a new short story from Kenan Orhan about exile from Turkey and longing for a homeland.

Watch. The latest episode of Succession (streaming on HBO Max), which features the creepiest corporate retreat ever.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last year, Faith wrote one of my favorite Atlantic articles in recent memory, about people with a very unique social appetite: the “nocturnals,” or the ultra-introverts who come alive when most people are fast asleep.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Not long after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, commentators warned that another right might unexpectedly be in danger: the right to travel. Republicans in Missouri proposed a law that would have allowed people to sue anyone who helped a resident travel out of state to end a pregnancy. Missouri’s bill didn’t pass, but it seemed to signal a new strategy—one that Idaho has now taken up. Idaho’s new “abortion trafficking” bill, passed earlier this month, criminalizes helping a pregnant minor travel to get an abortion or obtain abortion pills out of state without parental consent, and creates a right to sue doctors who perform abortions for those minors, even if those doctors live and work in a state where abortion is legal.

But in fact this is an old strategy, one that helped anti-abortion groups revoke the right to abortion. The movement learned a key lesson from the decades-long struggle to undo Roe: It’s easiest to start with minors.

Part of the reason is constitutional. In the 1970s, when states began introducing laws requiring parental consent or notification before minors got an abortion, state legislators knew that children didn’t always have the same constitutional rights as adults. States could insist, quite plausibly under the Constitution and other parts of American law, that minors sometimes need to be protected from the consequences of their own decisions in ways that adults do not.

There was a political reason for starting with minors too. Parental-involvement laws have always enjoyed broad public support—including from some Americans who support abortion rights. In the 1980s and ’90s, when these laws were spreading across the country, many who supported parental-involvement laws viewed them as almost unrelated to any attack on abortion: They were simply commonsense protections of parental authority.

For the anti-abortion movement, the end goal, of course, was not modest limitations on the freedom of minors. The more the Court believed that restrictions were acceptable for minors, abortion opponents hoped, the more the justices may come to see abortion as something that was unnecessary or even dangerous for adults too—and the more the Court may be willing to uphold restrictions that affected everyone. In turn, the more restrictions the Court upheld, the more legal conflicts could arise in the lower courts, and the more anti-abortion groups could argue that a right to choose was unworkable and incoherent. Additionally, limiting minors’ rights could set a political precedent, reinforcing the idea that at least some abortion restrictions were worth having.

[Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion]

Idaho’s law draws on the same incrementalist strategy. Conservative lawmakers might have hesitated to limit travel for abortion when roughly 70 percent of Americans, and a majority of Republicans, oppose laws banning the practice. And travel bans—including laws seeking to criminalize the behavior of doctors or others helping out-of-state abortion seekers who reached blue states—might fail in court. The Supreme Court has recognized protection for the right to travel between states since the early 19th century. In a series of decisions issued from the 1960s to the 1990s, the Court struck down laws that required Americans to live in a state for a certain amount of time before collecting welfare benefits. By any definition, the right to travel is “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition”—the test the Court set out in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that reversed Roe—and no one could easily argue that the right to travel is a fiction invented by judicial activists, as Republicans once said of the right to an abortion. In his concurring Dobbs opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh reasoned that any law banning travel for abortion would obviously be unconstitutional.

Idaho’s law is based on a model released by the National Right to Life Committee a month after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe. As far-reaching as Idaho’s bill may sound, travel restrictions on minors will do relatively little to change the fact that many people will figure out ways around their state’s abortion restrictions, and Idaho’s law covers only a small subset of abortion seekers: Just 9 percent are younger than 20, and many of them have their parents’ consent.

But the point is to shift the Overton window, not to stop abortion travel overnight. Idaho’s bill attempts to change the subject from the right to travel to trafficking—the bill lifts its language from federal laws against child sex trafficking. Those laws are broad: They may treat an act as trafficking even if a minor doesn’t cross state lines or national borders, and they apply even if there is no evidence of force, fraud, or coercion. If Americans think of abortion travel as trafficking—inherently involuntary and morally wrong—their support for a right to travel for abortion may falter.

Idaho’s law is intended to set a legal precedent too. Even if the Supreme Court generally thinks a right to travel deserves protection, it is not clear how the courts will react to travel bans on minors. Nor is it clear that courts would invalidate other possible laws that, like Idaho’s, specifically criminalize helping minors travel (for example, helping a minor arrange an abortion in another state or driving them to the state line) and thus technically do not prohibit a right to cross state lines; or laws that allow lawsuits against doctors who perform abortions where the procedure is legal, but on minors from states where it is not—again, technically not a prohibition on travel itself. Starting with a law centered on minors may make justifying other such travel-related laws easier down the line, even if states try to apply them to adults. But the distinction between minors and adults does not matter in the big picture. The point of this law, and others like it, is to restrict access to abortion as much as possible. Today, it may be minors whose rights are on the line, but if the anti-abortion movement has its way, it will soon be the rest of us.